WebWarrior: MilitaryHistoryOnline

Jim H. Moreno | March 31, 2004  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

Each month, I, the ?WebWarrior’, will be bringing you an in depth look at the armchair historians who are responsible for propagating the growth of, and interest in, military history online. I will introduce these ?webwarriors’ in the hopes of forging a more interactive relationship between them and you, readers of the Armchair General magazine. So, let’s get to it…

Brian Williams of MilitaryHistoryOnline

Brian Williams grew up in an Army family, and like so many of us, got his military history interest started by a war game, when his uncle (an Army Captain) bought him Tactics II.

"My brother and I played that a few times and although I believe my brother moved on, I was bitten," he said . "Later on, even though I really had no one to play with, I bought many games after that to include 3rd Reich, ASL (Advanced Squad Leader), Panzer Leader, War in Russia, etc., etc. I just loved to read the rules, set up the games, and recreate history. I guess as others during High School were buying other things, I was buying wargames.

Continuing in the progression very well known to us, Williams found the new medium of computers to open a whole new world.

"I remember one of the first games I bought was Computer Ambush on the Atari 800 XL. To this day, I still remember the feeling of moving ‘Janko’ across the open town center and getting nailed by a sniper. Boy, I wouldn’t do that again! What a wonderful feeling that was. I also remember playing War in Russia. I remember that the computer had a bug where when it would start losing, it would ?create’ a phantom Russian (enemy in this case) unit behind my lines and disrupt my supply line. And it was immune to any attacks and it just sat there. But, boy it was fun none-the-less! That game taught me so much about the Eastern Front situation that it was scary."

After graduating from high school, Williams became an Airborne Russian Linguist in the U.S. Air Force. He spent two years stationed at Sembach, Germany, flying in EC-130’s. Upon returning to Maryland, he joined the Reserves for a nine year tour, including serving his country aboard an AWACS during the Gulf War.

Williams heard the Gettysburg battlefield call to him while in Maryland, strengthened by SSI’s Gettysburg: The Turning Point game.

"What made Gettysburg so interesting was the length of the battle (3-day battle), the location of the battle (Southern invasion of the North), and the impact of the battle on the Civil War. But, every time I visited, I found myself overwhelmed with the events of the battlefield and especially the chronology of the battlefield. I mean, because of the type of person I am, I HAD to understand what I was seeing and make sense of it all. So, I set out to lay out all of my books on the table and start from the beginning."

Williams decided that, once he started to dissect the battle, he would share his learned knowledge with others. He set about teaching himself HTML, creating maps of the Gettysburg battle, and gathering details about the battlefield to understand it all much better.

"At the time, I had a Mindspring account which gave me only so much bandwidth. It came down to a point where at mid-month, I would have to delete all my maps and images in order to stay online because they would shut me down every time I went over my quota. Those were the old days."

"Well, to make a long story short, the Gettysburg site grew and grew and eventually branched out into other Civil War battles and then into other battles to include all periods. My favorite conflict to study is WWII, so I really wanted to start branching into that conflict with battle summaries, articles, photos, etc. Eventually we had to upgrade servers several times to keep up with the traffic and the demand of the site."

Thus, William’s current site, MilitaryHistoryOnline, was born. Much more than your average website spouting forth facts and figures about military history, MilitaryHistoryOnline is quite grand in scale, especially considering it’s run by one man. Volunteer writers post their best works of knowledge here, in sections devoted to Ancient Wars, the Civil War, The Great War, World War Two, the Vietnam War, and Wargaming.

Help Armchair General by bookmarking to

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.