Author Eric Setzekorn gives us a new look at World War II’s China-Burma-India (CBI) theatre through the eyes of Joseph Stilwell, the tough-minded American general entrusted with command over all U.S. forces in China, Burma, and India. His new book is Uncertain Allies: General Joseph Stilwell and the China-Burma-India Theater.

Most Americans know little about the CBI, an awkward, sprawling command that stretched from eastern India across Burma into China. It was created mainly to keep China in the war against Japan and to defend British India, using a mix of Chinese, Indian, British, East African, and American forces against Japanese and local Axis-aligned troops.

Japan seized Burma in 1942 and cut the Burma Road, China’s last overland lifeline to Allied aid. The U.S. responded with two desperate improvisations: flying supplies over the Himalayas on the dangerous “Hump” air route and carving a new jungle highway—the Ledo Road—through Assam in India to reconnect with the old Burma Road into China.

Into this tangle stepped Lt. Gen. Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. A career officer, fluent in Chinese and with long experience in Asia, Stilwell was chosen to be Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff and the commanding general of all American forces in China, Burma, and India. Washington hoped his language skills and blunt, no-nonsense style would bridge gaps between the Allies and turn China’s vast manpower into a more effective fighting force.

Instead, Stilwell found himself at the center of a constant political and strategic storm. He clashed with Chiang Kai-shek, whom he saw as corrupt, cautious, and more interested in preserving his regime than fighting Japan. Chiang, for his part, distrusted Stilwell’s plans to rebuild and control Chinese armies and resented American pressure on Chinese strategy.

Stilwell also collided with fellow American Claire Chennault, the former Flying Tigers leader who commanded the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force. Chennault believed that a strong air campaign from Chinese bases could batter Japanese cities and lines of communication. Stilwell argued instead for a ground-first approach: reopen Burma, build the Ledo Road, and reform Chinese ground forces before committing to large-scale air offensives. Allied leaders in London and Washington tried to mediate the difference but often ended up deepening the rivalry and confusion over priorities.

Each of the Allies, it turned out, had its own priorities. The British wanted to defend India and recover Burma. The Americans wanted China as a major fighting partner and future base against Japan. Chinese leaders pursued survival in a grinding civil war against Chinese Communists even as they resisted Japan.

In Uncertain Allies: General Joseph Stilwell and the China-Burma-India Theater, historian Eric Setzekorn uses Stilwell’s story to make sense of this complicated, often overlooked front. Drawing on American, Chinese, and Japanese sources, he shows how mismatched expectations, clashing personalities, and limited resources shaped the campaigns in Burma and China—and how the CBI became an early example of the political-military challenges the United States would face in later conflicts.

Setzekorn’s analysis draws on newly available archival materials, including declassified U.S. records and Chinese- and Japanese-language sources — a research base far wider than most earlier accounts of the CBI. The result is a more balanced, granular, and realistic portrait of war, alliance, and policy than the sweeping, often sentimental narratives that dominated postwar memory.

The book doesn’t pretend that Stilwell was entirely right or wrong. Rather, it shows how his blunt, soldierly pragmatism, his insistence on a transactional, militarily efficient approach, collided repeatedly with the political realities of global alliance, Chinese internal weaknesses, and divergent Allied priorities. The CBI campaign emerges not as an unalloyed triumph, but as a case study in the deeper challenges that would continue to haunt U.S. military-political engagements for decades to come.

For readers of the Greatest Generation, Uncertain Allies offers fresh insight into a theater of WWII that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!

Join us for a Veterans Breakfast Club livestream conversation with author Edward Aldrich about his compelling dual biography, Partnership: George Marshall, Henry Stimson, and the Extraordinary Collaboration That Won World War II. In this richly researched work, Aldrich brings into sharp focus one of the most consequential collaborations in twentieth-century American history: the wartime partnership between Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.

While the canon of World War II history is filled with battlefield commanders and frontline exploits, Partnership shifts the lens to the strategic heart of the U.S. war effort in Washington. Marshall and Stimson, working from adjacent offices with the door intentionally left open between them, built and directed the Army’s dramatic expansion, oversaw logistics on a global scale, and helped shape the Allied strategy that would defeat the Axis powers. Their decisions touched virtually every dimension of the war—from training and equipping millions of soldiers, to strategic planning and coordination with Allied leaders like Winston Churchill, to considerations about the postwar world order.

Aldrich’s book is more than a military history: it is a dual biography that traces how two very different men—Marshall, the Army organizer of victory, and Stimson, the seasoned statesman and civilian leader—came together under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to manage the greatest industrial mobilization in U.S. history. It draws on primary sources including Stimson’s wartime diary and Marshall’s papers to illuminate not only their accomplishments but the character, disagreements, and mutual respect that defined their long collaboration.

In our livestream, Aldrich will reflect on what it meant to write this book: the gaps in the historical record he sought to fill, the insights he gained into how civilian and military leadership can function in concert, and how Marshall’s and Stimson’s partnership shaped not just the Allied victory but the postwar international order. We’ll explore why understanding their relationship matters for the broader story of World War II, and why their example resonates with readers interested in leadership, strategy, and the often invisible networks of decision-making that define war and peace.

Whether you’re a lifelong student of the Second World War or are discovering these towering figures for the first time, this conversation will shed light on how two leaders behind the scenes helped win the most vast and complex war in history—and why their extraordinary collaboration still matters today.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!

For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Veterans Breakfast Club hosts a special livestream conversation with historian David Nasaw, focusing on one of the most searing chapters in his new book, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II: the experiences of Black veterans returning to the United States in 1945–46.

More than one million Black men and women served in World War II, fighting for democracy overseas while living under segregation at home. Many embraced the war as a chance to claim full citizenship, inspired by the “Double V” campaign—victory against fascism abroad and racism at home. What awaited them, as Nasaw shows, was not gratitude or equality, but a wave of intimidation, violence, and repression aimed squarely at returning Black veterans.

Through Black newspapers like The Pittsburgh Courier, government reports, and contemporary scholarship, Nasaw traces how the simple act of coming home—stepping off a ship, boarding a bus, wearing a uniform—could trigger confrontation and punishment. Returning veterans were assaulted on public transportation, targeted by police, and warned, often brutally, that Jim Crow still ruled. The story of Sergeant Isaac Woodard, blinded by a South Carolina police chief while still in uniform, stands as one of the most infamous and devastating examples of this campaign of terror.

The discussion will also examine why Black veterans were seen as such a threat. White officials and politicians feared that men who had worn the uniform, carried weapons, and fought overseas would challenge segregation at home—by voting, organizing, and demanding respect. In response, Southern leaders mobilized law enforcement, courts, and vigilante violence to “put them back in their place,” often with deadly consequences.

Nasaw will help us understand how the treatment of Black veterans after World War II shaped the early civil rights struggle, hardened resistance to Jim Crow, and revealed the deep contradictions at the heart of American victory. It is a story of courage, trauma, and resistance—and a reminder that for many veterans, the war did not end when they came home.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!