Join us for a special livestream about the history of the Battle of Monte Cassino and what it will be like to talk its grounds as part of our VBC WWII Italian Campaign Tour, October 17–30, 2026.

In the spring of 1944, the rugged slopes above the Italian town of Cassino became the scene of one of World War II’s most desperate, costly, and consequential struggles. For four months — through repeated assaults, bitter weather, and brutal terrain — Allied forces fought to break the German Gustav Line and open the road to Rome. The fighting around the ancient abbey and the Liri valley exacted a terrible toll and left a mark on every unit that passed through.

We’ll discuss what made Monte Cassino so formidable: the Abbey, the Gustav Line, the rivers, and the hills that dominated the Liri Valley. We’ll also discuss some of the human stories behind the statistics, from infantry assaults to artillery duels and the multinational Allied effort. And we’ll talk about how this history ties to our itinerary, especially the portion of the trip centered around Cassino:

Day 10 (Mon, Oct 26) — travel into Cassino via the Winter Line and iconic sites of the Italian Campaign.

Day 11 (Tue, Oct 27) — a full day on the ground in Cassino — visiting the Cassino War Museum, both Commonwealth and German cemeteries, the Abbey of Montecassino, and the Polish Cemetery and exhibit.

Day 12 (Wed, Oct 28) — continuing our exploration of battlefield landscapes at Anzio and Piana delle Orme, and then on to Rome.

We’ll touch on the larger arc of the tour — from the landings in Sicily through Salerno, down the Amalfi Coast, across the Winter Line, and up to Rome — and how each segment sets the stage for understanding Monte Cassino in its full historical context.

When Americans picture the Pacific War, they usually imagine palm trees and jungle heat. But in 1942–43, World War II came to the frozen edge of Alaska. On the remote Aleutian Islands of Attu Island and Kiska Island, U.S. and Japanese forces fought a brutal campaign of fog, wind, snow, and rock, the only land battle of World War II fought on American soil.

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a virtual conversation with Allen Frazier, Military.com journalist and historian, whose deeply researched article brings this overlooked campaign into sharp focus. Drawing on military records and human stories, Frazier recounts how more than 15,000 American troops battled not only entrenched Japanese defenders, but exposure, frostbite, and terrain so unforgiving that weather claimed more casualties than enemy fire.

This conversation will explore:

The Japanese attacks on Dutch Harbor and the occupation of Attu and Kiska

Operation Landcrab and the savage 18-day fight to retake Attu

The role of “Castner’s Cutthroats,” Alaska Native scouts crucial to the campaign

Acts of heroism, including Private Joe Martinez’s Medal of Honor charge

The final banzai assault on Attu—and its devastating cost

The bloodless but deadly Allied landing on evacuated Kiska

The forgotten civilian story: the Unangax̂ (Aleut) people, whose village was destroyed and whose culture was nearly erased

Frazier also confronts the moral weight of the campaign: the forced relocation of Aleut civilians, the deaths of Attuan villagers in Japanese captivity, and the fact that survivors were never allowed to return home. The Battle for Alaska secured U.S. territory, but at an immense human cost that still echoes today.

As always, VBC’s livestream will invite reflection, questions, and conversation. This is a chance to revisit a chapter of World War II that is both uniquely American and too often forgotten.

Glenn Flickinger sits down with legal historian John Q. Barrett to explore the origins, drama, and legacy of the Nuremberg trials, the unprecedented post–World War II prosecution of Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Barrett, a Professor of Law at St. John’s University and Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow at the Robert H. Jackson Center, is one of the foremost experts on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt’s close adviser who left the Court in 1945 to serve as chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg. He is currently at work on a major Jackson biography and is the creator of The Jackson List, a long-running email and web project that shares stories and discoveries about Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg, and related topics with readers around the world.

In this program, Glenn and Professor Barrett will walk us through how Jackson came to lead the Nuremberg prosecution, what was at stake in the courtroom, how the trials were actually conducted day-to-day, and why Jackson later called Nuremberg “the most important work of my life.” They’ll also look at how the trials shaped modern ideas of international criminal law and individual accountability for state-sponsored atrocities, and why Nuremberg remains a touchstone in debates about war, justice, and memory today.

Whether you’re new to the subject or already familiar with Jackson and Nuremberg, this is an opportunity to hear from the scholar who has done as much as anyone to recover and explain this history.

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

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!

Historian Bruce Henderson joins us to discuss Operation Carpetbagger, a secret war in Europe in World War II that is subject of his new book, Midnight Flyboys: The American Bomber Crews and Allied Secret Agents Who Aided the French Resistance in World War II.

In Midnight Flyboys, Bruce delivers a masterful, richly detailed chronicle of that secret war. Beginning in 1943, the precursor to the CIA — the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — recruited volunteer crews from American bomber squadrons and assembled them at a hidden airfield just west of London. Given the choice to stay with conventional bombing duties or sign up for an entirely different kind of mission, these flyers volunteered.

Under codename Operation Carpetbagger, these men flew heavy B-24 Liberators across the English Channel, not to bomb enemy targets, but to fly low over pitch-black countryside, in the dead of night, hoping to pick out faint ground signals marking drop zones. Into those dark fields they dropped steel containers filled with rifles, ammunition, grenades, medicine, even bicycles, the essentials of insurgent warfare. On many nights, they also parachuted Allied secret agents into the maquis strongholds of Nazi-occupied France.

For decades the story remained classified. But as Henderson shows, the Carpetbaggers and the agents they supported played a vital role in preparing the ground for the Normandy invasion and the liberation that followed. Those who served eventually earned the highest military honors: a Presidential Unit Citation for the bomber crews, and later a Congressional Gold Medal for OSS personnel.

What makes Midnight Flyboys particularly powerful are its vivid portraits of the men and women behind the missions: the bomber crews risking night after night, the secret agents dropped into unknown danger, and the members of the French Resistance who awaited them. Critics have praised the book’s clarity and narrative power. A starred review in Library Journal calls it “immersing readers in the peril and heroism of covert World War II missions,” noting Henderson’s ability to “simplify complex military operations without losing emotional depth or detail.”

We are honored to present this story with Bruce Henderson, live on our VBC Greatest Generation Live — Thursday, January 8 at 7:00 pm ET. Join us!

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

Glenn Flickinger marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge with historian Walter S. Zapotoczny, author of The 28th Infantry Division and the Battle of the Bulge: Combat, Faith, and Perseverance. The book is a close study of how the men of Pennsylvania’s “Keystone Division” held the line in the Ardennes in December 1944–January 1945, and what kept them fighting when the odds were against them. Drawing on extensive firsthand accounts, he follows the 28th as it stretches across the 25-mile front on the German border, absorbs the shock of Hitler’s last offensive, and defends key positions in Belgium and Luxembourg.

Zapotoczny is less interested in re-telling the battle map than in examining motivation, morale, and belief. The book looks closely at how soldiers understood “the American way of life,” how Army chaplains ministered under fire, and how faith and camaraderie shaped endurance in combat. Based in part on his doctoral research on the 28th Division at the Bulge, the study blends operational history with social and religious history to explain why these citizen-soldiers kept going when retreat seemed like the only rational option.

It’s a focused, 240-page narrative—illustrated with photos and maps—well-suited to readers who want to understand what the Battle of the Bulge looked and felt like from the foxhole level, especially in one hard-hit American division.

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