By Todd DePastino One of our great VBC WWII veterans, George B. Mason, passed away October 25, 2026, at the age of 102. Those who attended our recent breakfasts in Beaver County may remember George telling stories about the war. One of the most memorable was his certainty that he would never come home.
By Todd DePastino Our Italian tour manager, Riccardo, smiled and shook his head “no” when I asked him if any tour groups ever requested a trip to crumbling ruins of an abandoned tobacco processing plant outside Salerno. The old Tobacco Factory, near the tiny town of Eboli, is not exactly a tourist attraction. There
By Todd DePastino Today was the first full day of our VBC World War II Tour of Italy, and we made a little history of our own by becoming quite possibly the first American tourist group ever to stop beneath a garbage-strewn bridge to visit an obscure but important World War II battlefield. Our
By David Wassel Several years ago while cleaning out a family house, David Wassel ran across a box containing 170 letters written during World War II. Together, these letters tell the story of the Dininger family of Freeport, Pennsylvania, and walk readers through the adventure, hardship, and heartache of war. The correspondence revolves around
By Todd DePastino I thought I knew most of the little books, pamphlets, newspapers, and guides the U.S. Army produced for its troops during World War II. But Navy Corpsman veteran Michelle Wilcox gave me one I'd never seen before. Michelle recently discovered it among the belongings of her late father, a World War
By Todd DePastino On December 17, 1944, hundreds of American bombers crossed Central Europe on a mission against Nazi Germany’s synthetic fuel industry. One of them, a B-24J Liberator known only by the number painted on its fuselage—“White 47”—never returned. The airplane broke apart nearly five miles above Silesia and fell into a snowy
