Kelly DeVries and Michael Livingston break down Campaldino — the 1289 battle between Florence and Arezzo that put Dante Alighieri on a medieval Italian battlefield. The episode benefits from DeVries's depth on medieval cavalry tactics and the mechanics of communal Italian warfare, a subject that proves the peninsula's military history runs centuries deeper than its World War II reputation and rarely gets this level of English-language attention. The literary connection to Dante will draw people in, but the military treatment is the reason to stay.

Lions Led By Donkeys covers South Korea's deployment to Vietnam — Park Chung-hee's mercenary calculation in sending troops for American dollars, the ROK forces' combat performance, and the extensive war crimes committed against Vietnamese civilians. The episode handles the political transaction between Washington and Seoul well, but doesn't flinch from the operational reality on the ground. An underexplored corner of the Vietnam War that deserves more attention than it usually gets.

🎙 Veterans' accounts: Library of Congress Veterans History Project holds 100,000+ interviews including Vietnam War veterans — searchable at loc.gov/vets

⚖ The debate: Did South Korean forces in Vietnam commit systematic war crimes, or were incidents isolated and exaggerated in retrospective accounts? Critics point to documented massacres and civilian killings as evidence of command-level culpability; other scholars argue the scale and intentionality remain contested and that wartime casualty figures conflate combat deaths with alleged atrocities.

Filipino historian Desiree Benipayo joins Paridon and Parshall to cover the guerrilla resistance that sprang up almost immediately after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. The episode goes beyond the American-centric narrative to spotlight Filipino leaders, the critical role of women as intelligence operatives and couriers, and how the movement sustained itself across three years of occupation. A perspective you rarely hear on Anglophone podcasts, and one that fills a genuine gap in Pacific War coverage.

Ray Harris Jr. covers the Japanese all-out assault on Henderson Field and the concurrent reinforcement landings on Guadalcanal, with Vandegrift's increasingly desperate calls for support. At 22 minutes this is tight and focused — no padding, just the tactical situation on the ground at one of the campaign's crisis points. Harris's chronological format means the listener gets the blow-by-blow as it unfolds, which works well for a battle that turned on hours.

SpyCast covers the capture of Carlos the Jackal — his evolution from privileged Venezuelan to Cold War-era terrorist, his alliances with state sponsors, and the CIA operation that finally brought him in. Good intelligence-operations content with Cold War context, though the framing is more thriller than analytical.

Christian Parkinson and historian David Mould trace the life of Arthur Connolly — the cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and explorer who coined the term 'Great Game' while operating across Russia, Persia, and Central Asia. Good on the intersection of military intelligence and imperial strategy, with Connolly's fatal mission to Bukhara providing a grim conclusion.

Veteran oral history from a Marine who was at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Guam, and Iwo Jima — four of the most significant Pacific actions. The personal-account format limits analytical depth, but the combat arc of this single Marine's war is extraordinary and pairs well with Harris's Henderson Field episode this week.

Murray Dahm addresses how the Roman army kept its legions supplied with chain mail — the workshops, the craftsmen, and the logistics of armour production. Short at under 11 minutes, but the topic is squarely in the logistics-and-supply lane and Dahm handles it with precision.