Peter L. Belmonte is a retired U.S. Air Force officer. He holds a master’s degree in history from California State University, Stanislaus, and has written articles, book chapters, and reviews on military and immigration history. Pete is the author of several books, including Italian Americans in World War II (Arcadia, 2001), The U.S. 26th Infantry Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, October-November 1918 (Schiffer, 2015), Forgotten Soldiers of World War I: America’s Immigrant Doughboys (with Alexander F. Barnes, Schiffer, 2018), and Play Ball! Doughboys and Baseball during the Great War (with Alexander F. Barnes and Sam Barnes, Schiffer, 2019).
Thousands of immigrants from the southern Italian region of Calabria came to the Chicago-area in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. As many as 8,000 of them served in the U.S....
