A family story, World War II and beyond

The series I am posting on my family’s experiences, photos and letters during World War II and beyond has attracted heavy traffic, for which I am grateful. It begins here and the posts run chronologically and are numbered sequentially. At this stage in the story, the spring of 1944, my father is about to arrive in the southwest Pacific islands as an infantry platoon leader. I'll post the next installment Wednesday.

If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll take a look at the series.

Readership of the blog during the last month has remained strong. Here are the top 25 posts, with hits ranging from 231 to 1,073. The numbers in parentheses are last month's rankings.

1. Killing the Southerners with kindness (1)

2. Why couldn’t Franklin Pierce just keep his mouth shut? (2)

3. Urgent! Telegram from Gettysburg (3)

4. A Gettysburg veteran who knew the battlefield by heart (4)

5. Farewell, my teacher (5)

6. Exeter’s Civil War general (6)

7. Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves? (7)

8. A Gettysburg journal (part 3) (8)

9. Unpacking the new ‘Gettysburg’ (9)

10. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part I (10)

11. Faces of Fort Wagner, Olustee and Andersonville (11)

12. One school’s proud Civil War heritage (13)

13. The Civil War: ‘It was not my fault,’ Buchanan insists (12)

14. The rise and fall of James Willis Patterson (14)

15. The long American tradition of racist speech (new to list)

16 (tie). A gift from the heart (15)

              Gallery: Old soldiers (2), a New England brigade (17)

18. A Gettysburg Journal, part 4 (21)

19. Gallery: Faces of the Fighting Fifth (part one) (16)

20. ‘The reputation of a regiment is always made by the worst men in it’ (19)

21. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part II  (18)

22. A Gettysburg photo album (24)

23. Together again: They rode with Cross at Gettysburg (20)

24. Backstage with Billy Collins (23)

25. The Civil War created a boom for Yankee’s circus (new to list)