Howard Mansfield is an accomplished author and writer of a dozen books. However, his latest, “I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II,” is not his story. It belongs to Pincus Mansfield, his father, who lived the stories in the book during World War II. Howard knew his father had flown aboard a B-24 Liberator Bomber during the war, but like many of his generation, mum was the word when it came to talking about his wartime experiences.
“You’re not getting any war stories from me,” he’d say.
During a visit to England, his son got a taste of what World War II was like for the bomber crews who flew over Nazi-occupied Europe. He joined a British airplane enthusiasts’ club for a screening of the 1941 Royal Air Force film “Target for Tonight.” During the short film, he watched as bomber crews planned and executed a mission over the Rhine, and he saw just how dangerous his father’s wartime profession really was. But he had never heard his father talk about it.
Years later, Pincus Mansfield went into a veterans’ home, and Howard had the task of cleaning out his father’s house, which was the only house his family had ever lived in. Cleaning up a small drawer one day, he came across a diary. The diary contained a detailed account of each of Pincus Mansfield’s bomber missions, written when his father was just 19 and 20 years old. The writer in Howard took over, and he began to fill in the blanks of his father’s war story.
“I Will Tell No War Stories” is the story of Pincus Mansfield’s World War II experience with the 8th Air Force.
“I began to fill in the details, helped by miles of microfilmed records of the Army Air Forces,” Howard Mansfield writes in the book’s introduction. “The memories he had recorded in his last years of growing up and training for the war, memories that always stopped well short of what happened in the air at war.”
About the Author of I Will Tell No War Stories
Pincus Mansfield was drafted but not inducted, yet he kept trying to join the Army and serve his country until it finally accepted him as a waist gunner in 1943. On his 19th mission, he was hit by flak while on a bombing run over Kassel, Germany. He was wounded in the legs, buttocks, and face and sent back to the United States to recuperate. He was hospitalized for 164 days.
He did not receive the Medal of Honor, and there will be no big-budget Hollywood movie made about his life. He was one of millions of Americans who signed up to fight for his country during World War II. If not for Howard Mansfield’s talent as a writer and his persistence in learning about his father’s wartime experience, his story—that of an American who did his duty without fanfare—might never have been told.
While the glorious tales of battlefield heroics will always enthrall us, now and in the future, World War II was won by Americans like Pincus Mansfield: ordinary people who signed up to extraordinary things. But that victory came at a price; it left those countless millions unwilling or unable to revisit their deeds. Thankfully, there are those like Pincus who wrote them down so those sacrifices won’t be forgotten.
“I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II” by Howard Mansfield is available in hardcover for $22.46, on Kindle for $23.50, and via Audible for $13.96 on Amazon. It’s also available at Barnes and Noble and Walmart for around the same price.
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I AM ONE TOO. My father was in the Navy during WWII. Firecontrolman was his MOS.
Dad spent the first part of his drafted “career” aboard the USS New York. I was merely a new born babe but during a train ride from Toledo to New York, my mother said I made many uniformed friends.
When Germany surrendered my Dad was transferred to the Pacific theater to serve out his time aboard an LST. Quite a change from a battleship. When Japan surrendered his ship was anchored in Pearl Harbor. He did talk about the celebration but not the action he experienced. He would not ever watch the movie, Tora, Tora, Tora. He also would not talk about the war.