On a nondescript day in 2018, Howard Mansfield began the innocuous task of clearing out his family home. Little did he know that among the remnants of his father’s life, he would discover the fragments of heroism silently tucked away in a small, unassuming diary. Within its worn pages lay the detailed account of each bombing mission Pincus Mansfield, Howard’s father, undertook as a waist gunner on a B-24 Liberator Bomber during World War II. This quiet revelation set Howard on a journey that would culminate in the creation of “I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II.”
“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.”
In a time when valor and sacrifice were the currency of the day, Pincus Mansfield’s story emerges as a testament to the quiet fortitude of a generation. Despite his physical limitations, Pincus was driven by a relentless desire to serve his country, which was under attack. Draft boards rejected him due to a disability, but his persistence paid off, and he was finally accepted into the Army Air Forces on August 13, 1943. Unbeknownst to him, his acceptance foreshadowed a grueling fate—by 1943, a staggering 75% casualty rate plagued bomber crews, a stark reality Pincus would face firsthand.
Surviving 18 missions before his plane was riddled with flak over the Henschel & Sohn Tiger tank facilities, Pincus endured wounds that would end his combat service, but not his war. The very act of remembrance and recounting one’s war experiences has often been seen as an act of re-living trauma.
This might explain Pincus’s reluctance to share his wartime experiences with his family, as suggested in Howard’s poignant reflections. “Other people just wouldn’t understand,” he writes, encapsulating his father’s reticence—a sentiment shared by many veterans who bore their memories in silence.
Pincus Mansfield witnessed bombers being destroyed in midflight. Ten men, including some friends, were killed instantly as his own plane was riddled with holes from exploding flak and enemy fighters. Reading about his father’s firsthand experiences during the war, Howard Mansfield understood why The Greatest Generation was also the quietest.
Relevant articles:
– ‘I Will Tell No War Stories’: A Writer Uncovers His Father’s Hidden World War II History, Military.com
– Howard Mansfield – I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II, Gibson’s Bookstore
– I WILL TELL NO WAR STORIES, Kirkus Reviews
– My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir, Goodreads