I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II
When Howard Mansfield grew up, World War II was omnipresent and hidden. This was also true of his father's time in the Air Force. Like most of his generation, it was a rule not to talk about what he'd experienced in war. "You're not getting any war stories from me," he'd say.
Cleaning up the old family house the year before his father's death, Mansfield was surprised to find a short diary of the bombing missions he had flown. Some of the missions were harrowing. Mansfield began to fill in the details, and to be surprised again, this time by a history he thought he knew.
I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in a family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace?
I Will Tell No War Stories is also about learning to live with history, a theme Mansfield explored in earlier books like In the Memory House, which The New York Times called "a wise and beautiful book" and The Same Ax, Twice, said by the Times to be "filled with insight and eloquence ... a brilliant book."
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Howard Mansfield has written a dozen books, sifting through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. The late critic Guy Davenport said: "Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent."
"The compelling story of how the author's father and the Air Force fought the Axis... A father's war experiences, unvarnished and illuminating."
-- "Kirkus Reviews""The result is an impeccably researched and beautifully written account of the stories his father wouldn't tell. Readers will find themselves in heated sheepskin flight suits and oxygen masks, high in the sky over enemy territory, and they will feel the frustration of a child asking his father what it was like and not getting any answers. A vital and moving history of all that is left unsaid in the aftermath of war and how that affects the next generation."
-- "Booklist""To readers' benefit, the author comes to understand his father better, and he shares insights into air combatants' experiences during World War II."
-- "Library Journal""Mansfield seamlessly weaves the tracing of his own father's story with the broader implications of history and memory."
-- "Military Times""The accounts of flying missions in this book are vivid."
-- "New York Journal of Books""I don't think I've read anything that conveys the brutality of war as powerfully as you do... People may think this is just a terrific history book -- which it is -- but it's also a cautionary tale for those of us who see sanitized pictures of a war. The universality of this book is totally here."
--Jim Braude, co-host, Boston Public Radio, on GBH"This was really a very moving book."
--Margery Eagan, Boston Public Radio, on GBH"Perhaps the best WWII book I've ever read, and I've been reading them all my life. I mean every word of this."
--Lawrence S. Braden, in a letter about his father's war -- Lt. Col. Lawrence A Braden, 101st Airborne Division, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment
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