Calendar

Howard Mansfield discusses the new book I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II in conversation with Scott Mansfield. When Howard Mansfield grew up, World War II was omnipresent and hidden. This was also true of his father, Pincus Mansfield’s time as a tail gunner on B-24 bombers. 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?