I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II [Hardcover]

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 Storiesis 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 Storiesis also about learning to live with history, a theme Mansfield explored in earlier books like In the Memory House, whichThe New York Timescalled “a wise and beautiful book” andThe Same Ax,Twice,said by theTimesto be “filled with insight and eloquence … a brilliant book.”Howard Mansfieldhas 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 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 malS,