I Will Tell No War Stories
What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II
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Average rating4
15
What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II
Ratings1
Average rating4
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?
Reviews with the most likes.
Father. Grandfather. Farmer. Engineer. Clerk. WWII Badass. Wait. What? While this book focuses more on the air war over Britain and Europe, it does in fact get to the heart of what so many of us born in the post WWII era have only been learning over the last 20-30 yrs or so: Our fathers (in the case of Boomers/ maybe Gen Xers) or grandfathers (for Millenials and Zoomers) that we knew as just that (+ whatever occupation they may have had as we knew them) had experiences during WWII that most of the rest of us can never imagine. For Mansfield's dad and his dad's fellow Airmen, Mansfield does a fairly thorough job of combining the personal and the global, of showing both where his dad was and when and also what was going on in the overall war effort - at least as it related to the air war over Europe and what the fliers encountered up there.
Personally, as the grandson of a pair of Infantrymen who both survived the Battle of the Bulge (and one of whom became a legit hero during its mop-up, earning a Silver Star and Purple Heart, while the other became one of the first to liberate the concentration camps on the American side of the war), I was hoping for more of a general look at this entire phenomena, of our fathers and grandfathers choosing to remain silent about their experiences during this pivotal time in human history, rather than the far more personal and specific look we get here - but that is more my own fault than the author's. My own pre-conceptions and desires, rather than any fault of the author's motivations or writing skills.
Indeed, the only actual fault vis a vis the writing itself is the dearth of a bibliography, despite the author clearly doing quite a bit of research. So that was the star deduction right there, simply for that. Beyond the lack of bibliography though, this really was an excellent look at the Air War in the European Theater as it was felt by the people flying as crew in the bombers themselves.
Truly an excellent book anyone remotely interested in that era and in particular that facet of that era will very much enjoy and may find quite informative. Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.