Page 7 - The Shores of Jupiter - April '24

The Shores, Page 7
Book Review

I Will Tell No War Stories: for almost 65 years. It Equally tense was the situation for the onboard gunners
What Our Fathers Left Unsaid was an account of each whose job was to protect themselves and their crews from
bomber mission Pincus
the attacks of enemy fighter planes. Some of the following
About World War II had been on when he text has been deleted for lack of space here and been replaced
by ellipses (…).
was 19 and 20 years old!
By Nils A. Shapiro Eventually serving “The big problem was the obvious one: aiming the
As we near the century as a belly gunner on gun … the gunner, cold and on oxygen after hours of
mark since the end of World B-24 Liberator bombers inactivity had to exercise split-second judgment … 1)
War II only two decades from for many missions over Recognize the airplane (enemy vs. friendly fighter)—at
now, we have all seen many Germany, the young man six hundred yards it would appear no bigger than a dime
movies and read books about had kept a handwritten held at arm’s length, edgewise; 2) Estimate its distance
what our military forces diary describing after (The gunsight made planes look smaller than they were.)
experienced during those each mission what he and The plane’s vibration also made accurate aiming difficult
years in combat overseas. the crew of his plane had … 3) Estimate the difference in the speeds of his bomber
But what has been strangely just gone through—an and the enemy aircraft … 4) ‘Compute the Lead’ – how
missing is an explanation, extraordinary document far in front of the attacker to fire … 5) And then fire … all
and understanding, of why that reveals a view of aerial warfare so intimate and detailed within three to six seconds.”
our veterans—those who survived to return home when that to read its pages is as close as one can ever get to living On Sept. 8, 1944, a few days before his 20th birthday,
so many did not—locked their wartime memories within the experience. Pincus Mansfield’s last note about his crew’s mission
themselves, refusing to discuss such experiences with family That was the inspiration and motivation for a new book over Karlsruhe read: “Temp. -38 C. (-34.6 F) Froze two
or friends for the rest of their lives. by his son, Howard, who—starting with those faded old fingers.” He was later to lose two fingers of his left hand,
One of today’s finest historians and most skillful pages and a series of private tape recordings made by his amputated because of the below-freezing cold that gunners
researchers, Howard Mansfield, grew up in that kind of home. father 75 years after the war and discovered along with the were exposed to in the cramped, clear plexiglass “bubbles”
His father, Pincus Mansfield, had joined the Army Air diary—takes it from there and uses his own brilliant research in which they were restricted during flight. He had frostbite
Force in 1943 at the age of 19. Although the truth was not skills to add a wealth of information gleaned from sources but it didn’t stop him from flying; he was back in action
known by the general American public at the time, training for that fill a reference section of six full pages at the end of this the next day. The author notes, “My father’s frostbite,
wartime air combat was woefully inadequate. The result was book. I Will Tell No War Stories is officially being published three weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, would bother
that only one of every four bomber crews—each consisting this month. him for the rest of his life. It was on his bad left hand.
of a pilot and copilot, a bombardier, navigator and gunners— After training in Colorado, Pincus Mansfield was sent Into his nineties, he was seeing doctors to have parts cut
completed its full tour of 25 missions. The rest were shot overseas to Old Buckenham military air base in East Anglia, off. When I asked him why he was seeing a doctor for his
down, killed in action, missing in action or taken as prisoners. England, and assigned as a belly gunner on the crew of the hand, he said only, ‘It’s nothing. An inconvenience.’”
As United Press reporter Harrison Salisbury said, “To fly in B-24 Liberator, Mary Harriet, in the 453rd BG (Bomber Between what was for some a terror that was so intense
the Eighth Air Force then was to hold a ticket to a funeral. Group). He was one of nearly 3,000 men stationed there it would last a lifetime, for others a guilt at the realization
Your own.” as either crew or ground support for flying missions over that their job was to kill over and over again, we begin to
Like most men of his generation, Pincus refused to talk Germany in the years to come. understand in these pages why so many World War II veterans
about the war throughout his lifetime, even to his family. He Try to picture in your mind, on a single mission, the could never speak about their wartime experiences to anyone
said a few things about his time in England but nothing ever staggering sight of as many as 1,400 B-24 bombers filling but each other for the rest of their lives.
about combat. the skies (plus hundreds of roving escort fighter planes), in a Here is one more brief excerpt that provides a glimpse of
It was not until many years later, after his father’s passing carefully organized formation, often with fewer than 100 feet what it was like in the skies of World War II:
and while cleaning out the old family home, that Howard between wing tips, and—for fear of crashing into their own “Sometimes the planes would blow up, the bombs
Mansfield found in a small drawer with his dad’s cufflinks very close bombers—being unable to move out of position aboard exploding, or the fuel in the tanks, or both … The
and tie clips some small, unlined, pocket-sized notebook despite being attacked by enemy fighter planes and flak from aircraft splits into pieces of metal … You might see bodies
pages, folded over and tossed aside, sitting as they had ground-based anti-aircraft cannons. … Men, pinned to the walls and floor by the centrifugal
force of a spinning plane had little time to escape before the
bomber hit the ground … The crews in other bombers could
only watch as men fell five miles down through bombers
and fighters in battle, fell without a parachute or with a
parachute on fire, or were machine-gunned to death as they
hung from a parachute.”
But Howard Mansfield’s book is not all a history of
tragedy. His Dad made it home, and the last two chapters
describe the life he returned to – a touching and emotional
reminder of why these men kept the demons of memory to
themselves, refusing to share them with loved ones.
“My father, like most of the men of his generation, chose
silence … By his silence he said, I give you peace. Take it.
Take the yawning days of summer boredom, the hours on
the floor watching TV shows with a talking horse or a wily
coyote, the hours lost with a coloring book on a rainy day
… take the school days and proms … touch football in the
street … Take it all. I give you peace. Take it and don’t ask
me questions. I will tell no war stories.”
To all of you who are veterans of any war, or who now or
in the past have had veterans in your lives, those words alone
are all you need to know about Howard Mansfield, and why I
recommend this as just the first of this wonderful historian’s
books you will want to read.

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