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Howard Mansfield discussing "I Will Tell No War Stories" about his father and others in the WW2 Army Air Force

Please join us as Howard Mansfield discusses his new book "I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War ll".  Viewers fascinated by "Masters Of The Air" on the Apple TV network will discover a very personal story about his father, a gunner, and fellow crew members in the Eighth Air Force and the bombing missions over Germany from their base in England. 

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."

Howard Mansfield lives in Hancock NH with his wife the author Sy Montgomery.


 

Date: 04/20/2024
Time: 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Place:
Balin Books
375 Amherst St.
Somerset Plaza
Nashua, NH 03063-1216