I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II

by Howard Mansfield

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.”

159 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 16, 2024

About the author

Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation as he seeks to understand the soul of American places. He is the author of a dozen books about the stories we tell each other and the ones we refuse to tell. In short, how we chose our ancestors

He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”

Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”

“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”

His newest book to be published in October is Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. It's about the memorials we debate, dedicate, and then ignore.

We live in an era of monument building. Our monuments, often after fierce debate, are dedicated in ceremonies that try to bring life to the stone -- and then we walk away. The mute stones are left to the pigeons. Our grandest efforts at creating a shared, cultural memory melt to invisibility. Why?

Invisible Monuments looks at these moments of commemoration in the familiar and the unfamiliar. We visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Bunker Hill Monument, and a once- venerated World War I memorial in England. We journey to a little-known memorial that one grief-stricken family built stone-by-stone for their son lost in war, a place that still draws thousands each year.

And Invisible Monuments looks at the failure to commemorate in the recently rediscovered African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in the unmarked graves of the Irish immigrants who built the railroads in the woods of New Hampshire. We’re also introduced to an audacious attempt to memorialize the future by building a clock deep in a mountain that is designed to run for 10,000 years.

These memorials are attempts to bring us closer to our ancestors, to say that we are still joined hand-to-hand across the centuries. In Vietnam, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, there are two burials. The first to return the body to the earth, and then the second, when the bones are dug up and brought closer to the village. We do the same.

When we commission memorials, we are trying to bring the bones closer to home. The memorials we build are a second burial. In all the current controversies about what to build and how, and what to tear down, we’ve lost track of why we build monuments. We want the counsel of our ancestors – edited, and chiseled into stone.

Invisible Monuments is about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.

Howard Mansfield has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Heritage, The Threepenny Review, and other publications.

He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and he has co-written a documentary film about “The Old Homestead: The Play of the Century.”