MY HERO: The Peace Bequeathed to Me by My Father’s Noble Silence After World War II

Like many veterans, he did his duty and carried the burden for the rest of his life

Howard Mansfield,

AARP Experience Counts

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En español

Published April 18, 2024

A soldier with an illustrated zipper over his mouth

At age 18, my father, Pincus Mansfield, volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, but he was rejected. He had only one good hand. But he returned and convinced the Air Force that it couldn’t fly without him. He was inducted on Aug. 13, 1943, and was trained to be a waist gunner, one of the men shooting a machine gun out of the open “gun port” of the B-24 Liberator bomber.

“My parents thought I was nuts and did until their dying day,” he said. His Uncle Sammy bought him a trumpet at a hock shop. “Here, when they hear you play maybe they won’t send you overseas,” Sammy said. He didn’t think his one-handed nephew was going to win the war.

Why would they take a one-handed 18 year old? The short answer is that in 1943 they were losing 75 percent of the men they trained and sent into battle. The Eighth Air Force had more deaths — 26,000 — than the entire Marine Corps. Only Pacific submarine crews suffered a higher fatality rate.

On my father’s 19th mission, over Kassel, Germany, he was hit by flak. He was shot up pretty badly, hit in the legs, buttocks and face. He was sent back to the United States and was hospitalized for 164 days.

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All this was hidden history in our family. My father never talked about the war and we learned not to ask. “I’m not gonna tell any war stories,” he’d say. In choosing silence he was like most men of his generation. It was a rule with him and millions of other veterans. But why?

Shortly before my father died five years ago, I stumbled over the answer to that question. As we were cleaning out the old home, I found a small, folded set of pages that had sat in a drawer for 65 years. It was a short journal of the bombing missions he had flown. I had no idea he’d kept this record. Airmen were forbidden to keep diaries.

I quickly read through it. Some of the missions he flew were harrowing, marked by attacking fighter planes, big anti-aircraft cannons firing from the ground, blowing holes in his bomber and wounding crewmen. They had limped back to England flying on three of the four engines with another engine threatening to quit.

He’d seen bombers blown out of the sky, exploding into nothing — 10 men, 18 tons of aluminum with tons more of high explosives and fuel — just gone. And my father and his crewmates had to fly on.

My father’s short diary hinted at the intensity of what he’d been through and hinted at why he and millions of other veterans didn’t want to talk. Other people wouldn’t understand, so you kept it to yourself.

We have memorials, big movies and books. But each war is private. “War happens inside a man,” wrote Eric Sevareid, a CBS radio correspondent who covered World War II. “It happens to one man alone. It can never be communicated.”

For some veterans there was trauma. And there was remorse. My father regretted having to kill, he told one of his grandsons, who managed to get him to talk for a few moments about the war. It was what had to be done, but this was a remorse he carried to his last days. When another grandson was leaving to go live in Germany, my father said: “Don’t tell them what your grandfather did to their beautiful country.”

Above all, not telling was a code of honor. This was an unspoken agreement about what is said and what is not. This mattered greatly to my father and the other veterans of his generation. The ugly things you had seen in the war, and what you felt about them, was all left unsaid. They carried that burden.

By their silence, they said, “I give you peace. Take it. Take it and don’t ask me for more. I will tell no war stories.”

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