A World War II veteran who lived to tell — but didn’t
May 8 is a date that once stood out: V-E Day, Victory in Europe, a day marking Germany’s unconditional surrender to Allied forces 79 years ago. The 16 million Americans who served in World War II are almost all gone. I knew only one well, my father, Pincus Mansfield. Not that he ever talked about “his war.” He shared with his generation the war’s greatest unacknowledged legacy: silence. He would tell no war stories.
So I learned about my father’s war only after he died. We were cleaning out the old family home. I found a small, folded set of pages that had sat in a drawer for 65 years. It was a short diary of the bombing missions he had flown as a gunner on a B-24 with the Eighth Air Force. I had no idea he’d kept this record; airmen were forbidden to keep diaries.
Standing there in the house we were emptying, I quickly read through his diary as though it might disappear in my hand. It was a record of some terrifying missions, times when his plane had been shot up by flak from the big antiaircraft guns on the ground. The plane had limped back with only three of the four engines, and one of those three was threatening to quit. They’d landed with no brakes, with the nose turret shattered, the nose gunner wounded, and the plane pierced by flak. He’d seen other bombers explode and go down in flames — 10 men, 18 tons of aluminum with tons more of high explosives and fuel: Just gone.
And they had to fly on. The bombers sometimes returned with hundreds of holes, with engines out or on fire, with ruptured fuel lines and cut rudder cables, with men wounded, maimed, or bleeding to death.
On a mission to bomb a Junkers “aero engine plant,” in Dessau, Germany, the flak was “intense — amazingly accurate,” he wrote.
The Luftwaffe’s fighters attacked straggling bombers. “Today, I said . . . you’ve had it!”
Flak inflicted close to three-quarters of all the wounds in the Eighth Air Force.
A week after my father’s 20th birthday, on his 19th mission, over Kassel, Germany, he was hit by flak. His wounds sent him through a series of hospitals for the next 164 days and, eventually, stateside.
This was just a small part of the war, a few ounces of steel hitting one kid from New York City. The Eighth Air Force lost 26,000 men, more men than the entire Marine Corps.
Only Pacific submarine crews suffered a higher fatality rate.
Three years after my father died, I was helping my brother David sort out the last few boxes of family photos and other things left over from the old house. That’s when we found two microcassettes that he had recorded and put away a decade earlier. The tapes are very short, just a few minutes. His voice is serious. He speaks carefully, as if he were testifying in court. In a handful of sentences, he talks about watching, on different missions, a B-17 blow up in midair, a B-24 ditch in the water with its fate unknown, and another B24 on fire as the men jumped. He counted the parachutes. “And that’s all the war story I’m gonna tell you,” he says.
But then, after a pause, he continues.
“But now I’m gonna tell you another war story. The war was over. It was probably 1957 or ’58. We were home sitting there, and Mom came in and said to me and David, a little guy about 5 or 6 years old, Mom said, you two boys sit and watch television, I’m going to prepare supper. So I put on the TV and little David and I are sitting and watching it. And they put on the newsreel, and on the newsreel they showed pictures of bombers flying over cities, dropping bombs, and destroying homes. And they showed the people below.
“Mom came in and said to little David, she said, ‘You see that airplane there, that’s the airplane your father flew in the war.’ And they were watching these airplanes dropping bombs on the cities, destroying everything. And David said to me, ‘Were there little boys there like me?’
“I didn’t know how to answer that question. What do you say? It was them or me. I was part of the war, and I was only following orders. How do you answer a question like that to a 5-year-old boy, 5, 6 years old? I never knew how to answer that, and to this day I don’t know. It’s just something I was never able to forget.”
This is the war hidden by my father’s silence. But this was also his gift. By his silence, he said: I give you peace. Take it and don’t ask me for more.
His generation is almost all gone now. It’s left to us to understand what they suffered on our behalf.