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0045-W2O-05/2003
Donald A. Webb
WWII Other
Captain of the HMS Switha
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He was a boy in England when World War II erupted in 1939, and felt the thud and boom of bombs from the Luftwaffe. Born in Wales in 1926, he was living with his family in Peterborough, about eighty miles from London, when German warplanes rumbled above. In the program to send children from harm's way in the British capital, the Webbs took in a boy and two girls--Isi Grunbaum and his two sisters, Hannah and Dorothea. These children of a Jewish family had been smuggled out of Berlin. While attending Cambridge, Donald joined the Royal Navy. Isi enlisted in the Royal Air Force. Donald served on a minesweeper, even continuing after the war until 1950 in clearing the North Sea and English Channel of mines. By then he was captain of HMS Switha (T-179). He and his wife, Renee Mowbray, came to America in 1957 where he graduated from Methodist Theological School in Ohio. He came to Shreveport in 1977 and served as president of Centenary College for fourteen years.