The Mysterious Seb'n (3)

 The Mysterious Seb’n (3)

 

My Daddy had an older (by 10 years) first cousin named Thomas Austin Withers, Jr. Thomas left the University of Virginia in 1941, where he was three years into his degree program, to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. As you know – or as you should know – America didn’t enter the war until it was attacked on December 7, 1941. Until that time most of us, including many of our “leaders”, were content to watch Britain suffer what we thought was a sure process of annihilation. After all, why back a loser? (We also watched Japan destroy China, though destroy is too light a word).

 

Antisemitism was high in the United States, we had Nazi youth groups, Madison Square Garden was the venue for a Nazi rally that began with the American Pledge of Allegiance, our State Department would not (with heroic exceptions) issue visas to Jews facing extermination, and in 1939 we, the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave, turned away 900 European Jews on the liner St. Louis and sent them back to Europe. You do, of course, remember learning this in your history classes? Of course you do.   

 

In the 1930s our population was about 120 million. It is estimated that about 30 million of us tuned our radios in weekly to hear Father Charles Coughlin spew his antisemitic venom through the airwaves – we haven’t changed, have we? We still love venom. Thank God for Pope Leo, he shows us a better way.

 

When newsreels showed video of Poland being bombed in movie theatres (yes, you could get your news before your movies in those days) some people clapped.

 

Why did this young man from dirt poor Nelson County, VA leave the safety of the University of Virginia to fight for what was surely a losing cause?

 

Not long before his death, in a letter to his parents, he wrote, “If we do not return we will have no regrets.”

 

I wonder what his Nelson County accent sounded like to his Canadian and British mates? I wonder if he pronounced “seven” as “seb’n” or “sem’n”? Or perhaps his UVA environment corrected that for him? I recall reading somewhere that he excelled in English and was considering law school.

 

Why, O why, leave UVA to fight for another people? Why leave the safety of the hills and hollows of Nelson County? Why put aside the aspirations of a degree, the promise of a career, the prospect of home and family, for certain danger and possible death? (Roughly 44% of crew members in Britain’s Bomber Command were killed.) Why not wait and see if America entered the war?

 

What was my second cousin feeling and thinking? How did he arrive at his decision?

 

What do you think?

 

 

The following is from a war memorial:

 

Thomas Austin Withers, Jr. was born on January 5, 1915, in Nelson County, Virginia. He was the son of Thomas Austin Withers Sr and Margaret Scruggs Withers.

 

Thomas served in the 405 Squadron as a Flight Sergeant during World War II. After training in Canada, he was sent to England where he was a tail gunner on a Wellington bomber. On one of the bombing runs over Germany, he was wounded and hospitalized. Upon return to duty, his bombing runs continued until July 27, 1942, when his plane, Halifax W1230, was downed over Germany and crashed into the Elbe River. Withers and two other crewmen were killed.