An Cosantóir

www.military.ie the defence forces magazine | 27 his young family returned to Tudenham but by this time the family farm had been long neglected. In early 1939, Nick and Tony, then aged only 17 and 15, were sent to Australia to a cousin of Harold's who was farming in Victoria. Sending two sons so far at such a young age can only have been made in the context of the boys having no future in Westmeath. When war broke out in September, only six months after they arrived in Mel- bourne, Nick immediately joined up, enlisting in the 2/2 Pioneeers ('the Diggers'). On the other side of the globe, Harold, despite being well beyond mititary age at 51, joined the Royal Norfolks and, because he spoke Malay, was posted as ADC to the Sultan of Johore in the summer of 1941. Meanwhile, the RAF recruited my grandmother as an officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), serving with Bomber Command in Lincoln- shire. My aunt Joan also joined the WAAF, where she became a radar operator. My mother and her younger siblings were left in Westmeath to be mind- ed by a pair of terrifying and, by all accounts, bad tempered maiden aunts. The Pioneers were sent to Syria, where the Vichy French were doggedly protecting the oil supply route from Iraq to the Germans, and despite being designed and trained for a back-up role, A and B companies of the 2/2 were thrown into the assault of Fort Medjayoun on 17th June 1941. It was a disaster for the Allies: the troops were ill prepared for the French machine guns and one report suggests they had been issued with American ammunition for British rifles. The unit lost: 27 killed, 29 captured (of whom Nick was one) and 46 wounded. The prisoners were rescued after six very unpleasant weeks, and in early 1942, following Japan's entry into the war, the 2/2 were ordered to return to Australia, embarking on the troopship Orcades. En route, following the fall of Singapore in February 1942, they were diverted to Java. They were not tactically loaded, as the bulk of their equipment had been sent on slower cargo ships and when they landed at Batavia Nick Tottenham and his comrades were once again ill equipped for action. Never- theless, as part of Blackforce they took a significant toll on the Japanese at Leuwilang. Support was, however, non- existent and the Australians were ordered to lay down their arms the day after the Dutch surrender on 8th March. Nick was a POW again, this time of the Japanese. He re- mained on Java for almost a year before being shipped to Changi, Singapore, in January 1943, suf- fering from dysentery, beri beri and pellagra, and not expected to live. As he struggled to come to terms with his new surround- ings in Selarang Barracks, he looked across the wire to where the British prisoners were impris- oned. There he saw an older man taking an unenthusiastic salute from the British POWs: it was his father, Harold. Nick was too sick to be sent north to the railways and my grandfather, relying heavily on his ability to speak Malay and Chinese, and the fact that the Japanese respected his advanced years, was able to get Nick the medicines and food that would allow him to recover. In the meantime Nick's brother, Tony Tottenham, joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in October 1942, two weeks after his 18th birth- day. He flew his first mission in March 1944 and then another 35 as a pilot on the Avro Lan- caster. He was based in Wad- dington in Lincolnshire where his mother, my grandmother, ran the operations room, and thus terrifyingly had an inti- mate knowledge of the danger her son faced every night he flew over the Nazi heartland. By this time my mother was also in the WAAF. Unusually for a woman she was a radar mechanic, a new technology at the time. Tony was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for his role in an at- tack on Brest in August 1944 af ter his aircraf t was holed three times on the run up to the target. He piloted 'S for Sugar', a famous Lancaster that bucked all the statistics, flying over 100 missions and stands today in the RAF Mu- seum in Hendon. Tony's name is one of four commemorated on her engine casings. At the end of his tour in late summer 1944 he immedi- ately volunteered for an- other. On 26th September, his mother's birthday and only a couple of weeks af ter his own 21st, he flew a daylight mission to the Pas de Calais. It is thought they were trying to locate the launch site of the V2 rockets. Flying in low over the Gross- er Kurfurst, one of the last remaining gun batteries of the Atlantic Wall, they were hit by flak and the aircraft exploded on impact. Only one dog tag was found belonging to the crew and it was not Tony's. He is buried in Wissant in the village cemetery. Af ter the war, Nick Totten- ham migrated to Australia and devoted his life to the welfare of ex servicemen. This is a story of an or- dinary family who were touched by extraordinary events and coincidence. As I researched it I imagined what they felt and how they coped with what happened to them. This led me to write This Tumult as a novel because I felt drawn to move in their personal spaces to better understand them. Barbara Tottenham, Caroline's mother Nick Tottenham Tony Tottenham Veronica Tottenham

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