Roll of Honour

Today’s post brought a copy of the order of service for the unveiling of the Memorial Tablet to the men of the 55th (Suffolk Yeomanry) Anti-Tank Regiment, R.A., from October 1948.

Complete with a lovely stamped crest on the cover, the document lists all those men who died on active service with the Regiment during the war. The only list I had seen until know, was the condensed list of 37 Yeoman (as opposed to the 41 listed here) who had died on active service during the NW Europe Campaign of 1944-45.

The condensed list was compiled two years before the unveiling of the tablet, whilst the Regiment was still stationed in Germany. It’s author was Lieutenant-Colonel B.S. Gooch who was then writing a small pamphlet on their war service to be printed locally in Germany and given away as a souvenir to those men who were soon to be demobbed.

To now have a complete list of all the fallen of 55th Anti-Tank Regiment is excellent, and will potentially save a great deal of stressful searching online in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission registers - which is such hard work these days (when it never used to be!) but a Roll of Honour will without a doubt, feature in the finished book, and this has been an enormous help.