Simmons

Heavy Section

What this roll records

ADDED TO THIS ROLL ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2026, AND THE SOURCE SETS OUT ITS OWN DOUBT ABOUT HIM. The entry reads, in full: “ON HS nom roll cJan 43, but no REME tracer card” — he is on the Heavy Section nominal roll of about January 1943, and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers have no tracer card for him. THAT IS A RECORD AND A GAP IN THE SAME BREATH, and it is the honest state of him. He is given as a FITTER of the R.E.M.E. with the HEAVY SECTION in the desert in 1943, with no forename and no rank, and the informant is a photograph credited to Pittaway. NO SERVICE NUMBER IS RECORDED FOR HIM, on that roll or anywhere on this one, so he cannot be searched at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission or in the service records. That is the first thing anyone working on him will need. The missing tracer card is the thread: it may mean he was attached rather than posted, or that the card is simply lost. If you can add anything about him and his LRDG service, please email the roll keeper. Recorded from Ian Chard’s red-line corrections to the L.R.D.G. P.S. Troopers roll of 11 September 2026 (LRDG_IanChard_Troopers_redlines_vs_roll_2026-09-11.xlsx), supplied by Tony Moore.

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Not By Strength But By Guile