Frank Simmons
British Army general
Major-General Frank Keith Simmons, (21 February 1888 – 22 September 1952) was a senior British Army officer during the Second World War. He was commander of the Singapore Fortress when it fell to the invading Imperial Japanese Army in February 1942. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese.
Military service
Born on 21 February 1888, Simmons was educated at Cranbrook School, Kent, and was, in 1907, commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Highland Light Infantry. He served in the First World War, on the Western Front, where he awarded the Military Cross and made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in November 1915.
Remaining in the army during the interwar period, Simmons married in 1922 and attended from 1922 to 1923 the Staff College, Camberley. Among his fellow students there included several future general officers, notably Thomas Hutton, Charles Fullbrook-Leggatt, John Evetts, Gerald Smallwood and Robert Money. After graduation from Camberley, he served as a staff officer at the War Office from 1924 to 1927. Divorcing his wife in 1926, he remarried the following year and transferred to the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders.
Simmons then served as a Military Attache to Spain from 1928 until 1931, whereupon he then commanded the 2nd Battalion, Cameron Highlanders, from 1932 to 1936.
“Frank Simmons” enters the record as british Army general. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Frank, Simmons and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frank Simmons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.