Simmons, George G.
Army Corporal

George G. Simmons, age 25, from Montana, Ravalli county.

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Thursday, November 19, 1942
Death details: On December 22, 2015, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) accounted for Corporal George G. Simmons, missing from World War II. Corporal Simmons, who entered the U.S. Army from Montana, was a member of Battery H, 60th Coast Artillery Regiment. CPL Simmons was serving on Corregidor Island when Japanese forces invaded the Philippines. He was one of the thousands of service members taken as prisoners of war when Allied forces surrendered on Corregidor on May 6, 1942. Following his capture, CPL Simmons was eventually taken to the Cabanatuan POW camp where he died of unknown causes on November 19, 1942. He was buried in Common Grave 717 in Cabanatuan Camp #3 Cemetery. Following the war, American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) personnel exhumed the remains buried at this Cabanatuan cemetery and relocated them to a temporary U.S. military cemetery near Manila. In 1947, the AGRS exhumed the remains at the Manila cemetery in an attempt to identify them, but many were unidentifiable and were reburied as “unknowns” in the permanent American Battle Monuments Commission cemetery in the Philippines. In 2014, ten graves initially associated with Cabanatuan Common Grave 717 were brought to the DPAA laboratory in Hawaii for reexamination. Analysts used modern forensic techniques to individually identify CPL Simmons from among these remains.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency