Philip Christison

General Sir Alexander Frank Philip Christison, 4th Baronet, GBE, CB, DSO, MC & Bar (17 November 1893 – 21 December 1993) was a British Army officer who served with distinction during the world wars.

[8][9] He was educated at Edinburgh Academy and University College, Oxford where, as a cadet in the latter's Officer Training Corps (OTC), he was made a second lieutenant in March 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War that August.

He displayed the utmost courage and determination in pushing back the enemy and clearing the north side of the village.

)[5]Promoted to captain on 4 August 1917,[15] three years since the outbreak of war, on 24 October 1918 he was promoted to the acting rank of major,[16] and served as second-in-command (2IC) with the 1/6th Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders, a Territorial Force (TF) unit, part of the 152nd (Seaforth and Cameron) Brigade of the 51st (Highland) Division.

[29][8] On 18 March 1937, Christison, due to a lack of promotion in his own regiment, transferred to the Duke of Wellington's Regiment (DWR) where he received an immediate promotion to lieutenant-colonel,[30] and was appointed Commanding Officer (CO) of the 2nd Battalion, DWR in the Multan area of the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province.

On 18 February 1938 he was promoted to colonel[31] and, on the same date, to the temporary rank of brigadier,[32] and was selected to command the Quetta Brigade in India,[12][33] an unusual posting for a British Army officer.

[12] The length of the course at the college had, in pre-war days, lasted almost two years, but had now been reduced to a relatively brief period of five months, due to the outbreak of war and the urgent need to train large numbers of competent staff officers to fill the increasing number of jobs for the expanding British and Indian Armies.

[34] In May 1941 Christison returned to the United Kingdom and, after serving briefly as a Brigadier General Staff (BGS), on 17 June 1941 was promoted to the acting rank of major-general[35] and became General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division, taking over from Major-General Sir Oliver Leese, who had been a fellow student at the Staff College in the late 1920s, and who he would encounter later in the war.

[36] After a short appointment as a military district commander, he was promoted to the acting rank of lieutenant-general on 12 November 1942[37] and became GOC of XXXIII Indian Corps.

[39] He handed over XXXIII Corps to Lieutenant-General Montagu Stopford in mid-November 1943 and then assumed command of the XV Indian Corps,[13] part of the new Fourteenth Army, succeeding Lieutenant-General William Slim, who he knew from years before as a fellow instructor at the Staff College, and had been promoted to command the Fourteenth Army.

In December 1944 Christison and his fellow corps commanders, Lieutenant-Generals Montagu Stopford and Geoffry Scoones, were knighted and invested as Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the viceroy Lord Wavell at a ceremony at Imphal in front of the Scottish, Gurkha and Punjab regiments.

Christison's stance on negotiations with the Indonesian nationalists was criticised by the Dutch and eventually at the end of January 1946 he was relieved of his command by Lord Mountbatten.