Military Career
Wilson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in The East Surrey Regiment on 2 February 1933. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 1936 and was seconded to the 2nd (Nyasaland) Battalion The King's African Rifles in 1937 serving in East Africa, where he learned to speak Nyanja. He was then seconded to The Somaliland Camel Corps in 1939.
In August 1940, Wilson was 27-years-old, and by then an acting captain attached to the Somaliland Camel Corps, when Italian forces commanded by General Guglielmo Nasi invaded British Somaliland (now Somalia). During the Italian conquest of British Somaliland the heavily outnumbered British-led forces made their stand on the hills around Tug Argan. During this battle, from 11 August 1940 to 15 August 1940 at Observation Hill, Captain Wilson kept a Vickers machine-gun post in action in spite of being wounded and suffering from malaria. Some of his guns were blown to pieces by the enemy's field artillery fire, and his spectacles were smashed. He was wounded in the right shoulder and left eye, and he was assumed to have been killed. For his actions, likened in the Daily Sketch to another Rorke's Drift, he was awarded the Victoria Cross. He had however had been captured by the Italians.
He has the rare distinction of being mistakenly awarded a "posthumous" VC, announced in the London Gazette on 16 October 1940. At the time the award was made he was believed to be missing in action, presumed dead. An official report in The Times in 16 October indicated that he has survived, but another captured officer was surprised to find the "late" Captain Wilson still alive in a POW camp in Eritrea.
When the Italian forces in East Africa surrendered following the East African Campaign Wilson was released from captivity in 1941. He returned to England and received his Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace in July 1942. With his captain's rank made permanent in 1941, and serving as a temporary major, he served as adjutant of the Long Range Desert Group and then as second in command of the 11th (Kenyan) King's African Rifles, part of the 25th East African Brigade in 11th East African Division, in the Burma Campaign. Having contracted scrub typhus he was hospitalised for two months and then returned to East Africa to command an infantry training establishment at Jinja in Uganda. He was promoted to acting lieutenant-colonel in June 1945 and was seconded to The Northern Rhodesian Regiment in 1946. He retired from the Army in 1949 and although at this time his permanent rank was major, he was granted the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel.
Read more about this topic: Eric Charles Twelves Wilson
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