Eric Charles Twelves Wilson

Eric Charles Twelves Wilson, whose British Army service number was 58138, was born at Sandown on the Isle of Wight on 2 October 1912. The son of an Anglican curate, he gained entry to Marlborough College and subsequently secured a cadetship to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, before being commissioned into the East Surrey Regiment on 2 February 1933. A desire for service across the African continent drew him into secondment with colonial formations, first with the 2nd (Nyasaland) Battalion, King's African Rifles, in Tanganyika, where he mastered the Nyanja tongue, and by late 1938 with the Somaliland Camel Corps. Tasked with training local Somali recruits into a Vickers machine-gun detachment, Wilson developed a profound professional respect for his Somali soldiers and non-commissioned officers, relying upon their discipline when Fascist Italy invaded the British Somaliland Protectorate in August 1940.

Tasked with holding the vital Tug Argan Gap along the Assa Hills to buy time for the evacuation of Commonwealth troops from the port of Berbera, Wilson placed his machine guns across four prominent ridges, establishing his command redoubt on Observation Hill. The knoll provided open fields of fire along the main roadway but stood fully exposed to incoming artillery fire. Over five days of continuous bombardment and infantry assaults from 11 to 15 August 1940, Wilson held the breach. Although incapacitated by a severe recurrence of malaria, blinded in his left eye and struck in his right shoulder by shell fragments, and forced to fight without spectacles after artillery blasts shattered them, he repeatedly rebuilt his shattered gun emplacements and kept his weapons firing until the position was overrun by Italian infantry on the afternoon of 15 August. Presumed dead amidst the slaughter on Observation Hill, Wilson received the Victoria Cross in the Second Supplement to The London Gazette of 11 October 1940 (Issue 34968, page 5993):

"The KING has been pleased to approve of the award of The Victoria Cross to :— Lieutenant (acting Captain) Eric Charles Twelves Wilson, The East Surrey Regiment (attached Somaliland Camel Corps).

For most conspicuous gallantry on active service in Somaliland. Captain Wilson was in command of machine-gun posts manned by Somali soldiers in the key position of Observation Hill, a defended post in the defensive organisation of the Tug Argan Gap in British Somaliland. The enemy attacked Observation Hill on August 11th, 1940. Captain Wilson and Somali gunners under his command beat off the attack and opened fire on the enemy troops attacking Mill Hill, another post within his range. He inflicted such heavy casualties that the enemy, determined to put his guns out of action, brought up a pack battery to within seven hundred yards, and scored two direct hits through the loopholes of his defences, which, bursting within the post, wounded Captain Wilson severely in the right shoulder and in the left eye, several of his team being also wounded. His guns were blown off their stands but he repaired and replaced them and, regardless of his wounds, carried on, whilst his Somali sergeant was killed beside him. On August 12th and 14th the enemy again concentrated field artillery fire on Captain Wilson's guns, but he continued, with his wounds untended, to man them. On August 15th two of his machine-gun posts were blown to pieces, yet Captain Wilson, now suffering from malaria in addition to wounds, still kept his own post in action. The enemy finally over-ran the post at 5 p.m. on the 15th August when Captain Wilson, fighting to the last, was killed."

Wilson had survived the final onslaught. Found alive amidst the debris, he was transported to an Italian prisoner of war camp at Adi Ugri in Eritrea, where a captured Royal Air Force officer subsequently astonished him with the news that his Victoria Cross had been announced worldwide. Liberated in April 1941 when Commonwealth divisions captured the region, Wilson recuperated in Britain and received his medal from King George VI at Buckingham Palace on 28 July 1942. He returned to active operations as adjutant of the Long Range Desert Group in Egypt and Libya before deploying to Southeast Asia as second-in-command of the 11th (Kenya) Battalion, King's African Rifles, fighting in the Kabaw Valley and along the Chindwin River in the Burma Campaign until felled by scrub typhus. Following convalescence, he commanded the Infantry Training Centre at Jinja, Uganda, finished his career seconded to the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, and retired from military service in 1949 with the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel. Wilson spent the next twelve years in the Colonial Administrative Service in Tanganyika, remaining in retirement until his death in Somerset on 23 December 2008 at the age of ninety-six.