John Wilton (general)
General Sir John Gordon Noel Wilton, KBE, CB, DSO, was a senior commander in the Australian Army. He served as Chief of the General Staff from 1963 until 1966, and as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1966 until 1970. His eight-year tenure as senior officer of first the Army and then the Australian military spanned almost the entire period of the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
About John Wilton (general) in brief
General Sir John Gordon Noel Wilton, KBE, CB, DSO, was a senior commander in the Australian Army. He served as Chief of the General Staff from 1963 until 1966, and as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1966 until 1970. His eight-year tenure as senior officer of first the Army and then the Australian military spanned almost the entire period of the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Wilton was born in Sydney on 22 November 1910, the second of two sons to English migrants Noel and Muriel Wilton. He entered the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in February 1927, aged sixteen. He saw action with the 7th Division in Syria and the 3rd Division in New Guinea, earning a mention in despatches in the former campaign and the Distinguished Service Order in the latter. In 1953 he took command of the 28th Commonwealth Brigade, leading it in its final action of the war in July. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1962 and made CGS the following January, with the rank of lieutenant general. In this role he had overall responsibility for Australia’s forces in Vietnam, and worked to achieve an integrated defence organisation, including a tri-services academy, a joint intelligence group, and the amalgamation of separate government departments for the Army, Navy and Air Force. He retired from the military in November 1970 and served as Consul-General in New York City from 1973 to 1975. He died in 1981, aged seventy, and was buried in Grafton, New South Wales, where he had lived with his wife and two children since 1921.
He is buried at the Royal Australian Military Cemetery, near Sydney, in a plot of land he inherited from his father, Noel, who moved to Hobart in 1915 to work in the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Department. He also had a son, Maurice, who worked in the same company as his father until he moved to Tasmania in the 1930s, when he took up employment in Hobart as an electrical engineer. He had a daughter, Mary, who was married to Australian politician and politician, Michael Wilton; they had three children. Wilon was known as a ‘loner’ and was considered to be a ‘clear thinker’ and a ‘quite, determined, achiever’ He was a keen swimmer and took up rugby and hockey as a teenager. He joined the Royal Artillery in 1930, and served in India for three years. In 1935 he was posted to Burma, joining the 10th Battery of the Indian Mountain Artillery at Mayo Mandalayo near Mandalay, near the Nepalese border. In 1936 he was promoted to lieutenant. He spent the next three years based at Fyzabad, near Nepaleses, training with his battery and learning to speak Urdu, but saw no action. By 1930, the effects of the Great Depression had reduced the opportunities for Duntraon graduates. Only four of Wilton’s classmates joined the Australian Military Forces, while four transferred to the British Army.
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