Lieutenant Colonel Eric Charles Twelves Wilson VC (2 October 1912 – 23 December 2008) was an English British Army officer and colonial administrator.

[2] 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.

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 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.

[1] Wilson has the rare distinction of being mistakenly awarded a "posthumous" VC, announced in The London Gazette on 16 October 1940.

An official report in The Times on 16 October indicated that he had survived, but another captured officer was surprised to find the "late" Captain Wilson still alive in a prisoner of war camp in Eritrea.

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.

The formal citation for Wilson's VC, published in the London Gazette in October 1940 when he was still presumed dead, reads:[7]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).

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.

On 12 and 14 August the enemy again concentrated field artillery fire on Captain Wilson's guns, but he continued, with his wounds untended, to man them.