Colonel John Maurice Arthur Tillett (4 November 1919 – 14 December 2014) was a British Army officer who had a critical role in the planning of the capture of the Caen canal and Orne river bridges on D-Day, 6 June 1944, during the Second World War.

However, Tillett was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (Ox and Bucks) on 24 August 1940, eleven months after the Second World War began, and was given the service number of 145422.

The battalion was now part of the British Army's expanding airborne forces and underwent training as a glider infantry unit.

The battalion, along with the rest of the 6th Airborne Division, returned to Bulford Camp, Wiltshire, in early September 1944, after three months of nearly continuous action.

He was to lead the company in the Ardennes: the Battle of the Bulge, holding the line in the Netherlands and in Operation Varsity: the air assault landing over the River Rhine on 24 March 1945.

The Germans met the landing gliders with ferocious fire in the air and on the ground; the 2nd Ox and Bucks lost 400 killed or injured out of a total battalion strength of 800 men.

He witnessed the British atomic weapons tests which took place at Maralinga in South Australia; the effects of which were to subsequently cause him health problems.

He was the last-known surviving 2nd Ox and Bucks (the 52nd) officer to have taken part in the gliderborne air assault landing on Normandy, on D-Day, 6 June 1944.

Tillett organised and regularly attended the regimental commemorations of the anniversaries of the battle for Normandy at Bénouville and of the River Rhine Crossing at Hamminkeln, Germany.