page_title: John Wilton (general)
section_title: Chief of the General Staff
hierarchical_section_title: John Wilton (general) / Post-war career / Chief of the General Staff
caption_attribution_description: A Bell UH-1D Huey of No. 9 Squadron RAAF, used to support the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment in Vietnam, 1970.
context_page_description: 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, the Army's professional head, from 1963 until 1966, and as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, forerunner of the role of Australia's Chief of the Defence Force, 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.
  Born in Sydney, Wilton entered the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1927. Owing to lack of opportunity in the Australian military at the time, he took a commission in the British Army following his graduation in 1930. He spent most of the remainder of the decade with the Royal Artillery in India. Wilton returned to Australia on the eve of World War II and was commissioned into the Royal Australian Artillery. 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.
context_section_description: Following the lead of the US Army, in 1960 the Australian Army had replaced its former "triangular" divisional structure of three infantry battalions under a brigade headquarters, with a "pentropic" organisation consisting of five larger battalions without a brigade layer between division and battalion headquarters. This had the effect of reducing the total number of Australian battalions, while increasing their individual strength. Wilton was unhappy with the pentropic structure, reasoning that the number of battalions, rather than their relative strength, was the overriding factor when considering potential overseas deployments. The US had in any event abandoned the system in June 1961. In October 1964, Wilton commissioned a review that ultimately recommended a return to the triangular formation. In the meantime, as a response to the Indonesia–Malaysia Konfrontasi, the Australian government reintroduced conscription, which Wilton fought until convinced that the government was not going to improve pay and conditions sufficiently to attract by any other means the recruits needed to meet overseas commitments. Wilton was keen to mitigate any prejudices the national servicemen might have against the regular soldiery, and vice versa; when he found a memo from an Army committee asserting that "it must be recognised that the NS man was likely to be a reluctant soldier", he wrote on it "This assumption not justified". In February–March 1965, following a request from the Malaysian government, Australia despatched 1 Squadron, Special Air Service Regiment, and 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, to Borneo—a commitment Wilton felt able to recommend as a result of the recent decisions to increase the Army's personnel and battalion numbers.
  By mid-1964, Australia had already sent a small team of military advisors, as well as a flight of newly acquired DHC-4 Caribou transports, to aid the South Vietnamese government in its fight against the Viet Cong.  The 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, was deployed in May 1965. It was attached to a US Army brigade, and Wilton was responsible for setting its operational parameters. In August, he recommended to his opposite number in the RAAF, Air Marshal Alister Murdoch, the despatch of two UH-1 Iroquois helicopters to Vietnam. Wilton believed that both services would benefit from gaining familiarisation with air/ground operations in the region before any large-scale commitment of Australian forces. He was exasperated when Murdoch rejected the idea on resourcing grounds, despite the fact that two-thirds of the RAAF's UH-1 complement had been purchased for the express purpose of army cooperation. According to the official history of the post-war Air Force, when the Federal government deployed No. 9 Squadron and its UH-1s to Vietnam less than a year later, the unit was under-prepared for combat operations.
  Wilton supported the RAAF's request that the deputy commander of Australian Forces Vietnam be an air officer, despite the misgivings of some senior Army personnel and the fact that an appointment of this level was not commensurate with the services' relative commitments to the conflict. In what the official history of Australia in the Vietnam War described as a "pragmatic and far-sighted approach", Wilton expressed his hope that such an arrangement would give the Air Force a closer understanding of land/air cooperation, and avoid "increasing differences of views about strategic and tactical concepts with the Australian Armed Forces". Following the Federal government's decision in March 1966 to despatch a task force of two battalions to Vietnam, Wilton negotiated with US and South Vietnamese commanders a self-contained area of operations for the Australians, in Phuoc Tuy Province, where they could function with a reasonable degree of independence. He also approved Nui Dat, in the centre of the province forward of the major population areas, as the task force's main base, despite its distance from support units in Vung Tau and the extra effort required to defend it. Wilton rejected a mo
caption: UH-1 Iroquois of No. 9 Squadron RAAF in Vietnam
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