Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

General Service 1918-62, 1 clasp, Palestine 1945-48, with M.I.D. oak leaf (Act. Gp. Cpt. D. A. Wilson. R.A.F.) very fine £200-£240

C.B.E. London Gazette 12 June 1958.

A.F.C. London Gazette 1 January 1954.

M.I.D. London Gazette 29 June 1948:
‘For distinguished service in Palestine.’

Denis Aymard Wilson was born at Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, on 3 December 1901 and was commissioned into the Medical Branch of the Royal Air Force in 1927. ‘He spent most of his medical career in the Royal Air Force, serving in nearly every station in east Africa and the Middle East. During the War he was one of the last to be evacuated from Crete, and was several times Mentioned in Despatches. After the War he took up radiology and eventually became Air Commodore and consultant adviser. He became deeply involved with the nuclear weapon programme, and particularly with the radiological problems that might affect aircrew. In 1953 he flew as the radiological observer in a Canberra through an atomic cloud a few minutes after the nuclear explosion north of Woomera in the Australian desert, for which work he was awarded the Air Force Cross. He retired from the Royal Air Force in 1966, and died at the Phyllis Tuckwell Memorial Hospice, Farnham, Surrey, on 9 February 1996.’ (recipient’s obituary refers).

The pilot of the Canberra that flew through the centre of the mushroom cloud, Geoffrey Dhenin, stated ‘We have seen Dante’s Inferno.’

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