Ships
- USS Colhoun (DD-801) Captain, 8 July 1944 – 6 April 1945
George Rees Wilson was born on 6 October 1910 in Tallula, Illinois. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1932 and was a lieutenant by the summer of 1940. Temporary wartime promotion made him a lieutenant commander in June 1942 and a commander that November.
In June 1943 he took command of the destroyer Chevalier (DD-451). He was still her commanding officer when she was sunk in the Solomon Islands on 6 October 1943. The Navy awarded him the Silver Star for his conduct on 6 and 7 October. He had already received the Navy Cross in August 1943.
Wilson returned to sea as the first commanding officer of a new Fletcher-class destroyer. Colhoun (DD-801) had been launched at Seattle on 10 April 1944 by Todd Pacific Shipbuilding and was named for Rear Admiral Edmund Ross Colhoun. Wilson assumed command when she was commissioned on 8 July 1944. In her first weeks he took her through Puget Sound trials, including a run on 21 July after a port-engine casualty during earlier tests.
Colhoun reached Pearl Harbor on 10 October 1944 for training, patrol duty, and yard work that fitted her for radar picket service. In early February 1945 she sailed with a transport group bound for the Volcano Islands, exercising along the way with other destroyers of the screen. Off Iwo Jima from 19 February she screened transports, stood radar picket, and fired in support of the landing. On 1 March a salvo from heavy Japanese batteries ashore killed one man and wounded sixteen. After repairs at Saipan she reached Okinawa on 31 March and went back onto the picket line.
On the afternoon of 6 April 1945, during the first heavy kamikaze raid of the Okinawa campaign, Colhoun answered a call for help from the destroyer Bush and closed to place her guns between the damaged ship and the attacking aircraft. About a dozen suicide planes and dive bombers came at her. Wilson directed the fire that brought down five of them and kept fighting after four suicide aircraft struck the ship. He then directed damage control until the crew had to abandon her. Listing, uncontrolled flooding, and fire defeated an attempt to tow the wreck toward Okinawa, and Cassin Young sank her with gunfire northwest of the island, near 27°16' N, 127°48' E. Thirty-two men were killed and twenty-three wounded, and two of the wounded later died. Colhoun received one battle star for her wartime service.
For his leadership that day the Navy awarded Wilson a Gold Star in lieu of a second Navy Cross. In November 1945 he took command of the destroyer William W. Wood (DD-715). He retired from the Navy as a captain and died in September 1990 in Sun City Center, Florida, at the age of seventy-nine.