Abstract
Gwynne Dyer is a syndicated journalist and military historian, best known for his two television series, War and The Defence of Canada. He was born in 1943, raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and joined the Canadian navy at the age of sixteen. While still serving in the navy, he completed a B.A. from Memorial University; and an M.A. from Rice University in Texas. After a two-year spell teaching War Studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, Dyer moved to England to take a Ph.D. in military history at the University of London. This in turn led to positions teaching at the Royal Military Academy (Sandhurst) and at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1973 Dyer began writing articles for leading London newspapers on the Arab-Israeli war, and soon decided to abandon academic life for a full-time career in journalism. Since the mid-1970s he has regularly contributed a syndicated column published by major newspapers in Britain, Canada, and the U.S.A. He began working in the field of radio journalism in the late 1970s, and made War first as a radio series before adapting it to television for the National Film Board of Canada. It was subsequently published in book form. "The Defence of Canada" was made for CBC television in the mid-1980s, and Dyer and his co-author Tina Viljoen are still working on the book version, which is slated for publication in the spring of 1989.