Historian, military analyst and journalist, Ph.D. in Ottoman military history, The King’s College London.

Gwynne Dyer is one of the few Western scholars to have done research in Ottoman military archives. Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland, he received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities, finishing with a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London. He served in three navies and held academic appointments at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Oxford University before launching his twice-weekly column on international affairs, which is published by over 175 papers in some 45 countries. [info]

major publications

• War: 1985, documentary television series
• Ignorant Armies: Sliding Into War in Iraq (2003)
  

relevant publications

• Turkish 'Falsifiers' and Armenian 'Deceivers': Historiography and the Armenian Massacres, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan. 1976), pp. 99-107
• The Turkish Armistice of 1918, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May, 1972), pp. 143-178
  

Source: Turkish 'Falsifiers' and Armenian 'Deceivers': Historiography and the Armenian Massacres

"When more work is completed on the period I believe that historians will come to see Talat, Enver and their associates not so much as evil men but as desperate, frightened, unsophisticated men struggling to keep their nation afloat in a crisis far graver than they had anticipated when they first entered the war (the Armenian decisions were taken at the height of the crisis of the Dardanelles), reacting to events rather than creating them, and not fully realizing the "tent of the horrors they had set in motion in 'Turkish Armenia' until they were too deeply committed to withdraw. As for the complicity of ordinary Turks with their leaders, hatred and revenge and blind panic were the motives for the behaviour of the Ottoman army and the Muslim Population of eastern Anatolia in the Armenian massacres, scarcely creditable motives, nor ones an Armenian is likely to forgive, but common enough in all nations and even understandable in the Turkish situation in the East in 1915. The 'final solution' attempted by the Ottoman government at the end of 1915, and all the succeeding bouts of mutual slaughter between Turks and Armenians down to 1922 grew out of those original decisions in early 1915, the history of which is yet to be written." P. 107

Source: The Turkish Armistice of 1918, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May, 1972)

" As a result of these developments, by August 1918, there was beginning of a talk heard among political circles in Istanbul of a possible change of cabinet in which Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha would be replaced respectively as Prime Minister and War Minister by Ahmed Tevfik Pasha and General Ahmed Izzet Pasha, as men less likely to be offensive to the Entente than the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (C.U.P.) which the Allies blamed for Turkey’s entry into the war and for the Armenian massacres of 1915." P. 148