The War Chronicles: From Flintlocks to Machine Guns: A Global Reference of All the Major Modern Conflicts Book

Back in the days long before Ken Burns' The Civil War and, later, Foyle's War and Downton Abbey made PBS viewing popular de rigueur mass media events that your friends and neighbors were talking about, it was a lonely pastime to be a PBS fan, watching shows that nobody else within a 10-mile radius of you had seen or were likely to, and no internet to let you bond with somebody, somewhere, who had.

It was in this circumstance in the early 1980s that I watched in awed solitude the musings of Canadian journalist and war historian, Gwynne Dyer, as he patiently and eruditely revealed the psychology of warfare and patriotism and the making of soldiers in a way that had never been seen on TV before. The Canadian-produced, PBS-aired 7-part series he hosted was titled, simply War, or War, with Gwynne Dyer -- shortly thereafter turned into this companion book, which more or less reiterates the points made on the show.

When the show first showed up in the newspaper TV schedule, my initial reaction at the time was, "Who the hell is Gwynne Dyer and what makes her such an expert about warfare?"

I soon found that Gwynne was a dude, and not just any dude, but the kind of dude you wished you'd had in history class (though, to be fair, in college in the early '80s we did have a lot of chill, long-haired, polyester-or-corduroy-wearing, post-hippie professor dudes with student chick groupies in tow in the manner no longer tenable). Dyer rocks the beard, the hair, the shades and the earth-tone corduroy in pimplike glory, talking about war in a buttery voice of authority that sounds partly leavened by some off-camera toking.

The show is decidedly a product of its time, ruminating on issues arising in the era of the post-Vietnam War and as the nuclear threats of the Cold War were still acute. Some of the show's rough and ready stylistics and cinema-verite techniques may be easier to engage for those who remember them. Parenthetically, and quite surprisingly, one of the episodes of this television series was actually nominated for an Academy Award, which seems a rather rare occurrence.

Instead of battle plans and strategy and tactics and weapons and general politics, Dyer took a refreshing tack in looking at war. He aimed to mine the psychological aspects of war; why we wage it and how we prepare for it; the realpolitik, the propaganda and the dehumanizing training of cannon fodder. Most importantly, Dyer implicates the citizenry themselves for their role in maintaining the military status quo, and posits the conundrum of the necessity of military defence and the parallel desire for peace and demilitarization. It was a great thought-provoking series, and fortunately some fine folks have made it available on Youtube.

Full disclosure: I've only read parts of this book, enough to know it reflects the contents of the show; therefore my rating is conditional. I intend to give it a full read, but you know the problem -- all those books...


KR@KY 2018