John James Dwyer enlisted in Toronto on 10 September 1939 with the 48th Highlanders of Canada and was given the service number B73180. He trained with the 48th Highlanders, most of it at the CNE grounds in Toronto with barracks in the Horse Palace. On 17 December 1939, he, with the 1st Battalion, 48th Highlanders boarded a CN train for Halifax. There they embarked on 18 December on the Reina del Pacifico as part of the convoy carrying the 1st Canadian Contingent to the UK. They landed at Gourock, Scotland in the Clyde on 31 December and went by train to the Corunna Barracks in Aldershot, arriving New Year’s Day.
On 18 April 1940 he was struck of strength of the 1st Battalion and sent to 1 Canadian Inf Base Depot, having been declared “medically unfit, Category “C”. On 27 May he was transferred to the holding unit, 1CIRU having been declared suitable “in UK to be employed on guard and air defence with RCAMC units until return to Canada”. In England he spent many periods in the hospital with asthmatic bronchitis and emphysema, perhaps a condition related to his job in Cape Breton as a coal miner.
Pte Dwyer married in England in 1942, changing his next of kin to Mrs. Irene Dyer. They had two children while in England. Pte Dwyer returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia and was discharged on 4 April 1945. They had a third child before he died in 1948, declared due to service. His headstone reads RCAMC.
NOK: sister, Mrs. J. J. Murphy at 13th Street, New Waterford, Nova Scotia.