Dan van der Vat, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Dan van der Vat

British historian and journalist

Date of Birth: 28-Oct-1939

Place of Birth: Alkmaar, North Holland, Netherlands

Date of Death: 09-May-2019

Profession: writer, historian, journalist

Nationality: Kingdom of the Netherlands

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio

Daniel Francis Jeroen van der Vat (28 October 1939 – 9 May 2019) was an journalist, writer and military historian, with a focus on naval history.Born in Alkmaar, North Holland, Van der Vat grew up in the Nazi-German occupied Netherlands.
He attended the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in London, and then was a student at St Cuthbert's Society, Durham University from 1957 to 1960, graduating with a BA in Classics.
He wrote fourteen books.He then became a graduate trainee on The Journal, a newspaper based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, later joining the Daily Mail in Manchester and returning to Newcastle as its regional chief reporter.
He was recruited by The Sunday Times in 1965 and transferred to The Times in 1967.
He was a foreign correspondent for ten years, opening The Times bureau in South Africa, but was later expelled from the country, having been described by the apartheid-era authorities as being a "pernicious liberal".
Instead he became the newspaper's bureau chief in Germany, but after Rupert Murdoch acquired The Times in 1981, he left and joined The Guardian the next year.
He served as the publication's chief foreign leader-writer before leaving the title in 1988 to write books.
He continued to write obituaries for The Guardian.