Customer Reviews

The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Bywater explains the "inevitable" war in the Pacific between the United States and Japan if the Naval Treaty between the US, UK, and Japan hadn't been signed in the 1920's. What is interesting is the amount of detail that Bywater brings to the "war that never happened" and forecasts some of the steps that the US would enventually take in WW2. It's not for everyone but if you like the "What-If" genre of history you'll find it quite enjoyable. This book was out of print for years so if you want to read it buy the reprint now! I tried to find it for years from specialty shops and could never find it.

Who will forget Roosevelt's speech condemning the Japanes for their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor? But was it a day of infamy or a very predictable event that US intelligence failed to get right? After all In his book the naval authority Hector Bywater outlined in novel format a scenario for a Pacific war between Japan and the US in 1931. Japan made a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet based in the Philippines ( Pearl was not then the naval base). After initial setbacks the US employed a strategy of island hopping to cut back the Japanese. Finally they made a move on the Japanese so provocative that the Japanese fleet had no option but to come out and fight to save their honor. They were annihilated.
He was called a war mongerer. Roosevelt attacked him and disagreed that such a war would happen. Meanwhile a fellow called Yamamoto bought and read the novel as did most of the Japanese naval academy.
December 7th 1941 Hector Bywater's novel became reality.
Whilst the novel is old worldly quaint and focuses on pure ship power (aircraft at the time did not have the capability to inflict any significant damage) it is prophetic if only Roosevelt had listened.
A must read for all those interested in naval power and the war in the Pacific.

A surprise attack on a US installation in the Pacific by the Japanese? The US conducting a campaign of "island-hopping" to fight the enemy? The Japanese using suicide aircraft to defend themselves? This sounds like a history of WWII but it isn't from WWII but rather a novel written years before. What the author has done is basically use military logic to write a book that details a clash between the US and Japan. Some parts of the book are right on the mark with what would later happen for real in World War II. However, other parts miss wide such as the author having the US use gas as a weapon.

As novels go, this book really isn't that exciting. It's main interest is to the historian, both professional and amateur, who is interested in what was foreseen by some people in the 1920's.

A well written, quickly moving narative with main chapter subjects at beginning of each chapter. This author is a terrific news man and a far cry from the self-serving propagandist we have to day.

Bywater was a naval correspondent both in England and the US and it is rumored that he worked for British Naval Intel during the First World War. He wrote a book published during course of the 1921-22 Naval Arms Limitation Conference in Washington (SEA POWER IN THE PACIFIC) in which he outlined problems that might be encountered by the US and Great Britain in view of Japan's naval ambitions. His GPW, written in 1925, fleshed out his deliberations of the 1922 book in a docu-fictional scenario. His is not the first such book. Homer Lea, the peculiar, though gifted, hunchbacked geopolitical theorist had written THE VALOR OF IGNORANCE in 1909, likewise prophesizing a Japanese-American conflict for control of the Pacific Ocean resources. Bywater's scenario in many ways parrots US war planning underway in the Naval War College (Newport, RI) at the time and his book was studied not only by US naval planners,(WAR PLAN ORANGE) but by Japanese admirals and generals both active and retired who utilized elements of Bywater's hypothetical war in their own planning memos. Interestingly, Bywater disparages Lea's contention that the Japanese could make amphibious landings along the US west coast, which Secretary of War Stimson feared in 1941, and which led to the infamous policy of locking up Japanese Americans in concentration camps. I doubt that Admiraal Isoruku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, cribbed his war plans from Bywater's book, as alleged by William Honan, among others, but Bywater's very carefully crafted "what if?" was taken seriously by Japanese strategists hoping to overcome the factors that guided the American victory in GPW. Bywater did not foresee the decisive role of carrier-based airpower and the submarine during the decade after 1925, but his "stepping stone" scenario was quite prescient, even if he assigned the battleship the decisive role.

I have to think that this is how Mahan would have predicted the Pacific war had he lived another 10 years. By all means, get this book if you have any interest in WWII in the Pacific theater.

Obviously written before the author (and his training) really understood the signifigance aircraft carriers would have in the war between these two countries (1941 -1945), so a lot of his suppositions are not born out by fact.

However, the three biggest objections I had to the volume was 1) the fact of his use of very very long paragraphs to get his point across (some paragraphs would go for two or three PAGES at a minimum); 2) the fact that the volume was/is touted as having predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor (at least a decade before it actually happened) but does not mention an attack there at all in the narrative, and 3) how Japan is protrayed as treating prisoners of war in the novel versus how they actuslly treated them in fact.

Is it worth reading- - - yes. Just don't do it to see how history was revealed, but only as it might have been.