Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto smashed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, yet the man who first conceived of the Pacific war -- Japan's surprise attack, the seizure of the Philippines & Guam, & the American island-hopping campaign -- was a British naval correspondent, Hector C. Bywater. He wrote a series of brilliant books & articles in the 1920s & 1930s that prophetically outlined naval strategies that would read like a blueprint for the Pacific Theater during World War II. Bywater's ideas created an uproar & then were quickly forgotten. But Yamamoto adopted Bywater's ideas as his own. Photos.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Hector Bywater, a British authority on naval affairs, published books and articles in the 1920s and '30s that were astonishingly prophetic. In 1924, 16 years before the Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor, he accurately predicted the course of the Pacific war, including the surprise attack against U.S. naval forces, the invasions of Guam and the Philippines, and the island-hopping U.S. counterattack. Honan, chief cultural correspondent for the New York Times , argues persuasively that Bywater's writings directly influenced admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor offensive and many of Japan's subsequent moves. Ironically, Yamamoto initially agreed with Bywater that Japan could hold out against the U.S. for only a year and a half. Bywater died suddenly in 1940 at the age of 55, ostensibly from alcohol poisoning. Honan cites circumstantial evidence suggesting that he was murdered by the Japanese in order to eliminate the one Westerner who knew exactly what the Imperial Navy was up to. A compelling narrative. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
During the Thirties, numerous people postulated a sneak Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor. Bywater, a hard-drinking and self-taught naval expert, was more astute about it than most. The strategies he devised for his fictitious battle between Japan and the United States in his novel The Great Pacific War (1925; St. Martin's. Aug. 1991. ISBN 0-312-06364-4. $22.95; Honan wrote a new introduction) became all too real when the Japanese borrowed them to plan their attack on Pearl Harbor. His prescience and untimely death just before the raid leads Honan to suggest that Bywater had been "silenced," probably by the Japanese high command. All speculation aside, the outspoken newspaperman had an interesting and adventurous life, well worth reading about. This fast-moving biography lends insight to the dramatic worldwide naval developments of the 1920s and 1930s. Recommended for general collections.
-Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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This review is from: Visions of Infamy: The Untold Story of How Journalist Hector C. Bywater Devised the Plans That Led to Pearl Harbor (Paperback)
William Honan has done history buffs and strategists alike a signal service in presenting this exciting biography of Hector C. Bywater. Not content with a biography of this journalist, spy and prophet, Honan attempts to do more: understand Bywater's intellectual development--a transformation which led him to foresee what others felt was absurd: a trans-Pacific war between the U.S. and Japan. Honan unearths Bywaters public debates with none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt--at that time a naive pacifist--as well as coming close to proving that Japan's Admiral Yamamoto seized on Bywater's ideas to create the Japanese strategy that culminated in Pearl Harbor and the rout of MacArthur in the Phillippines. For strategists, Visions of Infamy carves a statue to what it really takes to think with vigor and independence.
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