Blurb

THE GREAT PACIFIC WAR: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931 - 33
1925 1st. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York [novel]

A British naval correspondent, author of many books on naval affairs and a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bywater, caused a sensation with the publication of this novel. In fact the first American edition was printed in England and shipped across to the States for the Houghton Mifflin Company of New York and Boston. The story's feasibility and likelihood were rubbished by Bywater's contemporaries and the navies of America and Great Britain alike. After all it was a bit farfetched! The Japanese striking a surprise blow on the American Pacific Fleet, attacking the Philippines, someone from the Philippines taking command of the American counter-attack and Island hopping towards the Japanese mainland, a naval battle in mid-ocean the turning point of the war, American industrial power eventually redressing the naval balance etc. Whatever next! Obviously he was not totally correct: he was ten years out and had the Japanese surrender after leaflets were dropped on Tokyo!

Hector C. Bywater's biography by William H. Honan

From a short review by Piers Brendon

Toy sailor who planned Pearl Harbour: Bywater:

The Man Who Invented The Pacific War, by William H. Honan (Macdonald, £13.95)1991

WAS the entire strategy of 'the Pacific war worked out in advance by an Englishman with model ships firing corks on Keston Pond, near Beckenham, Kent?
Hector Bywater, a former spy and the naval correspondent of many newspapers, embodied his toy manoeuvres in a dramatic novel entitled The Great Pacific War, published in 1925.
It forecast with uncanny accuracy the rise of militarist Japan, the surprise attack on the US fleet (even the number of casualties was right) and the island-hopping gambit which America adopted to defeat Japan.
Bywater's book deeply influenced senior sailors on both sides of the Pacific. Admiral Yamomoto based not only his Pearl Harbour plan on it, but his tactics in the Battle of Midway.
So, at any rate, claims William Honan in this thorough study of Bywater's long-lost career.
His argument is always intriguing but not altogether convincing.
The Japanese had long favoured surprise attacks and Bywater did not realise that aeroplanes had made battleships obsolete. Whatever the truth, Honan has uncovered a fantastic instance of life imitating art.

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