Jacket blurb

This book tells for the first time the remarkable story of Hector C. Bywater — the leading British naval authority between the two World Wars — who devised the basic strategy used by Japan to make war in the Pacific nearly fifty years ago, commencing with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Until now, historians have believed that Japan's opening gambit in World War II was conceived by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander-inChief of the Combined Fleet of Imperial Japan. However, William H. Honan, the Chief Cultural Correspondent of The New York Times, draws upon his research in Japan, Britain and the USA to demonstrate that it was Bywater who first spelled out the war plan adopted by Yamamoto.

Bywater laboured for years to develop his ideas about Pacific strategy. In the early 1920s, he engaged in a long-running debate with Franklin D. Roosevelt over whether a Pacific war was a physical possibility, given the vast distances involved. He finally solved the last strategic problem by gaming with model ships on a pond just outside London. In 1925, Bywater published his war plan. He hoped to deter the Japanese from attempting any such venture by showing that although Japan's aggressive expansion of her empire in the Western Pacific could achieve spectacular victories at the outset, she would ultimately be crushed in any war against the United States.

Yamamoto read Bywater's book while serving as Naval Attaché in Washington, and reported about it to Tokyo. On returning home, he even delivered a lecture in which he adopted Bywater's ideas as his own. Later, Bywater and Yamamoto met in London and spent an evening discussing prospects for peace and war. Consequently, when Yamamoto was charged with developing a war-contingency plan in 1939, he commenced preparations for an updated version of the Bywater strategy. He was soon obliged to carry it out.
Bywater's life is presented here against a pageant of naval history from the first testing of high-speed armoured warships at the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894 up to the Second World War.

Bywater's story also includes his daredevil adventures as a British Secret Service agent inside Germany, his revealing to the world of Germany's pocket battleships, his unmasking of Japan's top-secret super battleships, and his personal audience with Mussolini during which he mischievously convinced it Duce to squander millions of lire renovating a pair of useless old rust buckets.

The author

William H. Honan is Chief Cultural Correspondent of The New York Times. In a career spanning more than two decades at The Times, he has written frequently about naval developments. Mr Honan lives in Connecticut with his wife, three children and a 17-foot wooden sailboat that he
claims is unarmed. His brother, Park Honan, also a writer, is Professor of English at the University of Leeds in England.

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.

Contents

Acknowledgment
Preface
1 Banzaii
2 War When Japan is Ready'
3 'Our Splendid Spy in Germany'
4 Cruel Years
5 The Fleet Street Press Gang
6 Seize the Danube Position
7 An Exhilarating Possibility
8 'Special Line on Japanese Information'
9 Bywater vs. Roosevelt
10 Keston Pond Manoeuvres
11 Les Guerres Imaginaires
12 'It Might Foment Trouble'
13 The Great Pacific War'
14 Wrong End of the Telescope
15 'Prophetic!"Mischievous!"A Bungle!'
16 'Attack Americans at Hawaii'
17 'How Do You Like My Navy?'
18 Comrades for Peace
19 The Monster Battleship Crisis
20 The Most Violent Day
21 'I Can Give Them Hell'
22 Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Maps

1. Crossing the T at Tsushima
2. The Danube Position
3. Bywater's Three Naval Routes to Japan
4. Philippines Invasion Plans by Bywater and the Japanese
5. The 'Highway' to Japan

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