Bywater; The man who invented the Pacific War
Bradley Honan (Author photograph) London, England: Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1990. Presumed First U.K. Edition, First printing. Hardcover. xiv, 337, [1] pages. This was published in the United States as Visions of Infamy. Minor DJ wear. Some edge soiling. Includes Acknowledgments, Preface, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Chapters cover Banzai!; 'War When Japan is Ready'; 'Our Splendid Spy in Germany'; Cruel Years; The Fleet Street Press Gang; Seize the Danube Position; An Exhilarating Possibility; 'Special Line on Japanese Information'; Bywater vs. Roosevelt; Keston Pond Manoeurvres; Les Guerres Imaginaires; "It Might Foment Trouble'; 'The Great Pacific War'; Wrong End of the Telescope; "Prophetic!' 'Mischievous!; 'A Bungle!'; 'Attack Americans at Hawaii'; 'How Do You Like My Navy?'; Comrades for Peace; The Monster Battleship Crisis; The Most Violent Day; "I Can Give Them Hell'; Epilogue. Also contains 5 black and white maps of Japan. William Holmes Honan (May 11, 1930 – April 28, 2014) was an American journalist and author who held senior editorial positions at the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Saturday Review and The Villager, a weekly newspaper serving downtown Manhattan. After serving in the Army, Honan moved to New York City where he managed Ed Koch's early political campaigns and began a career in journalism. Honan also helped solve the theft of medieval art from Quedlinburg: the disappearance of over $200 million worth of medieval treasures from Quedlinburg, Germany at the end of World War II. The quest to find the "Quedlinburg Hoard" later became the subject of one of Honan's books. Hector Charles Bywater (21 October 1884 in London-16 or 17 August 1940 in London) was a British journalist and military writer. He was sent as foreign correspondent to London. There he became a naval spy for Britain. In 1915, he was sent back to America to investigate suspicious activity on New York's docks and averted an attempted German bombing. In his 1921 book Sea-power in the Pacific: a study of the American-Japanese naval problem, he predicted naval conflict between Imperial Japan and the United States and expanded the topic further in 1925 book The Great Pacific War. Here Bywater correctly predicted many actions of the Japanese and the Americans. After WWII many military leaders confirmed that Bywater's The Great Pacific War was a key resource in planning military strategy during the war. Visions of Infamy is a biography of Hector Charles Bywater, the leading naval journalist of the first part of the 20th century who Honan argues was the architect of Japan's naval war against the United States in the Second World War. Bywater's 1925 book, The Great Pacific War, was a fictional account of how Japan might engage the United States in a theoretical future naval conflict and how the U.S. might respond. As Honan points out in Visions of Infamy, both Japan and the U.S. adopted strategies that were remarkably faithful to what Bywater promulgated in his fictionalized war game. Honan speculates that this was more than a coincidence. Derived from a Kirkus review: Bywater's prophetic writings in the 20's and 30's strongly influenced naval officers--some called him the successor to Alfred Thayer Mahan. Remarkably, Honan argues, both the Japanese Imperial Navy and the US Navy adopted many of Bywater's ideas and tested them in combat. Trying to prevent war, Bywater warned the Japanese militarists that, although they might score brilliant surprise victories at the start, a badly bloodied but enraged America would return in time with devastating power and numbers to destroy a depleted Japan. Japan's leaders believed they could hold and expand their early wins with wide and impregnable defenses. Honan hints that Bywater's sudden, mysterious death may have been ordered by Yamamoto before Pearl Harbor, since the Briton knew too much about Japan's plans. Honan collects much circumstantial evidence in support of his brief, gives deserved credit to a fascinating man, and contributes to the lore of WW II. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: Hector C. Bywater, Pacific Strategy, Great Pacific War, Japanese Imperial Navy, Frederick Jane, Naval War Game, Keston Pond, Homer Lea, Washington Conference, Isoroku Yamamoto, Russo-Japanese War
ISBN: 0356191354
[Book #82307]
Price: $50.00