Bywater, Hector Charles
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1884-1940) UK journalist and author of influential works on the military applications of sea-power, and of a Future War novel on the same theme, The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (1925), which quite remarkably predicts a massive Japanese surprise attack and early triumphs, and an ultimate American victory, the latter due in large part to an inexhaustible supply of energy, once the American navy began to shorten its extended supply lines through an initially laborious island-hopping progress westwards to ultimate victory. In his Bywater: The Man Who Invented the Pacific War (1990), William H Honan suggests that Admiral Yamamoto read The Great Pacific War in the 1920s and used it as a blueprint for his eventual attack on Pearl Harbor; the book was also apparently read by the American military. [JC]
Hector Charles Bywater
born London: 21 October 1884
died London: 17 August 1940
works
- Sea Power in the Pacific: A Study of the American-Japanese Naval Problem (London: Constable and Co, 1921) [nonfiction: hb/]
- The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (London: Constable and Co, 1925) [copies of the US edition from Houghton Mifflin were printed (the Library of Congress holds a copy) but it is not certain the book was actually released at this time: hb/]
- The Great Pacific War: A Prophecy Now Being Fulfilled (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942) [vt of the above: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry