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 and Guam, and the American island-hopping campaign -- was a British naval correspondent, Hector C. Bywater. He wrote a series of brilliant books and articles in the 1920s and 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 and then were quickly forgotten. But Yamamoto adopted Bywater's ideas as his own. Photos.
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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