A little known novel by a British naval analyst predicted a U. S.-Japan war, including a Japanese sneak attack on U. S. forces.
The novel predicted a Japanese surprise attack on U. S. naval forces in the Pacific, the Allies’ island hopping strategy used during the actual Pacific War, and the eventual U. S. victory over Japan. Bywater’s work of fiction is thought to have influenced Imperial Japan’s chief naval strategist and commander of the Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet, Marshal Admiral Isoruko Yamamoto, when he was planning his naval campaign against the United States.
The war ends after six years of heavy fighting, during which the Americans slowly encroached on Japan by employing a leapfrogging strategy. In the book, U. S. naval forces defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy in a climactic battle off the island of Yap in the Western Pacific. In the battle, the Japanese lose five battleships while the U. S. Navy loses only two. Japan finally capitulates following a U. S. air raid on Tokyo where U. S. aircraft drop bombs filled with leaflets urging the Japanese population to surrender rather than risk destruction of their homeland.
The book was translated into Japanese and for a time became required reading for Japanese Navy officers (in the United States, war planners purportedly rewrote War Plan Orange to more closely resemble the operational plan described in the novel.) According to Honan, Yamamoto read Bywater’s novel “so assiduously in both overall strategy and specific tactics at Pearl Harbor, Guam, the Philippines, and even the Battle of Midway that it is no exaggeration to call Hector Bywater the man who invented the Pacific War.” This almost certainly overstates the novel’s influence.
For one thing, many other analysts and naval planners were anticipating a future military confrontation between the two countries in the Pacific.
