VISIONS OF INFAMY - The Untold Story of How Journalist Hector C. Bywater devised the Plans that led to Pearl Harbor by Honan, William H

New York, 1991, St. Martin's. first US edition, hard bound in dust jacket, Fine/Fine cond. 6 x 9, 346 pages, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliog & index.  --------------------------------------- Full account of how American journalist predicted Japanese plans for WW 2 in the Pacific, during the 1930's. December 7, 1941. In one of the most devastating surprise attacks in naval history, Japanese forces under the command of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto delivered a crushing blow to the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto has been perceived ever since as a naval strategist of great originality.Yet Yamamoto did not invent the audacious plan, nor did any other Japanese. The man who first conceived of the great Pacific war Japan's surprise attack, the seizure of the Philippines and Guam, and even the American island-hopping campaign that dominated its course thereafter-was a convivial, pub crawling British naval correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun, who died under highly mysterious circumstances in 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor. Hector C. Bywater's passion was naval strategy, and by the 1920s he feared that Japan's militaristic inclinations would lead to a long and deadly war. In a series of brilliant books and articles written during the twenties and thirties, Bywater prophetically outlined naval strategies that would read like a blueprint for the Pacific Theater during World War II and establish his reputation as the successor to the great naval authority Alfred Thayer Mahan.---------------------------------------------------------------To the public, Bywater's ideas created an uproar and then were quickly forgotten. But in the ranks of the Japanese navy, a rising captain named Isoroku Yamamoto adopted Bywater's ideas as his own. In one of history's strangest scenes, the two men once met, discussing war and peace in an amiable fashion over a bottle of scotch. For Hector C. Bywater, that pleasant night may have been fatal, for as William H. Honan suggests in this biography that overturns conventional twentieth-century military history, Bywater's death may have been ordered by Yamamoto as he planned the assault on Pearl Harbor, to rid himself of the one man in the West who knew exactly what the Japanese navy would do when war broke out. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------Bywater was not only a Cassandra-like voice on Japanese militancy and a brilliant naval strategist, he was also a fascinating, robust, and exciting man, whose work as a journalist led him to dabble in espionage. Bywater was a man of contradictions who could live easily in many worlds, from the Fleet Street Press Gang whose credo was "The three most beautiful things in the world are a fighting ship, a nubile woman and a fast racehorse-in that order," to a long-running debate over naval policy with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to grand international naval conferences, to pulling Mussolini's leg when invited to inspect the Italian navy.Visions of Infamy is a major biography set against the grand stage of the forces that led to war. William H. Honan brilliantly relates how one complex man's obsessions influenced the course of history. This is a book about genius, folly, and doom.