Visions of Infamy: The Untold Story of How Journalist Hector C. Bywater Devised the Plans That Led to Pearl Harbor

by William H. Honan

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312083327
• ISBN13: 9780312083328
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 346 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.7" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Exciting, Scholarly, Prescient

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.