Hector Charles Bywater (21 October 1884 in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

– 16 or 17 August 1940 in

) was a British journalist and military writer.

Biography

Bywater was the second son of a middle class Welshman. The family had emigrated into the United States in 1901. At age of 19 he started part-time job writing naval articles for the ''

New York Herald The ''New York Herald'' was a large-distribution newspaper based in New York City that existed between 1835 and 1924. At that point it was acquired by its smaller rival the '' New-York Tribune'' to form the '' New York Herald Tribune''. Hi ...

'' and later was sent as foreign correspondent to London. There he became a naval spy for Britain. Naturally gifted with languages, he could pass for a native German. In 1915, he was sent back to America to investigate suspicious activity on New York's docks and apocryphally averted an attempted German bombing. Years later, he returned to London to analyze naval data and documents. In his 1921 book ''Sea-power in the Pacific : a study of the American-Japanese naval problem'', he predicted naval conflict between

Imperial Japan The also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was a historical nation-state and great power that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the post-World War II 1947 constitution and subsequent forma ...

and the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

and expanded the topic further in 1925 book ''

The Great Pacific War ''The Great Pacific War'' was a 1925 novel by British author Hector Charles Bywater which discussed a hypothetical future war between Japan and the United States. The novel accurately predicted a number of details about the Pacific Campaign of ...

''. Here Bywater correctly predicted many actions of the Japanese and the Americans, including the Japanese drive to win the "Decisive Battle" and the US island-hopping campaign. Contrary to popular belief, neither book predicted an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead, he predicted that the aerial attack would occur in US-colonized Philippines, then having the largest concentration of US naval vessels in the Pacific. The book was translated into Japanese and read by senior officers of the Japanese Imperial Navy. William H. Honan (December 1970
"Japan Strikes: 1941"
''American Heritage'', vol. 22, no. 1, pages 12-15, 91-95. H. C. Bywater died just over a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He died of "undetermined causes" according to the hospital coroner's report, but no autopsy was ever performed. After World War II, many military leaders in both the Allied Powers and Imperial Japan confirmed that Bywater's ''The Great Pacific War'' was a key resource book in planning military strategy during the war. To this day, first edition printings of the book in either English and Japanese are highly sought after by collectors.

Works

* Archibald Hurd (1869–1959) and H. C. Bywater: ''From Heligoland to Keeling Island : one hundred days of naval war'', Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1914. * H. C. Bywater
''Sea-power in the Pacific : a study of the American-Japanese naval problem''
Constable, London, 1921. * H. C. Bywater: '' The Great Pacific War: a history of the American-Japanese campaign of 1931-33'', Constable, London, 1925. Published again in Boston, 1942 as '' The great Pacific war : a historic prophecy now being fulfilled''. * H. C. Bywater: ''Navies and nations : a review of naval developments since the Great War'', Constable, London, 1927. * H. C. Bywater: ''A searchlight on the Navy'', Constable, London, 1934. * H. C. Bywater and Herbert Cecil Ferraby (1884–1942): ''Strange intelligence : memoirs of naval secret service '', London, 1934. * H. C. Bywater: ''Cruisers in battle : naval 'light cavalry' under fire, 1914-1918'', Constable, London, 1939.

References

External links

Short biography of Bywater
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bywater, Hector Charles 1884 births 1940 deaths British naval historians British male journalists 20th-century British writers Journalists from London 20th-century English male writers

Biography

Works

Further reading

References

External links