SDHF Newsletter No.453 Book Review Great Pacific War

The Great Pacific War: A History of the American Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933
Author: Hector C. Bywater
Houston Mifflin Co., 1925
Reprinted: St. Martin’s Press, 1991
Reviewed by David Lee

February 20, 2026

There are those who have praised British-born, American journalist, author and spy Hector Bywater’s book The Great Pacific War, as “prophetic”, that he “accurately predicted” Imperial Japan’s December 1941 attack on American Naval Base Pearl Habor.
Others have gone over the edge and claimed that the Imperial Japanese Navy fully embraced Bywater’s book as their Mein Kampf, which adopted it in their future war of aggression against the US.

Bywater specialized in reporting on naval affairs. Bywater extended a chapter from one of his previous books on Imperial Japan-US naval strategy in the Pacific into The Great Pacific War, a third person narrative of a hypothetical three-year naval war between Japan and the US, based on his knowledge of naval technology before 1925 and based on his understanding contemporary geopolitics. He died in 1940, before he could witness the unfolding of the real Japan-US Pacific War.

To hear fanatics, Bywater’s book is a magical fountainhead of naval strategy. Bywater fanatics have claimed that The Great Pacific War was utilized by Japan as a blueprint for war against America. However, there are others more knowledgeable in pre-World War II Japanese naval planning and operations, who have stated that there is absolutely no evidence to support such a notion. Bywater’s impression of the Japanese was that the “Japanese are imitative …” and “not mechanical by temperament.” It looks like nothing has changed since Bywater’s book regarding Western estimation of the Japanese.

Rather than a magic blue-print, Bywater’s techno-thriller of a Japan-US war merely reflects his times and his own personal bias and shallow, Western-centric knowledge.

There are, though, at least two aspects of Bywater’s fictional war that deserves attention.
The first is his unbelievable reason behind Japan’s war against the US. The second is the book’s treatment of Japanese Americans in Hawaii—Bywater foresees Japanese rioting against America. No Japanese-led armed uprising occurred, but The Franklin Roosevelt Administration in 1942 set up the War Relocation Authority and forcibly removed all Japanese from the US West Coast.

URL: https://www.sdh-fact.com/review-article/2429/
　　　　PDF: https://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/GreatE.pdf

MOTEKI Hiromichi, Chairman
Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact