Pearl Harbor Attack Based On 1925 Book, Says Author -- Japanese Reportedly Used A Novel Approach

WASHINGTON - The Japanese admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack got the idea from a British novel, says a new book examining U.S. and Japanese strategy in World War II.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto - who insisted on the 1941 surprise raid that destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at its base in Hawaii - based his strategy on a book that had Washington buzzing when Yamamoto was Japanese naval attache here from 1926 to 1928, says author William Honan.

The 1925 novel, ``The Great Pacific War'' by Hector Bywater, begins with a surprise Japanese attack in 1931 that wipes out much of the U.S. fleet in Asia.

Honan's book, ``Bywater: The Man Who Invented the Pacific War,'' went on sale earlier this month in England. It is due for U.S. publication in February with the title ``The Man Who Knew Too Much: How Hector C. Bywater Invented the Great Pacific War.''

Bywater was a British secret agent in Germany who later became a leading expert on the world's navies in the pre-jet age, when national strength was measured in battleship tonnage.

From 1920 to 1940, he wrote for newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, covered major naval disarmament conferences in London and Washington and published several books.

It was more than coincidence that the course of the war was predicted in Bywater's novel, says Honan, currently The New York Times' chief cultural correspondent.

Honan presents exhaustive research intended to show that Bywater's writings profoundly influenced Japanese strategists led by Yamamoto, supreme commander of the Imperial Navy combined fleet and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.

``The Great Pacific War'' was translated into Japanese and for a time was required reading for Japanese navy officers. It also inspired Japanese imitations that switched endings and had the Japanese winning the war.

Yamamoto spent a year at Harvard University in 1919 and returned to America seven years later with the rank of Navy captain for his Washington stint.

Back in Japan, Yamamoto in a lecture ``adopted Bywater's ideas as his own,'' Honan says. The author adds that the Japanese naval officer in 1941 threatened to resign with his entire staff to force acceptance of his plan ``to eradicate the American naval presence'' in mid-Pacific at the start of the war.

This was precisely Bywater's conception, Honan says, and Yamamoto enhanced it with something not available at the time ``The Great Pacific War'' first appeared - massed aircraft carriers and their planes, ``the daring tactical innovation'' of Japanese naval air chief Minoru Genda.

Yamamoto followed Bywater ``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,'' Honan adds.

Unlike more optimistic Imperial admirals, Yamamoto hedged when his government tried to assess Japanese prospects in war with the United States. Quoting the late Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye's diary, Honan says Yamamoto told his superiors, ``if you insist on my going ahead, I can promise to give them hell for a year or a year and a half, but can guarantee nothing'' beyond.

This was as if Yamamoto ``had cribbed his answer from The Great Pacific War'' in which Japanese strength declines after 18 months of war against an aroused America, Honan continues.

The U.S. Navy also drew on Bywater's thinking, Honan says.

Bywater ``knocked some sense into'' the Americans with two chapters of ``The Great Pacific War,'' exposing weaknesses of the U.S. contingency war plan.

Bywater had the U.S. fleet getting intercepted, severely mauled and humbled, prompting the United States to redesign ``a carefully planned step-by-step advance to Manila across a bridge of

islands in the Marshall and Caroline chains. It was the first time a naval expert had publicly spelled out such a campaign'', says Honan.

Honan raises but leaves unanswered a question of whether Japanese agents caused the mid-1940 deaths of Bywater, then 55, in a London suburb and Bywater's Tokyo source, English journalist Melville Cox.

An autopsy, hampered by German air raids during the Battle of Britain, found that Bywater died of a heart attack and overdrinking. Cox died in a fall or jump at Tokyo police headquarters.

Honan says London Daily Telegraph correspondent E.A. Harwood theorized in 1987 that Yamamoto ordered the deaths of Bywater and Cox shortly after committing himself to the Pearl Harbor attack in order to keep the two Englishmen from alerting the United States to his war plan.

Admiral Yamamoto was killed when his plane was shot down in 1943.