Standing apart from fiction, with its checkered history, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, are forecasts, which omit the conversations and streams of consciousness of a novel’s cast of characters:
The best is Hector C. Bywater’s The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931–1933. Bywater was a journalist and military commentator and a well-informed, insightful observer. Writing in 1925, he described the imagined events of a short, sharp conflict between the United States and Japan—a book that he said was designed to caution Japan against arousing the sleepy American giant, which had not yet begun to modernize the fleet left over after the Washington Disarmament Treaty of 1921.
The power of Bywater’s argument rested entirely on the acuity of his story. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that in this single book, written sixteen years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bywater assembled most of the lessons that it took Naval War College gamers twenty years to deduce. He predicted that Japan would launch a surprise attack before it declared war—on the Panama Canal rather than Pearl Harbor. The book describes how closing the canal eliminates the entire Atlantic Fleet for the first two months of hostilities. Bywater foresees Japan’s swift invasion of the Philippines in a landing at Lingayen Gulf, which takes place at the same time that it seizes Guam. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet is crushed at war’s onset, while the Pacific Fleet, with neither cruising radius nor logistic ships, must fume in frustration. As the war proceeds, the United States masses Marine Corps and Army troops—and transports to carry them—at Pearl Harbor while Japan stages attacks on the Aleutian Islands and along the Oregon-California coast as a distraction. Both sides attempt ambushes and both suffer from lack of scouting. Already search aircraft are a precious resource in short supply.
As the war proceeds, the United States masses Marine Corps and Army troops—and transports to carry them—at Pearl Harbor while Japan stages attacks on the Aleutian Islands and along the Oregon-California coast as a distraction. Both sides attempt ambushes and both suffer from lack of scouting. Already search aircraft are a precious resource in short supply. In a temporizing move that presages the operations that the United States would conduct later at Guadalcanal, the U.S. Navy blocks a Japanese thrust to take American Samoa. Japanese invade China, and the troops become bogged down in its vastness. The American fleet, now reinforced, begins its irresistible sweep through the Central Pacific, seizing Truk atoll, which in Bywater’s book is not yet the bastion that it actually would become by 1944. The climactic fleet action is in the vicinity of Yap Island. The narrative is a sort of early compression of the two great naval battles in 1944, off the Marianas in June and around Leyte Gulf in October. The Japanese in Bywater’s novel, not faced with President Roosevelt’s proclaimed policy of unconditional surrender, immediately sue for a negotiated, albeit humbling peace.