In the 1920s, leading British naval authority and former spy Hector Bywater ended a public debate with Franklin D. Roosevelt about the possibility of confrontation between the U.S. and Japan in his book The Great Pacific War. Bywater laid out a detailed fictitious war plan that began with a surprise attack by the Japanese. Did Isoroku Yamamoto, then a young Japanese naval attaché in Washington, read the book and later, as Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Navy, put into play its strategies?
