H. Irving Hancock - "The Invasion of The United States"

"The Invasion of The United States"

Hancock's four-book series "The Invasion of the United States", published in 1916, depicted a fictional invasion of the USA by Germany in 1920-21 - reflecting, and to some degree helping to intensify, the shift of American public opinion towards getting involved in The First World War. It was an American representative of the sub-genre known as invasion literature which originated in Britain and was frequent in the early Twentieth Century. This kind of books were credited - by some politicians at the time and by historians and researchers later - with intensifying bellicose public attitudes in various countries and contributing to escalation and war.

The series may have been influenced by William Le Queux's The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) in which the French launch a surprise invasion of England and penetrate into the heart of London but are finally defeated after much desperate and heroic fighting by the British protagonists. The book was highly popular in the early Twentieth Century, and Hancock is likely to have read it.

In Hancock's far more extensive version, constituting no less than four books, it is the Germans who launch a surprise attack in 1920, capture Boston despite heroic resistance by "Uncle Sam's boys", overrun all of New England and New York and reach as far as Pittsburgh - but are at last are gloriously crushed by fresh American forces. From the present-day point of view, it can be considered as "retroactive" alternate history.

Hancok's plot has a basic implausibility in that it assumes either an overwhelming German victory over the British, giving them mastery of the seas, or a British "friendly neutrality" and a free hand to invade America. Further, it assumes the German Navy to be capable of utterly defeating the US Navy, followed by ferrying no less than a million German troops across the Atlantic and keeping them supplied for years-long hard fighting. The experience of the first two years of the actual war, at the time of writing, already conclusively proved the Kaiserliche Marine manifestly incapable of anything remotely of the kind. In actuality it was US soldiers who - a year after the story's publication - would pour across a British-dominated Atlantic to assault Germany in Europe.

However, alternate history writer and analyst Dale Cozort notes that "(...)The broad outline of the war is so much like what actually happened between Germany and Russia 25 or so years later, in World War II, that it's almost uncanny. The Germans win battle after battle but the opposition moves industry out of their reach, builds up overwhelming superiority in manpower and strategic mobility, then cuts off the cream of the German army. Sounds a lot like Eastern Front World War II up through Stalingrad". Cozort also notes that Hancock's is one of the first fictional depictions of war to make reference to tanks.

Hancock appears to have been among the first American writers to graphically describe their country being devastatingly invaded by powerful enemies - reflecting the disruption of the hitherto dominant American isolationist mindset. In later decades he was followed by a host of others depicting the US being fictionally invaded by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and China, as well as a considerable array of extraterrestrial aliens (see Invasion literature, Yellow Peril, Earth in fiction, Alternate History, The Man in the High Castle, The Ultimate Solution). In effect, this sub-genre went full circle with the alternative history novel 1901 by Robert Conroy, depicting a fictitious invasion of the United States by Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in the title year, bearing quite a bit of resemblance to Hancock's work.