Invasion literature

Clarke: Many feared that military weakness at home would invite attack from abroad; and for the rest of the century not a decade passed without an alarm of some kind about the dangers pressing upon the nation.

In order to demonstrate the defenceless condition of the country an anonymous author wrote A History of the sudden and terrible invasion of England by the French … in May 1852 ( London, 1851).

This was the first complete imaginary war of the future to be written in English, and it anticipated Chesney’s technique of giving a detailed account of the weaknesses that led to the disaster.

The novella, The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), by George Tomkyns Chesney was first published in Blackwood's Magazine, a respected political journal of the Victorian era.

[2] The Battle of Dorking was initially meant to shock readers into becoming more aware of the possible dangers of a foreign threat, but unwittingly created a new literary genre appealing to popular anxieties.

Between the publication of The Battle of Dorking in 1871 and the start of the First World War in 1914 there were hundreds of authors writing invasion literature, often topping the best seller lists in Germany, France, England and the United States.

Dracula (1897) also tapped into English fears of foreign forces arriving unopposed on its shores, although between 1870 and 1903 the majority of these works assumed that the enemy would be France, rather than Germany.

Another is John Buchan, whose novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, published in 1915 but written just prior to the outbreak of World War I, is a thriller dealing with German agents in Britain preparing for an invasion.

[7] The move of U.S. public opinion towards participation in World War I was reflected in Uncle Sam's Boys at The Invasion of the United States by H. Irving Hancock.

The plot seems to transfer the main story line of Le Queux's The Great War (with which the writer may have been familiar) to a US theatre: the Germans launch a surprise attack, 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 at last are gloriously crushed by fresh US forces.

This book is known to have been originally written as Under the Red Flag, an explicit anti-Communist novel, and when rejected by the publishers in that form it was successfully "recycled" by Burroughs as science fiction.

Ivan Petrushevich's The Flying Submarine (1922) depicts an invasion of the United Kingdom by Soviet forces after most of Europe and Asia fall to communism.

In You Only Live Twice (1967), the PRC disrupts the geopolitical balance between the US and the Soviets, by the kidnapping of their respective spacecraft in outer space, to provoke a nuclear war, which would allow Chinese global supremacy.

In 1971, when the US began acknowledging that the Vietnam War (1955–1975) was a loss, two books depicting the Soviet occupation of the continental US were published; the cautionary tale Vandenberg (1971), by Oliver Lange, wherein most of the US accepts the Soviet overlord without much protest, and the only armed resistance is by guerrillas in New Mexico; and The First Team (1971), by John Ball, which depicts a hopeless situation resolved by a band of patriots, which concludes with the country's liberation.

The Tomorrow series (1993–1999) by John Marsden, details the perspective of adolescent guerrillas fighting against the invasion of Australia, by an unnamed country (implied to be Indonesia).

Historians today debate whether this was in fact the real reason, but in any case the concerns raised in invasion literature came to define the early duties of the Bureau's Home Section.

"[2] Journalist Charles Lowe wrote in 1910: "Among all the causes contributing to the continuance of a state of bad blood between England and Germany perhaps the most potent is the baneful industry of those unscrupulous writers who are forever asserting that the Germans are only awaiting a fitting opportunity to attack us in our island home and burst us up.