the time and by historians and researchers later— with intensifying bellicose public attitudes in various countries and contributing to escalation and war. Others treated them as reasonable anticipations of the current situation, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 story “Danger!”, in which Britain is brought to her knees by an unnamed power cutting off her food supplies using submarine warfare. 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. Hancock's plot has a difficulty 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. Hancock, therefore, assumed that Germany had won the World War, and that the USA had not built up its Navy and Army (the men fighting remark several times that the politicians had neglected the national defense). The war launched by the German Empire in the story is intended, not to conquer the USA, but to pressure it to give up the Monroe Doctrine. This will leave Germany free to seize parts of Brazil, and take colonies elsewhere in the New