Grand Duke Vodkakoff are offered music hall engagements and the leader of the army of Monaco is not, he takes offence and withdraws his troops. The two remaining armies are overcome thanks to the stratagems of the indomitable Clarence Chugwater, leader of the Boy Scouts. By causing each commander to become jealous of the other's music hall fees, he succeeds in breaking up the alliance and, in the ensuing chaos, Clarence and his Boy Scouts are able to overcome the invaders. In The Military Invasion of America, the United States is invaded by armies from Germany, under Prince Otto of Saxe-Pfennig, and Japan, led by General Owoki. Once again it is Clarence Chugwater who saves the day. Explanation of the title The title alludes to The Swoop of the Vulture, a novel by James Blyth that describes a surprise attack by forces of the "Imperial German Vulture". Complaining about the difficulties caused by so many simultaneous and surprise invasions, the leader of the German forces, Prince Otto, refers explicitly to Blyth's novel: "'It all comes of this dashed Swoop of the Vulture business', he grumbled." Major themes The Swoop! is a comical satire on the then-popular genre of invasion literature. Six years before The Swoop, Wodehouse (under the pseudonym Henry William-Jones) contributed a humorous article to Punch magazine in which he outlined, in a mock-serious tone, the plot of an "Inspired-Prophecy kind of novel, in which England is overrun by invaders until the last few chapters". While it differs in many details from the earlier outline, The Swoop was that novel. In writing The Swoop, Wodehouse was responding to an upsurge in the popularity of the invasion genre: 1909 marked "the year of greatest suppuration" of the genre. William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910 had been serialised in the Daily Mail and was a best-seller, while Guy du Maurier's play, An Englishman's Home, which had opened at Wyndham's Theatre on 27 January, was a theatrical sensation, playing in three London theatres simultaneously. Many writers of invasion-scare stories took as their starting point an assumed unpreparedness on the part of Britain's armed forces to counter the threat of invasion, and they wrote with the aim of raising public awareness of this deficiency. Du Maurier, for example, was a serving army officer, while Le Queux was assisted by Field Marshal Earl Roberts, who had resigned from active duty a few years