HMS Thunder Child

Torpedo rams were constructed in the 1870s and 1880s after the ramming and sinking of the Re d'Italia at the Battle of Lissa in 1866 by the Austrian flagship, Ferdinand Max. Despite the Italian warship being stationary at the time, the successful attack influenced naval thinking for the next few decades.[1]

The result was specially designed low profile, fast, armoured vessels equipped with a ram or torpedoes, or both, intended for use where it was possible to approach an enemy ship without being sunk; for example, at night or in poor visibility, or where the enemy ship was stationary or disabled, or lacked support by nearby ships.[2] As late as 1896, the United States commissioned a ship whose only effective weapon was a ram: the harbour-defence ram USS Katahdin.[3]

The Royal Navy's only example was HMS Polyphemus, which entered service in 1882. Its primary armament was torpedoes, with four side-firing tubes and one forward-firing tube in the centre of the bow-mounted ram, like the eye of a Cyclops, hence the ship's name of Polyphemus. The ram was fitted in case the then novel underwater torpedo tubes failed to operate properly. After the ship successfully destroyed a harbour defence boom with her ram in 1885, the Royal Navy ordered two further ships of this class; but neither ship was built, probably because the deployment of quick-firing traversing guns made these vessels vulnerable.[3]

In the novel Wells gives only a rough description of the ship, describing her thus: "About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. This was the ram Thunder Child". A few paragraphs later, it is stated that "It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping".

In Jeff Wayne's musical adaptation of The War of the Worlds, the ship is described as an ironclad but not specifically a ram or a torpedo ram; the album cover art illustration of Thunder Child is of a pre-dreadnought battleship, such as the Canopus-class, in combat with a Martian tripod. The warship in the Classics Illustrated comic book adaptation of the novel is drawn as a typical pre-dreadnought battleship. The real torpedo ram HMS Polyphemus was fast, heavily armoured for her size, and capable of operating in shallow coastal waters; her hull was low in the water with a raft-like superstructure mounting 6 single Hotchkiss 3-pounder (47mm) quick-firing guns, again very much unlike a pre-dreadnought era battleship.

Battle

A Henrique Alvim Corrêa illustration from a 1906 edition of the book.

In Wells' original novel the battle takes place off the mouth of the River Blackwater, Essex, where people from London are escaping the Martian offensive. Three Martian fighting-machines having approached the vessels from the seaward side, HMS Thunder Child signals to the main fleet and steams at full speed towards the Martians without firing. The Martians, whom the narrator suggests are unfamiliar with large warships (having come from an arid planet) at first use only a gas attack, which fails, whereupon they employ their Heat-Ray, inflicting a great amount of damage upon Thunder Child, which brings down a fighting machine with its guns even as it succumbs. The flaming wreckage of the torpedo-ram crashes into a second fighting-machine, however, destroying it, and furthermore when the black smoke and super-heated steam banks dissipate both the Thunder Child and the third fighting-machine are gone.

HMS Thunder Child is commonly omitted from adaptations or replaced with technology more appropriate to the updated setting.

In Orson Welles's famous 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber replaces the Thunder Child; it collides with a fighting-machine after being critically damaged by its Heat-Ray.

In the George Pal 1953 film the last-ditch defence against the Martians is an atomic bomb dropped by a Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing bomber; the weapon proves useless because fighting-machines have conglomerated their protective force fields.

The first adaptation to feature Thunder Child itself was Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, which was released in 1978 and retains the Victorian setting of the novel. The album features a song, entitled "Thunder Child", dedicated to this scene. The cover art of the album depicts a Canopus-class battleship in combat with a Martian tripod. The version of Thunder Child depicted appears to be based upon the painting made of the naval Battle of Coronel (1 November 1914). However, as the novel was written as an account of fictional current events in 1897 and the lead ship of the class HMS Canopus did not enter service until 1899, it is more likely that the vessel is a member of the Majestic Class, most obviously HMS Mars which was commissioned in 1896.

The 1999 video game, Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds, features a level revolving around the Thunder Child. The player is placed in control of the ironclad itself and must sail it down a river while using its cannons to destroy Martian units and settlements; the level ends in a climactic confrontation with the Tempest, a powerful Martian war machine.

The only version to feature Thunder Child directly is the low-budget, direct-to-DVD Pendragon adaptation, released in 2005. This version uses poorly executed CGI to portray Thunder Child as a Havock-class destroyer.

In Steven Spielberg's 2005 film adaptation, War of the Worlds, contemporary American military forces use tanks and helicopters against the alien Tripods, again without success. Earlier in the film, civilian ferries trying to escape from the Tripods are trapped and easily sunk, with no intervention by a warship.

In the BBC's 2019 TV miniseries the main characters join up again on the Essex coast, where many small boats are collecting civilians to take them out to anchored ships. A Martian tripod appears and several warships open fire on the tripod with their main guns. Most of them are at quite a distance, but one warship, which could be Thunder Child, is much closer to shore. The tripod is hit on one its the legs and in the command cabin, and immediately collapses. A second Martian tripod appears on the beach, chasing the protagonists, but before it can activate the Heat-Ray, it is struck by multiple shells. The tripod falls forward narrowly missing crushing the protagonists. As in the original novel, the refugees manage to escape; none of the warships are shown being sunk.

• List of fictional ships
• The War of the Worlds
• H. G. Wells

• HMS Thunderchild - A bad day to be a Tripod Drachinfel - Youtube - An attempt to answer the question, just what exactly was HMS Thunderchild?
• The War of the Worlds at Project Gutenberg
• Scale model of HMS Thunder Child