HMS Thunder Child

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." After the narrator talks about his brother he introduces us to the Thunder Child in chapter 17. This was the ram Thunder Child".[2] 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".[2] 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. When this fails to have any effect, they employ their Heat-Ray, inflicting fatal damage on the Thunder Child. The ship continues to attack, bringing down one of the fighting machines with its guns even as it succumbs. The flaming wreckage of the ironclad finally rams into a second fighting-machine, destroying it. When the black smoke and super-heated steam banks dissipate, both the Thunder Child and the third fighting-machine are gone. The attack by Thunder Child occupies the Martians long enough for three Royal Navy warships of the main Channel Fleet to arrive.

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 adaptation the last-ditch defense 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, though launched in 1897, 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 adaptation of Jeff Wayne's musical 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 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 attack 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

• The War of the Worlds at Project Gutenberg