HMS Thunder Child

HMS Thunder Child is the name of the fictional ironclad torpedo ram of the Royal Navy, destroyed by Martian fighting-machines in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, while protecting a refugee rescue fleet of civilian vessels.

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.

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. As late as 1896, the United States commissioned a ship whose only effective weapon was a ram: the harbour-defence ram USS Katahdin.

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.

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 said that "It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping".

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