How Do the Martians Die in The War of the Worlds? Plot, Ending and Meaning

In H. G. Wells's novel germs, not armies, defeat the Martians. The plot, the ending, what inspired Wells, and the truth about the 1938 radio panic.

The Martians die of disease. In H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, no human weapon stops the invasion; the narrator walks up to a silent fighting machine in London expecting to be killed and finds that all the Martians are dead, killed by earthly germs to which they had no immunity. That twist is the heart of the novel, which Wells wrote between 1895 and 1897 and published as a book in 1898. It is one of the earliest stories about a war between humans and aliens.

Why do the Martians invade?

The Martians come because their own world, older and smaller than Earth, has reached what Wells calls the "last stage of exhaustion"; they intend to wipe out humanity and take the planet. The novel's opening is famous for its cold tone. It describes minds across the gulf of space that are to ours "as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic", watching the Earth "with envious eyes".

The coming of the Martians

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator in Surrey, south-west of London. One summer an object thought to be a meteor lands on Horsell Common near his home. It turns out to be an artificial cylinder fired from Mars. The creatures that crawl out look nothing like humans: huge heads, two large eyes, a beak-like mouth and an octopus-like body with whip-like tentacles. When a group of people approaches waving a white flag, the Martians burn them with an invisible heat ray.

Soon the Martians walk out in giant three-legged "fighting machines", or tripods, armed with heat rays and a poisonous black smoke. They destroy the soldiers sent against them and most of the town of Woking. The army manages to bring down one tripod with artillery, but the invasion spreads, and Londoners flee in panic. The narrator's brother escapes to the coast, where the warship HMS Thunder Child charges the tripods so that the refugee boats can get away.

The Earth under the Martians

In the second half, the narrator is trapped with a curate in a ruined house next to a Martian landing pit. From his hiding place he learns terrible things: the Martians feed on human blood, and they seem to communicate by telepathy. The curate falls into despair, and when a Martian tentacle searches the house it takes his body away. Outside, a strange red weed from Mars is spreading wherever there is water.

How does it end?

Walking into an empty London, the narrator hears a strange howling from motionless fighting machines. In despair he decides to die and approaches a machine on Primrose Hill, only to discover that the Martians are dead, killed by bacteria. He returns to Woking and finds his wife alive. Humanity recovers and learns from the Martian machines, but it is left with a humbling lesson: Earth is vulnerable, and another invasion is possible.

The ending is not a cheat. It grows out of the novel's ideas about evolution. Earth's tiny organisms, the weakest things on the planet, do what armies could not, because humans have lived with them for ages and the Martians never have.

What was Wells really writing about?

Many readers see the novel as a comment on evolution, imperialism and the fears of the Victorian age. Wells later said the plot was inspired by the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians. In other words, he asked British readers, at the height of their empire, to imagine being the conquered people. Wells himself called the book, like The Time Machine, "another assault on human self-satisfaction".

Science shaped it too. Wells had trained as a science teacher under Thomas Henry Huxley, a leading defender of Darwin. He chose Mars because it was the planet most like Earth and because scientists then wrongly believed it was older, which would give Martians a longer evolution. The Italian astronomer Schiaparelli had described "canali" on Mars in 1877, and in 1895 Percival Lowell suggested they might be canals built by Martians.

Destroying the neighbours

The places in the novel are real. In 1895 Wells moved to Woking with his wife Catherine Robbins and spent his mornings walking or cycling around the area. In his autobiography he wrote that he "wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians". Today a seven-metre sculpture of a tripod stands near Woking railway station.

Did the 1938 radio play really cause panic?

In 1938 Orson Welles directed and narrated a radio version for CBS that moved the story to the United States and was told like a live news broadcast. It is often said to have convinced many listeners that a real invasion was under way. Later research is more sceptical: studies found little evidence of mass panic, the programme's audience share was only about 2 percent, and newspaper stories of lawsuits and guards at radio stations turned out to be false. The legend of the panic, however, made Orson Welles famous almost overnight.

Learn with The War of the Worlds: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
out of this world	amazing, extraordinary	The special effects were out of this world.
to wave the white flag	to show you want peace or surrender	They waved the white flag, but it did not help.
the tables are turned	the situation is reversed	The conquerors became the conquered; the tables were turned.
against all odds	despite very little chance	Against all odds, humanity survived.
to take something for granted	not to value it	We take our immune system for granted.

Try this: Write three sentences about a film where the ending surprised you, using "against all odds" and "the tables are turned".