http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wf5TPVz56A
To fit the tradition of panicking the nation, writers today should claim that a leader in Iraq has threatened Israel with weapons of mass destruction, or that North Korea has to started a nuclear war. Presumably if we did do that we'd either be called malicious or irresponsible. But that's what Orson Welles did. And, to some extent, that's what Colonel George Chesney did back in the late Eighteen Hundreds. In another book with very similar aims and ambitions, Erskine Childers writes in his preface that he wanted to bring about a change in Britain's lack of preparedness for a maritime conflict with Germany in the years leading up to World War One. You could say that Childers and Chesney, both of whom were active British soldiers, were trying to scare their governments into action. And, to some extent they both succeeded. Orson Welles, on the other hand, just wanted a good Halloween evening scare story. And that's exactly what he got.
Read War of the Worlds free online here
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/b1c1.html
France getting beaten by the Prussian Army in 1870
Orson Welles tradition of panicking the nation with invasion stories stemmed from the defeat of what had been upto that point the greatest army on earth, the Imperial French Army of Napoleon III. But the glorious French army was heavily defeated in a series of battles stretching from Alsace in August 1870 to the siege of Paris, which lasted until January of the following year. Some active British soldiers were so shocked and dismayed that any country could destroy the lionised, modern French army in such a short space of time that they immediately set about writing a whole series of propaganda campaigns in order to alert the sleepy British nation to the fact that it might very soon be Britain's turn to be devastated by the now mighty Prussian army. And, with that propagandistic goal in mind, Lieutenant Colonel George Chesney invents a story in which London gets the same treatment which Paris got. And he names his story, The Battle of Dorking. The rest, as they say, is history.
Read Colonel Chesney's The Battle of Dorking here:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602091.txt
If you read the two stories close together you'll see many similarities. Both stories are told from the point of view of an anonymous narrator. Both narrators stand knee deep in the centre of the fighting. More than once HG Wells' character tells us that he was the only survivor of this encounter or that one. The British forces are woefully unprepared in both encounters. Whilst battling with extra-terrestrials might be out of the experience of most soldiers, on one occasion the narrator meets a troop of guards on horseback. He tells them that the enemy is approaching and that it possesses a heat-ray against which there is no earthy protection. The horseguards ignore his protestations and set off at once in the direction of the enemy. HG Wells' storyteller says 'we saw them no more.' But what he actually means is that they got fried by the Martians' heat-ray. In both stories there are countless stories of British military heroism. But all of the bravery has only one outcome. The British soldiers die. And they loose the war.
Below 9 instalments of the 1953 version of the film
1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7yXjSmcG6c&feature=related
2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg0uRujcfZg&feature=related
3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fSc53zzSVE&feature=related
4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLgfKZ6lRQ&feature=related
5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KA4Rt27Emo&feature=related
6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivV2kMtftS8&feature=related
7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt-b5D1Yr3s&feature=related
8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0hCEjmHKl0&feature=related
9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LXjs55Ywpw