Bringing down planes with balloons

March 22, 2008

Like all great armed conflicts, the Second World War brought an industrial and technological revolution to all warring nations. Oddly enough, despite the military innovation of that period, to fight bombings over cities and other strategic targets, armies turned to an 18th century invention: aerostats. Moored balloons played a key role in the defense of London, the Invasion of Normandy and the Battle of Moscow, where this system was employed in its most massive and sophisticated way.

Soviet barrage balloon being lowered in 1945

Balloons in combat until World War I

The first time an aerostat was used in combat was in 1794, when the French army made use of the observation balloon l’Entreprenant to track Austrian troops and achieve victory at the Battle of Fleurus. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century the use of balloons was spread among main armies and conflicts from that period, like the American Civil War, the Russo-Japanese War and several colonial military campaigns.

Until the First World War military used balloons for three purposes: the already mentioned observation, bombing enemy positions and transportation of personnel, mail, and equipment.

With the development of aviation and the first bombers, which had a rather low flight ceiling and lacked of bombsights to accurately drop their load, aerostats became useful for a new aim: to deny low-level flights by creating nets of moored balloons. The risk of crashing into the tethering cables or the balloons itself pushed enemy airplanes to fly at higher altitude to bomb their targets, thereby decreasing surprise and bombing accuracy while enhancing ground-based air defenses and intercepting fighters.

The British Army was the first to use barrage balloons. During the last years of World War I barrage balloons were deployed to protect London against German bombers. Each one of those early barrages consisted of an apron of three blimps, 500 yards apart joined together by a heavy steel cable, which was raised up to 10,000 feet high.

Early World War I British Barrage Balloon

The balloons that protected London over a year had a very successful performance, since they practically denied the low-level attacks by the enemy bombers and allowed anti-aircraft guns and RAF fighters to engage Luftwaffe planes in the narrow expanse of airspace left.

Allied barrage balloons in Wold War II

The success achieved by the barrage balloons in the First World War led the British to use more than 2,000 of them during the Second one. Besides some technical improvements, the main change in the way of using barrage balloons was leaving aside the apron concept. Instead, single balloons were used because they could be sent aloft more quickly and were easier to operate. During those years balloons were not just used to protect London, but lots of other strategic sites like airfields, harbors and important buildings. A 20 meters long and 8 meters wide balloon above an specific target meant a great added hindrance to any attempt of dive bombing, like the ones carried out by the well known Stukas, which threw themselves into the targets to drop their bombs.

Although since World War I the airplanes had improved their capacity to fly at high altitude, nazis were still unhinged by the presence of barrage balloons and would try their best to destroy them by all possible means: from air missions devoted to shoot them down to equipping their bombers with all kinds of devices in order to dodge and cut the anchoring cables. All those attempts turned out too costly and not much effective, since the fallen balloons were replaced shortly.

Crashed Heinkel bomber because of cumbersome anti-barrage balloon fenders

Besides the Battle of Britain, the allies also used aerostats in several other occasions, like the defense of the US West Coast in 1942 or the deployment across northern Africa and the Mediterranean. Among all those occasions, the main turning point would be the Invasion of Normandy, when hundreds of ships sailed protected by barrage balloons to deter any attack from German planes.

Invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944

Soviet barrage balloons in World War II

The USSR found inspiration in the British experience in World War I and the battle of Britain, and would decide to use aerostats to fight the massive bombings carried out by the Luftwaffe over Moscow during 1941 and 1942, in Hitler’s attempt to take the city.

Soviet defenses against German air force were set up along three concentric circles: in a radius of 120 kilometers from Moscow city center were located several airfields in order to intercept German bombers within a range from 150 to 200 kilometers away from the capital, subsequently, in a radius of 35 kilometers, were deployed the first anti-aircraft guns, and finally, within a radius of 8 kilometers around the Kremlin, were scattered hundreds of barrage balloons following a chessboard pattern, covering all city center and the most important buildings.

Each post of the net consisted of a 12 people team and 2 identical blimps, which would be sent aloft separately, reaching a maximum height of 8,200 feet, or in tandem mode, reaching a maximum height of 14,700 feet:

Diagram of barrage balloons used in tandem mode

Besides the already mentioned benefits offered by the barrage balloons, Soviet blimps had mines attached to their anchoring cables. Thereby, in case a German plane struck a cable, it wouldn’t just get seriously damaged and crash, but may explode in the air after pulling the contact bomb against its fuselage. Since 1941 until the end of the Battle of Moscow, 120 German planes crashed due to impacts against the steel cables and 35 exploded in flight after detonating a hanging mine. Diagram:

As a result of the large amount of casualties, the Luftwaffe sent fighters to shoot down the barrage balloons, but they were replaced so quickly and nazi planes used to receive such a heavy response by Soviet fighters and ground defenses, that finally switched to night bombings. The Soviet response to jeopardize the enemy bombers was to keep the barrage balloons in the air at night and lower them before dawn. The total number of blimps deployed was over 3.000 units, which were sent aloft more than 300.000 times during the war. Luftwaffe lost over Moscow 491 planes, including those shot down by anti-aircraft guns and those brought down after crashing into barrage balloons.

Shot-down Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter

Besides the battle of Moscow, the USSR deployed barrage balloons in some other cities like Leningrad, where was taken the following picture, showing how was transported the gas which later would be used to inflate the defensive blimps:

Gas transportation in Leningrad

Finally, I would like to show you a primitive acoustic locator used by the Soviets to spot enemy planes before radars were introduced:

Acoustic plane locator

Sources: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

If you enjoyed this post, please share and don’t miss: Cold War blazing skies

Filed under Aviation, Military, Moscow, World War II | Share This

Comments

2 Responses to “Bringing down planes with balloons”

Younghusband

March 23rd, 2008 at 2:33 pm

Thanks Xavi, that was a great post.
Soviet Russia

March 24th, 2008 at 7:53 pm

Thanks Younghusband, to read these words from such a great blog like ComingAnarchy is something really special to me.