Parachutes and Balloons

[centurion]

To Centurion,

See : http://www3.nfb.ca/ww1/wartime-film.php?id=531371

Gilbert Deraedt

Thanks for this. The Balloon is the Caquot type which replaced the Drachen on all sides in 1916 (actually it took the Americans, who had a NIH approach, slightly longer). The observers are putting on the later version of the Spencer parachute harness, this had shoulder straps, the earliest version only had a waist band and leg straps but after some deaths and a near miss* through observers falling out of the harness when diving over the basket side the shoulder straps were added. Also note how the parachute attaches to the harness through a fitting on the waste band. Whilst this aided movement within the basket whilst not hindering a rapid exit from the basket and the pulling out of the 'chute it meant that the parachutist had little or no control over the shrouds whilst descending and landing in a tree was not that unusual. [The early German Paulus balloon parachutes used a harness system that allowed control whilst descending but hampered the observers movement and had to be put on before he could jump - causing too many deaths and a Spencer type harness was soon adopted]

* One observer survived the experience through catching the other observer's already open 'chute and was able to tell what the problem was.

[centurion]

I enclose an updated version of an earlier posting in this series. It contains more on the RN's use of balloons at Gallipoli etc.

Part 4 - at sea - updated

When one thinks of observation balloons and WW1 the mind tends to picture balloons tethered along a front and manned by army officers. However naval balloons also played a part and this is often overlooked. By 1914 there was already a history of naval ballooning. The US Navy made the world’s first ship borne balloon observation flight on August 3, 1861 off Confederate held Hampton Roads. The Confederates themselves only had two balloons and in order to maximise their use one was attached to the CSS Teaser, a tug turned gun boat and mine layer, so that it could be moved from position to position. This worked reasonably well until Teaser ran aground and it and the balloon were captured by a US Naval vessel. Teaser can reasonably be classed as the world’s first balloon ship.

Whilst the Royal Navy sometimes considered using balloons (for polar exploration for example) it was left to other nations to take naval ballooning forward until just before WW1. The balloon air bridge during the siege of Paris (September 19, 1870 – January 28, 1871) was organised by the French Navy with most balloons piloted by sailors. Experiments in the French Naval use of shipboard balloons began on the L’Indomptable in 1889 and by 1890 some French capital ships were being fitted with balloon handling facilities (the first to fly a balloon being the battleship Formidable). In 1898 the US Navy bought two French Naval balloons from the manufacturers in Paris for use in the Spanish American War (as contraband of war they had to be smuggled through Britain). I have not been able to discover whether they were actually used. The following year the French Navy began experiments with ship towed observation balloons for spotting mines. The torpedo boat tender Foudre being converted for the purpose (in 1911 the same ship became France’s first seaplane carrier). In 1902 The Foudre carried out exercises in submarine spotting for its accompanying torpedo boats in the Mediterranean near Toulon . Unfortunately the balloon used was spherical and round balloons do not tow well. The unfortunate observer Lieutenant Baudie fell into the sea and was killed. The same approach was however carried out in WW1 with more success using Caquot balloons. In 1910 a French Naval Corps d’ Aerostatier was formed de facto by 1912 it was official.

During the Russo Japanese War the Imperial Japanese Navy used a balloon for artillery spotting at the siege of Port Arthur. The Imperial Russian Navy had already established a series of coastal balloon stations providing support for Russian coastal defences. Captain Fyodor A. Postnikov, an army engineer who had had some success locating sunken wrecks from balloons, suggested using these techniques to locate minefields. Count S.A. Stroganov a wealthy ex naval officer who had visited the Foudre during its mine spotting exercises offered to supply the Imperial Russian Navy with a balloon ship for the same purpose. He purchased the elderly German liner Lahn which was converted to carry four Drachen type balloons and armed with four 3 inch and ten 6 pounders. She was then commissioned as the Imperial Russian cruiser Rus. Sailing for the Pacific in 1905 she never got further than Denmark as her basic machinery was, to use a technical term, knackered. She never got out of the Baltic (although over 180 training ascents were made!) The balloons and winches were off loaded and the ship sent to the scrap yard.

Germany carried out experiments with Naval balloons off Heligoland in 1890 using the SMS Mars. By 1908 drachen balloons towed by torpedo boats were being used to accompany the High Seas Fleet. However the German navy was taking the position that the roles carried out by balloons could be done better by Zeppelins in some instances and by kites in others. In WW1 there were 7 German Navy kite stations in the Baltic and North Sea. Balloons did not play a significant role.

Sweden commissioned a balloon carrier in 1902. Equipped with drachen balloons the Albatross formed part of Sweden’s coastal defences until the 1920s

In 1907 the Italians converted three vessels Elba, Etruria and Liguria into balloon ships but by WW1 had reconverted them to other uses. In 1912 the KuK submarine U5 conducted trials with a towed Drachen in order to determine the best colour to paint a submarine to avoid detection from the air when submerged. Having done this all further interest in naval ballooning vanished.

The Royal Navy had remained aloof from all of this although experiments with man lifting kites had been carried out. However in 1913 the army turned over almost all of its lighter than air inventory to the Navy (it would seem that, much like the French, they had assumed that the balloon had no future in modern warfare). The balloons were obsolete spherical types some of which had seen action in South Africa against the Boers. Whilst officers such as Wing Captain E. M. Maitland, of the R.N.A.S. struggled to find a use for the small airships not much was done with the balloons. However in October 1914 the Royal Naval Division was attempting to assist in the defence of Antwerp and a Naval Balloon Section was formed to support them. Antwerp fell before this section could arrive in Belgium but it was landed at Dunkirk on 14th October to spot for monitors bombarding German positions in Belgium and went into action on the 15th. The sand dunes had blinded the monitors view of their targets so that the balloon was a welcome asset but the spherical balloon proved very difficult to handle (especially by an inexperienced crew) and the intervention of a Belgian army drachen equipped balloon company became necessary. This was the nail in the coffin of the spherical balloon.

Drachen type balloons were ordered from Messrs. C. G. Spencer and Sons and an RN kite balloon training school was set up at Upper Grove House near Roehampton. Unfortunately whilst Spencers had all the design material necessary to start production there was a hiatus with the material necessary which had to be obtained in France (there may have been some international bureaucratic disagreements) so that when in March 1915 an order was received to send a balloon section to the Dardanelles there was no balloon to send. An officer was sent to Paris to try and wheedle one out from the French. He succeeded in obtaining a drachen and all the necessary winches. An Australian manure ship was pressed into service and transformed into the balloon carrier Manica. She arrived at Lemnos on the 16th April 1915. She provided artillery spotting support for a number of ships including the Triumph, Lord Nelson, and Prince George but is most associated with the Queen Elizabeth. One of the most important ealy uses of the balloon was the prevention of the Turkish battleship Turgut Reis (formerly SMS Weissenburg) from approaching close enough to shell the transports at the ANZAC landings by directing the Triumph's guns, firing over the horizon, to turn her back on three occassions.Had the Turgot Reis been able to bring her 11 inch guns to bear catastrophic damage could have been caused to the landings. Successful shoots were also carried out against Turkish batteries, barracks and HQs; on one occasion a Turkish freighter was sunk with the Queen Elizabeth firing seven miles clear over the Gallipoli peninsular at a Turkish convoy. Mancia's balloon was particularly valuable as the use of wireless by the RNAS aircraft at Gallipoli proved relatively unsuccesful (this may have been because only two airborne sets were available and these were swapped from machine to machine which cannot have done much for their tuning) Mancia's observer simply telephoned down to the ship and the mesages were then relayed to HMS Bacchanante, then onward by that ship's more poweful wireless.

The Turkish and German forces made various attempts using artillery to shoot down the balloon. They also tried to shell Mancia herself which sustained some minor damage. A second balloon was flown from the tug Rescue. This balloon was a South African War vintage spherical balloon, relatively useless for observation in these conditions. It has been surmised that this was in fact an attempt to draw fire away from Mancia's balloon and Rescue's was unmanned. The use of this balloon was soon abandoned, Shells bursting over Mancia came close to the 200 cylinders of compressed hydrogen carried on board, these it was realised formed an intolerable risk to Mancia and consequently were transferred along with the hydrogen generator and compressor to the Rescue which became based at Imbros. Rescue would take the balloon out of rage of the enemy's artillery for gas top ups and then tow it back to the Mancia.

Mancia was replaced at Gallipoli by HMS Hector which was later joined by by HMS Canning each carrying a British built drachen.

The balloon carriers shared some common features. They had a capacious forward hold, lined with wood, into which an inflated balloon would fit. This was covered with a split hatch so that when open each half formed a wind break down the side of the ship. When no heavy seas were expected the balloon might be carried with its top half proud of the hatchway but protected by the hatch halves. However in any sea the balloon had to be part deflated to allow the hatches to be shut. The winch was located at the bottom of the hold and the observer could get in and out of the basket in the hold. Each ship was fitted with a gas generator and a compressor for filling the cylinders used to top up the balloons lifting gas.

Two more vessels were converted into balloon ships, HMS City of Oxford and HMS Menelaus. These had holds that were big enough to carry a fully inflated balloon with the hatches shut. This was intended to allow them to support the Fleet at sea.They were first allocated for operations off the Flanders coast. Although well equipped they were too large with too big a draught to operate safely in this environment and recourse was made to a barge (the Arctic) to hold the balloon and a trawler to tow it. Balloon based artillery spotting took place spasmodically (for example against Ostend) right into 1917 by which time aeroplanes did the job as and when needed. HMS Menelaus was ordered to join the fleet in the action at Jutland but was unable to raise steam in time!

The problem with the balloon ship was that once the action had moved inland there was nothing much for them to do and this was the case in most theatres by 1917. However a new job for the naval balloon was emerging –anti submarine work.

The French, as recounted earlier, had done preliminary work in this area and in WW1 had a number of vessels in the Mediterranean acting as sub chasers and towing balloons. One such ship was the gunboat Corneille armed with a 75mm gun and depth charges. This was the former British steam yacht Medea (and as Medea again she served as a barrage balloon ship in WW2, today she still takes charters out of San Diego). France probably had some 25 ships so equipped. Britain began to fit balloon winches to the sterns of some destroyers and used these in anti submarine sweeps, the Caquot balloon was relatively viceless when towed. In July 1917 U69 was spotted by HMS Patriot’s balloon and subsequently sunk by gunfire. However British tactics changed from trying to seek and destroy U boats to supressing and neutralising them by forcing them to stay submerged in daylight. As a result balloons were fitted to a host of convoy escort vessels and to patrol craft guarding approaches to ports, naval bases etc. Estimates suggest that apart from the fleet itself over 150 escort and patrol vessels were converted to carry or tow balloons. Typically an observer in such a balloon would be able to spot a U boat within a 30 mile diameter circle. Attacks on convoys escorted by balloon carrying ships dropped dramatically.

The US Navy expanded its balloon fleet dramatically from 2 at the beginning of the war to over 200 at the armistice. Unfortunately they drastically mismanaged fitting them to ships by changing the winch design in the middle of the programme so few ships received a winch in time (probably no more than eleven). The three battleships Utah, Nevada and Oklahoma stationed in Bantry Bay as precaution against German Battle Cruiser convoy raids were balloon equipped as an adjunct to their gunnery control (so they could see and hit the battlecruisers whilst they were still over the horizon). However the USN Kite Balloon base at Berehaven had no destroyers to tow their balloons and this work was taken over by RN destroyers from Queenstown. At least one US sailor, Ensign Charles E. Reed, was killed on this duty whilst his balloon was towed by HMS Springbok.

As an interesting end to this account it is worth noting that it was a balloon towing drifter patrolling the mouth of the Firth of Forth that first saw the light cruiser Cardiff, also towing a kite balloon and leading the German fleet to its surrender loom out of the mist.

[centurion]

Part 7 Gas

One of the restrictions on observation balloons was the need for gas. The very first man carrying balloon built by the Montgolfier brothers and flown in 1783 used hot air. The balloon filled with this displaced more than it’s own weight of air at ambient temperature and therefore floated. Interestingly the Montgolfiers misunderstood the process and assumed that it was smoke that provided the lift so that wet straw was burnt to fill the balloon with smoke. Happily it heated the air sufficiently to provide lift but the fliers Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes had to constantly feed the fire brazier to maintain altitude. In the absence of devices like today’s propane burners the hot air balloon was not a viable vehicle for military work.

In the same year Professor Charles and Anne-Jean Robert made the first flight in a balloon filled with ‘Inflammable Air’ (Hydrogen). Unlike the Montgolfier Brothers Charles (and his balloon builders the Robert Brothers) understood the science of what they were doing and this balloon was very like a modern globular hydrogen or helium filled balloon. [Pilâtre de Rozier then built what was in effect a hot hydrogen balloon with entirely predictable results and in 1785 became, with his co-pilot, the first to die in an aircraft crash.] The gas filled balloon became the standard form and the first use of them for military purposes by the French Corps de Aerostatier during the Revolutionary Wars used hydrogen as the lifting agent.

Until the mid 20th century, balloonists had two choices, pure hydrogen or ‘town gas’ (produced from the distillation of coal and containing methane as well as hydrogen). Pure hydrogen gave the greatest lifting power but was expensive to produce. Town gas was cheap provided one had access to an operating gas works, not something usually found at a front. Showmen would use town gas, military balloons hydrogen.

Initially hydrogen was produced in quantity by the regenerative steam and iron method which involved blowing steam over red hot bars of iron, the oxygen atoms in the steam combined with the iron (producing iron oxide or rust) and the freed hydrogen could be collected. These plants were large and not portable and so balloons would be filled (very slowly) at the plant and towed to where they were to be deployed. Initially this was done by columns of soldiers and in the American Civil War by railway locomotives, balloon filling stations being established at Washington and Richmond. This was very restrictive and Professor Lowe who ran a number of balloons for the Union developed the vitriol process involving iron filings and diluted sulphuric acid. This was to an extent portable (the plant could be packed into three heavy wagons and reassembled on site). However the plant was not gas tight and had to be placed in a no smoking, no lanterns or candles, no camp fires area. Nevertheless the approach was refined with different chemical processes until by WW1 hydrogen gas generators were able to be carried in a single horse drawn or motorised wagon.

In Britain, France and Germany the process used involved dropping ferro-silicon into hot caustic soda. Russia and Japan utilised the effects of alkaline hydrates upon aluminium. In addition Germany also used a process involving petroleum distillates being first vaporised and then passed through producer ovens containing hot coke. This was railway mounted. In France a Dr. Jaubert developed three types of ferro silicon plants for military use , a truck mounted generator, a larger semi portable version and an even greater capacity fixed plant.

The gas generator trucks were prize targets for the enemy’s artillery and were therefore parked where it would be difficult to find and hit them so there was still the problem of getting gas from the generators to the balloon crews who needed it. Two approaches seem to have been used, cylinders of compressed gas and nurse balloons. Cylinders would be filled using a compressor (mounted on another truck). However these were heavy (certainly heavier than modern cylinders in which better quality steel and construction allows thinner walls) and expensive. The alternative was the nurse balloon which was a small balloon which when filled was lighter than air and could be ‘walked’ by a squad of soldiers, hanging onto handles on the side, to where it was needed. Transferring the uncompressed gas from the nurse to the observation balloon involved the squad sitting and bouncing up and down on the nurse in ‘bouncy castle’ fashion. The biggest problem would be lugging the deflated nurse back to the generator vehicle. This may have been an issue for the Germans who, with the introduction of the larger Caquot type balloons, seem to have recycled some small drachen types (with stabilising bags etc removed) for use as nurse balloons. These were larger than the British nurses.

I suspect that when a balloon needed a top up cylinders would be sent but where a refill was needed (eg after repair) nurses would be used as the weight of cylinders needed would make transport difficult.

[geraint]

I seldom dip into this part of the Forum - my feet are firmly on the ground! But - I've thoroughly enjoyed the whole thread Centurion.

[TARA]

Centurion I was a gas engineer in the days when town gas was manufactured and found this thread fascinating and informative. Do you have any photographs of the equipment used during the Great War to produce hydrogen for balloons? TARA.

[Puddinhead]

This thread has been a fasinating read and I owe a genuine debt to you, Centurion, for this wealth of information.

Your writing is clear and descriptive. I would like to encourage you to collect these essays in book form. You're a natural writer and with renewed interest in the war, what with the 100th anniversary and all, I can't help but think I wouldn't be the only one who'd be happy to purchase such a book.