Puddinhead Posted 17 September , 2013 Share Posted 17 September , 2013 I'm writing a trilogy about three English siblings during the Great War. This forum has been a great deal of help during my first book (which I'm pitching to a literary agent on Saturday - wish me luck!) Thank you so much for your assistance! I'm just beginning the research phase of my second book and I need information about reconnaissance balloons. My protagonist is a balloonatic with the RFC and I'm going to need to learn a whole lot more about them. For your reference, the time period is 1917, summer and fall and will center around the Battle of the Somme, and possibly include Passchendaele. I need to know the nuts and bolts. What will my character physically do the moment he climbs into his balloon? What does he check, what levers does he pull? When he watches out for balloon busters, what will that be like for him and what will the ground crew be doing? How exactly does his ground crew bring him down and what is the time frame of that? He's also going to jump, successfully, twice. The mechanics of that would be terribly helpful to know. Bascially, I'm looking for any and all info about balloonatics. If you know of any articles or books, I'd appreciate it. I'm a Yank and my library is terribly unbalanced. Shelves upon shelves about WW2 and a handful of books on the Great War. I buy what books I can find, but Amazon doesn't carry the WWI selection that AmazonUK has. So far, I've come up with scratch regarding balloons. Thank you so much for your thoughts on this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
centurion Posted 17 September , 2013 Share Posted 17 September , 2013 The forum is stuffed with material on this - use the search facility and look for balloons in forums For a start I opened a thread on balloons and parachutes that will give you a grounding Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Black Maria Posted 17 September , 2013 Share Posted 17 September , 2013 Two books= Memoirs of an Old Balloonatic , Goderic Hodges ,William Kimber 1972 The Balloonatics, Alan Morris, Jarrolds, 1970 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
centurion Posted 17 September , 2013 Share Posted 17 September , 2013 As blackmaria's post illustrates books on observation balloons are far and few between as I discovered when doing some investigations. There are however some books with some coverage published in the 1920s but long out of print - fortunately some of these are available as e books on things like project Guttenberg but you will need to do some searching. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Airshipped Posted 17 September , 2013 Share Posted 17 September , 2013 From the groundcrew perspective you could look up the Internet archive for a copy of 'Green Balls'. The chap was an RNAS mechanic as far as I recall. (There's useful description of using flags to convey information as they couldn't hear instructions with the sound of the winch machinery etc). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Puddinhead Posted 17 September , 2013 Author Share Posted 17 September , 2013 Thanks so much for your responses already. Taking notes on where to go. I checked out that thread and was thrilled. I may have yelped a little. You guys are amazing. This is going to be great and it looks like I'll be doing most of my research here. I did check for those books. They only had one copy of the second one, and it was listed at $69, which is a little steep for me. I plan to spend quite a few hours searching through posts related to this. Also will check into "Green Balls" - thanks for that! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
centurion Posted 17 September , 2013 Share Posted 17 September , 2013 One of the advantages of things like Project Guttenberg is that the e books on them are FREE. One book worth finding is AERIAL OBSERVATIONThe Airplane ObserverThe "Balloon Observerand the Army Corps PilotByHAROLD E. PORTER Published shortly after the war ended. Porter was responsible for training US Army observers. As General Pershing had got rid of all the US army's observation balloons in 1913 once in the war they effectively had to start over so this book incorporates British and French practices in observation balloons. I downloaded my copy as a free PDF. You should be able to find it via google and do the same. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Puddinhead Posted 17 September , 2013 Author Share Posted 17 September , 2013 That sounds perfect, Centurion. You came through for me again! Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Puddinhead Posted 24 May , 2014 Author Share Posted 24 May , 2014 In case anyone is reading this and wants to read the excellent source that Centurion suggested, Harold Porter's book can no longer be found on the guttenberg site, but is available for free here: http://archive.org/stream/cu31924030744688/cu31924030744688_djvu.txt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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