"Free Balloon Operations in World War Two " Topic

"During the early part of the war there was a Department in Whitehall that went under the name of D.M.W.D., the name stood for Royal Navy Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapon Development. The name was deliberately vague, within the Department the people employed there were referred to as the "Wheezers and Dodgers. (W.D.)". It had no connection with the Royal Air Force or the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. This lack of connection was nothing new: in the Great War the Navy had quarreled over who should pilot and crew the airships in the sky and since there was no Royal air Force the Royal Naval Air Service was born. (R.N.A.S.). The birth of the Royal Air Force as a separate service arm in April 1918 caused considerable ruffling of sails in the Admiralty.

In early 1940 Churchill summoned a meeting to discuss the possibility of firing into the sky a lethal curtain of wires on parachutes that would tangle around airscrews and bring the aircraft down. He told the meeting that a minefield in the sky was just the thing to bring down enemy aircraft. He told the meeting that he wanted a, "square of wire in the sky as big as Horse Guards Parade with parachutes to hold it in place". On the night of 17-18 September, 1940, a number of British barrage balloons broke loose in a gale they were whisked across the North Sea . In Sweden and Denmark , they damaged power lines, disrupted railways and the antenna for the Swedish International radio station was knocked down, bearing out the findings of the 1937 report. Five balloons were reported to have reached Finland . A report on the damage and confusion reached the British War Cabinet on 23 September, 1940. Winston Churchill then directed that the use of free-flying balloons as weapons against Germany was a matter for development.

The Air Ministry initially poured cold water on the idea, as the Ministry of Aircraft Production felt balloons would be ineffective weapons and would need much manpower and gas to deploy. However, their rivals in the Admiralty took up the idea with more enthusiasm. They decided balloons were low cost and were likely be able to do their job without servicemen being at risk. The rivalry between the two arms of the service over free balloons continued throughout the war with some very harsh comments made by both sides…"
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