Fighting the Big Guns from Balloons 



The sausage balloon is provided with a 

 wind bag which keeps the balloon nose 

 to the breeze. Steadying cones are also 

 fastened to the rope, kite-tail fashion 



THERE never was a time in the 

 history of fighting when a general 

 did not envy the birds. If he could 

 only hover over his enemy and see for 

 himself what was going on ! Since he 

 could not do that, he used such makeshifts 

 as he could devise. But the first real spy- 

 ing on the enemy came when the balloon 

 was invented. 



Someone asked Benjamin Franklin what 

 he thought of it. "It is a newly born child," 

 he replied. That was non-committal; also 

 prophetic. At all events, the French 

 revolutionists, daring adventurers in war 

 as well as in politics, adopted the balloon 

 at once as a superior substitute for the 

 old watch tower. They held it captive 

 by a rope, quite in the best Twentieth 

 Century way, and used it very effectively 

 in battles to drive home revolutionary 

 truths. Their "aerostiers" even dropped 

 their messages on long streamers of paper 

 weighted with lead. 



When the dirigible and the.airplane came, 

 it was popularly assumed that the observa- 

 tion balloon was to become as extinct as 

 the dodo. Indeed, in the early days of 

 the present war, observation balloons were 

 never mentioned in the despatches as were 

 the dirigibles and the airplanes. But as 

 the war developed, as weapons changed 

 their character and became even medieval, 

 as all Europe was converted into one huge 

 fortress, as warfare changed into a con- 

 tinuous siege, as guns of unprecedented 

 size and power were brought into action, 

 lo and behold, the old captive balloon came 

 into its own again with a vengeance! It 

 came back with other discarded and ancient 

 weapons — with steel helmets, and with 



Why the observation balloon still 

 plays a part in war despite the 

 airplane and the dirigible 



By Carl Dienstbach 



hand grenades thrown from trenches. 

 Battles of to-day are won by the 

 most terrible of systematic artillery 

 bombardments. The captive bal- 

 loon, connected as it is with a bat- 

 tery by a telephone wire running 

 through the holding cable, renders it pos- 

 sible to correct the range instantly, and 

 therein lies its advantage over a constantly 

 moving airplane. The balloon is at a 

 disadvantage because of its distance from 

 the enemy — a distance dictated by con- 

 siderations of safety. But that disadvan- 

 tage is compensated for by supplementary 

 information gathered by .the airplane. 

 An active enemy rarely permits an ob- 

 servation balloon to stay aloft for even an 

 hour. But as a rule the balloons are so 

 far behind their own lines that they may 

 stay up for a whole day. During the re- 

 cent engagements around Arras, Sir Doug- 

 las Haig reported that he had shot down 

 every German balloon over a front of per- 

 haps twenty-five miles. Such wholesale 

 destruction of observation balloons is pos- 

 ble only under exceptional circumstances. 

 Ordinarily the ranges are too great. But 

 artillery is not the only dread of the bal- 

 loon. Small, wasp-like airplanes darting in 

 and out with bewildering rapidity, throw 

 firebrands on the thin bladder filled with 

 gas, which explodes even more easily than 

 •dynamite. Threatened either by bursting 

 shells, or by these firebrands, the obser- 

 vation officers in the baskets of the bal- 

 loons, must jump for their lives. 



The peculiar sausage-like captive bal- 

 loons which are now used by all armies, 

 were invented in 1894 by two German army 

 officers. In Germany they are known as 

 "kite balloons." A kite balloon consists of 

 an elongated gas bag with an arrangement 

 by which the wind, caught in internal air 

 compartments by check-valves, distends 

 and stiffens the balloon against itself. A 

 regulation kite bridle is used. The balloon 

 is provided with a fin, consisting of an 

 appended air bag, like a modern kite, and 

 even with a regular wire-tail consisting of a 

 rope having a series of steadying cones. 



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