Never heard of this before in my life. Thought someone was getting mixed up with barrage balloons at first. "Between 1942 and 1944, the British Royal Air Force and Royal Navy frequently got to bickering over a certain issue. It was, oddly enough, to do with a program pushed by the Royal Navy’s Captain Gerald C. Banister, Director of Boom Defense to use free-flying, eight foot wide, hydrogen-filled balloons to sabotage German infrastructure. The RAF was often concerned about the balloons interfering with their air operations and rightly so. The German Luftwaffe was endlessly harassed by these simple devices and to the Admiralty and British Chief of Staff, that alone was worth the small cost for deploying these balloons. And the toll on German infrastructure, forests and farmland was greatly more lucrative to the British war effort. Mind you, there were also some pretty monumental accidents with the program, but for the most part, these relatively cheap, clever and amusing little devices were a delightfully successful tool in the British arsenal. It was Operation Outward. The lightbulb of this idea first clicked on with the Air Vice Marshal of the Balloon Command, who oversaw barrage balloon operations intended to defend against low-flying Luftwaffe bombers. It was suggested to launch balloons that would fly into German territory using radio trackers and triangulation to follow their course. The idea was initially turned down as, well, silly. But after a monstrous storm in mid-September 1940, when several barrage balloons came loose, drifted over the North Sea and reaped havoc on electrical infrastructure in Sweden and Denmark, Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked that the strategic value of balloon attacks on Germany be assessed. The Air Ministry once again deemed the whole idea rather silly and shot it down (so to say). Captain Banister pushed the idea through the Admiralty, however, and after studying the factors carefully, they decided the idea was brilliant. Here’s what they found: In studying meteorological concerns, they discovered that the winds above 16,000 ft (needed for such devices to float the distance and direction from Britain to Germany) almost always went West to East, meaning the Germans couldn’t retaliate in kind. Also, the whole apparatus of the balloons and their sabotage devices were not only relatively cheap (about £85 at current day equivalent), but could be made almost exclusively with surplus materials. The rigged-up balloons themselves were designed thoroughly and with great imagination. Inside surplus eight-foot wide latex weather balloons filled with hydrogen, the Navy inserted a wire so that as the balloon rose and continued to expand it would tighten the cable and stop the ascent at 25,000 ft. (7,600 m). They also added a slow-burning fuse that was calibrated, using calculated arrival time over Germany, to activate a slow drip from a can of mineral oil to lighten the balloon’s load and slow its decent. The same slow-burning fuse was also rigged to the balloons’ weapons. These weapons came in two forms: wires and incendiaries. When the fuse triggered the wire apparatus, the balloon would drop a 300 ft (91 m), 1.8mm diameter steel wire at the end of a 700 ft (210 m) hemp cord. The wire would then trail below the balloon until it (with any luck) struck German power lines, shorting out the lines and damaging electrical infrastructure to a great degree. These worked to varying success but certainly succeeded quite frequently." https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/britains-bomber-balloon-attacks.html?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=postplanner&utm_source=facebook.com
