Balloons Versus Bombers

Near Weybridge, London I was posted to a balloon centre because those balloons that they had to use in different places, you know what I mean, like over Winston Churchill’s home, or Downing Street and all these places, you know. They were balloons flown there and it was the girls, the WAAFs who were doing these. And those balloons were flown by V8 motors and they have a chassis, you know a driving chassis and they had to be done up and down by clutch movement and the girls were pretty hard on the clutches. S we used to be always out to either adjust or, if out, putting new plates on and all the rest. That’s the first job I actually had in the RAF as a mechanic. And in the centre, as well, they used make balloons there, you know. But on that station as well, they had an outfit there where they used to launch those balloons at certain heights and, not the big balloons like blimps, but they had smaller ones and they used to say there was supposed to be a raid over that certain area. Well those things were equipped with a tank, and a parachute, and a fuse and about, I forget, maybe two hundred feet of banana wire. Now they were made so an aircraft would link to that banana wire and when they get to the end they’d either set off the bomb, you know what I mean. That’s was the way that they got tangled, but if that didn’t happen the fuse burned and destroyed the bomb upstairs.