Field airship

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The field or fortress airships ( French aerostiers ) were military reconnaissance units that were equipped with tethered balloons of various systems and served the battlefield and artillery observation. They experienced their heyday during the First World War on the Western Front . The type of balloon used is called an observation or scouting balloon .

Field airships did not operate airships in the modern sense , but gas balloons . Both use the principle of lighter than air .

German airship and fortress airship troops

Captive Balloons at Équancourt (September 22, 1916)
Sergeant of the Luftschiffer Battalion No. 4 in Mannheim in an orderly suit around 1910
Establishment and telephone connections of the field airship force in 1918

Balloons have been known as a military element since the coalition wars of 1792–1815. In the Franco-Prussian War 1870–1871, the successful maintenance of a communications link between the besieged Paris and the outside world by means of balloons was the reason for the general deployment of balloon troops. In Prussia this happened on May 9th, 1884. At the end of the 19th century there were balloon detachments in almost all armed forces (army as well as navy), which, however, mostly dealt with free-moving spherical balloons. The original intention was for airship travel, i.e. the task that guided airships would later take over.

With the invention of the tethered balloon ascending from a cable , a new field of activity emerged: tactical battlefield reconnaissance . With the invention of the dragon balloon by August von Parseval and Hans Bartsch von Sigsfeld , this (German) type of balloon took the lead among military balloons. It has been copied and used many times over the years. Until World War I in 1914, however, most of the military did not really understand what to do with tactical battlefield reconnaissance. And so it came about that even before the war began, many of those responsible wanted to get rid of tethered balloons. In the classic war of movement there was little use for such a cumbersome device. After the Battle of the Marne in September 1914, the western front froze . A new - hitherto little known - war image took shape, the positional and grave war .

In February 1915 there were nine tethered balloons on the Western Front. The field airmen were thus a largely unused and more or less unknown quantity or weapon. This was mainly due to the lack of coordination and the low level of expertise of the upper command authorities or army units . Major i. G. Hermann Thomsen , a veteran airship, who had gained experience in both guided airship and field airship, wrote a memorandum on the situation of the "airship" in the spring of 1915, which had a great - positive - echo in the generals as well as the Kaiser found. As a result, the Highest Cabinet Order (AKO) of March 11, 1915 founded the "Chief of Field Aviation" department, which was located directly at the General Staff of the Army. This also ensured good contact with the Supreme Army Command (OHL). Chief of field aviation was Major i. G. Thomsen. All airplanes, guided airships, tethered balloons and weather management were subordinate to him.

On February 21, 1916 the attack on Verdun and its fortresses began. For the first time, 12 balloons were used in a coordinated manner. Army High Command 5 (AOK 5) had a special balloon pipeline network built and the reconnaissance reports from the field airmen to be evaluated centrally in a so-called balloon center and forwarded to the command in a targeted manner.

Since initially each balloon train had only one balloon, the entire unit failed when the balloon was destroyed. The train was only able to continue working after it had been purchased. Based on this knowledge, field airship depots and parks were immediately created in order to be able to replace the losses relatively quickly. The equipment requirement was not increased until the end of 1917 (see below).

During the Verdun offensive, the field airships suffered significant losses for the first time, as the enemy used the newly created incendiary ammunition (see the shooting down of the army airship LZ 77 on February 21, 1916).

In the Battle of the Somme from June 24 to November 26, 1916, more than half of the Feldluftschifferabteilung (FLA) available on the Western Front were deployed: 18 FLA with 50 balloons. For the first time, each AOK had its own balloon control center. Also for the first time, the field airmen received the urgently needed active protection from fighter pilots - the enemy had clearly classified the balloons and their activities as important and dangerous.

The events of 1916 had finally established the "Luftwaffe" and specified its tasks. Both the enemy and the German authorities now knew what airmen, airmen and field airmen could and were not able to do. On October 8, 1916, the office of the "Commanding General of the Air Force" ( Kogenluft ) was founded on the German side under General von Hoeppner , who now coordinated all replacement and training matters. Overall, the command structure has been streamlined and optimized. The German army now had 53 FLA with 128 balloon trains, which were led by 53 department staffs and 7 balloon control centers. The FLA or the balloon trains were combined into reconnaissance and combat groups. This massively improved the performance of this troop.

The restructuring of the air forces by the KoGenLuft had an impact everywhere, including the guidance airships, especially the army airships. For a variety of reasons (see link below), army airships were discontinued in the spring of 1917 (i.e. the operation of guided airships). Most of the (ground) personnel that became available was handed over to the field airship departments. In 1918, material bottlenecks made it necessary to merge two balloon trains into one balloon train. Until then, the rule “1 balloon train ≡ 1 balloon ≡ 1 ascent point” applied. The new structure ensured new (faster) material and personnel availability.

In the summer of 1918, the army had 186 balloon trains and 56 department headquarters. At the height of their effectiveness, the field airmen experienced the bitter price of their skill: the greatest losses in their history. The enemy fired at the balloons, as in their new high efficiency they reported every movement of enemy forces comprehensively and immediately. The loss rates are reminiscent of the guided airships, which, with its few airships, caused a very large bond of enemy forces. The field airmen, too, had risen from a neglected to a much-noticed, hard-fought weapon. Without their actions, tactical close-range reconnaissance was no longer conceivable.

Additions to the field airship in Germany and worldwide

Deployment FLA - balloon trains - series picture trains

Signal balloon in the German army

The majority of the FLA deployed on the Western Front. On the Eastern Front and during the campaigns against Romania and Serbia there were only selective uses. On the Isonzo , on the Italian front, there were targeted, very successful use of the balloon weapon in 1917. During the war there was no distinct separation of the air forces from the army in Germany - they were part of the army. The navy - an independent branch of the armed forces - had and commanded its own air forces: the naval airship detachment (later the naval airship department - led by the airship leader, frigate captain Peter Strasser ), the airship departments, which were attached to the respective air ports for various tasks, the navy - Tethered balloon department, which supported the German marine infantry in the Flemish coastal service and the naval forces. The deployment of the individual balloon trains or FLA and their subdivisions should be difficult to fathom in detail today. The evaluation of field post could be helpful , but this procedure has its limits, as the locations of the balloons followed the daily needs of the front office. In this context, the Luftschiffer-Bataillon Stollwerck , which appears again and again in the postal service, should be mentioned whose origin and further activities are largely unknown (see web links).

Even at the beginning of the war, the French field airmen recorded their observations (also) photographically. The creation of aerial photographs was carried out with scientific accuracy and was very helpful in front operation. On the German side, they initially limited themselves to simple visual observation and forwarding the findings by telephone. This had systemic weaknesses. Later, the creation of photographic terrain maps was started here as well. It was only in the course of 1916 that the first series of picture trains were set up and incorporated into the FLA. The series image trains were basically just a supplement in the form of cameras with a 30 centimeter (later 70 or 120 centimeter) focal length, the devices for developing the films and the associated specialist staff. The special main task of the series photo trains was the creation of series photo recordings, i.e. the production of aerial photos, which, when lined up, resulted in a large overview plan (= aerial photo).

In Great Britain , manned tethered balloons were used by the Royal Navy to locate zeppelins during World War I. In order to listen to the engines of the German airships, the soldiers deployed as listening posts should not be exposed to environmental noises on the ground and, moreover, should be able to listen to a wider area up high than on the ground. The tethered balloon, under which the listening post was sitting in a basket, was brought up about 150 meters. If the guard heard a zeppelin, he called his observation down to the ground crew. The ground crew was then apparently supposed to telephone an airfield to bring planes to repel the zeppelin. Should the rope of the tethered balloon break, the man in the basket had a rope with a hook to try to hook onto something on the ground while the balloon drifted.

Further development to the Caquot balloon

The technical system of the dragon balloon, as it was not only used on the German side as a tethered balloon, came from the years 1893–98, ie from the end of the 19th century. The kite balloons of the Parseval-Sigsfeld system had great advantages over spherical balloons, but they did not stand as quietly in the sky as would have been desirable. The observers had to be very seaworthy to stay in good health with the typical rocking of the balloon. A stable tethered balloon was also of great advantage for the photographic recordings.

Since the French had been providing high quality image reconnaissance since the beginning of the war, they felt hindered by this imperfection of the dragon balloon. In 1916, the French captain Albert Caquot developed a new type of sausage-shaped tethered balloon, which was provided at the stern with three radially arranged control bags as a tail unit, which were offset from each other by 120 degrees. This type of balloon turned out to be very stable during practical tests in the air. It was so successful that it was subsequently built and used in large numbers not only on the part of the Entente. In the spring, the German army captured a caquot balloon and promptly rebuilt it. All new German balloons were built according to this system. On the German side, as with the opponents, there were different sizes and varieties of the balloons, but they differed essentially only in the exact design of the tail unit. Typically, the construction consists entirely of a shell without any other solid, i.e. rigid, components. This type of balloon was still used during World War II . Today's tethered balloons (mostly used as advertising media) are usually caquot balloons, as the deflated balloons can be completely folded up and are therefore easy to transport.

Another advanced element of the caquot balloon was parachuting the observers . In the event of an air attack, the crew exited the balloon in this way as a precaution, as it was usually not possible to bring the device back to earth in such a short time. In contrast, aircraft crews were only equipped with parachutes at the end of 1918, as the commanders of the air squadrons assumed that such a rescue system would undermine morale.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Max Arthur: Lost Voices of the Royal Navy. Hodder and Stoughton Publisher, London 2005, ISBN 978-0-340-83814-3 . Pages 25-26

literature

  • Ernst Struck : In the captive balloon Ernst Struck, lieutenant in the reserve and leader of a balloon train, Verlag August Scherl Berlin 1918
  • Karl Friedrich Ehrhardt: The history of the military balloons from 1794 to the present . “Jet & Prop” Chronik Spezial 5, Verlag VDMedien Zweibrücken 2002 ISBN 3-925480-70-6
  • Max Erhardt: In the balloon before the enemy Max Erhardt, lieutenant of the Landwehr and leader of a balloon procession, Julius Hoffmann Stuttgart 1918

On the history of airship in Switzerland:

  • Carl Hildebrandt: Airship. The balloon troops of the Swiss Army 1893–1937 , self-published, Wabern 1992
  • Roman Schürmann: Helvetic hunters. Dramas and scandals in the military sky , Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-85869-406-5

Web links