TWENTIETH CENTURY DEFENCE SITES of TYNE and WEAR

Section 3 The Second World War
Barrage Balloons (Fig 4)
These were first used in World War One and
throughout World War Two. They forced
enemy aircraft to fly high, so they did not
become entangled in the balloon’s tethering
cable, thus providing an easier target for
fighters and anti-aircrafts gunners and
reducing the accuracy of bombing.
Unfortunately some of our own aircraft
occasionally collided with balloon cables.
There were also frequent reports of balloons
working loose and causing damage to
buildings. For instance, Ripley and Pears
record that on 14 October 1941, St. George’s
Church in Cullercoats was damaged by a
drifting balloon (diary reference D773) and
on 16 October 1942 a barrage balloon in City
Road, Newcastle caught fire. Barrage
balloons were either positioned around the
perimeter of large vulnerable points or were
“field sited” - moored over a circular area.
They were an RAF responsibility. Equipment
was usually mobile and based on lorries.
When inflated they measured 66 feet long
and needed 20,000 cubic feet of hydrogen to
fill them. Today the main evidence of their
Benton Barrage Balloon Station
40
location on the ground will be a ring of
cylindrical concrete tethering blocks.
Regional Balloon Centres, which acted as
headquarters for the balloon units and
storage depots had two unique buildings - a
balloon shed or balloon hangar, where the
balloons could be test inflated, and the
balloon storage shed with gantries over each
of its four doors. The Benton Balloon
Barrage Station (HER 5673) was responsible
for collecting the remains of destroyed
balloons and their cable. This building was
photographed in 1992, surrounded by timber
huts, not long before it was demolished.
There was a complex of pillboxes in this area
(HER 5433, 5434 and 5436), which would
have offered protection for the site (Lowry
1996, 63 and Ripley and Pears 1994-2006)
39 South Shields, North
Foreshore, Barrage Balloon
(HER 5546)
A German mine-laying Heinkel bomber hit a
barrage balloon cable on the North
Foreshore in February 1941, crashing into
Beach Road in South Shields, killing all of