Thousands of Women Were Given One Enormous Job: Protect Britain’s Skies.

Thousands of Women Were Given One Enormous Job: Protect Britain’s Skies

“Join the WAAF” recruitment poster, Air Ministry, 1939–1945. Imperial War Museums collection, Art.IWM PST 4916. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Thousands of women were given one enormous responsibility during the Second World War: helping to protect Britain’s skies with giant barrage balloons. They worked outdoors in wind, rain and darkness, handling heavy winches, steel cables and sandbags while trying to control something the size of a small building floating high above them.

If anyone thought “balloon duty” meant standing around holding a rope, they were in for a surprise.

Today I want to discover more about the women of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force who operated Britain’s barrage balloons during the Second World War. The balloons themselves are familiar from wartime photographs, hanging above cities like enormous silver creatures, but the women working beneath them are much less remembered.

Barrage balloons over London during the Second World War, 1939–1945. UK Government photograph, originally published in Air Publication 3003: A Brief History of the Royal Air Force. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

Barrage balloons were designed to make low-level attacks more dangerous for enemy aircraft. Beneath each balloon hung a strong steel cable. A pilot flying into one risked serious damage or the aircraft being destroyed, so the sight of a balloon barrage could force aircraft higher or even make them change course. That made accurate low-level attacks more difficult and helped to protect cities, ports, factories and other important targets.

By July 1940, RAF Balloon Command was operating around 1,466 balloons across Britain, with roughly 450 protecting London. At first, the work was largely carried out by men, but Britain desperately needed manpower elsewhere. From 1941, women began increasingly taking over balloon sites.

One of those women was Nancy Scamp, who later recalled her experiences with the WAAF. She had originally worked repairing balloon fabric before volunteering to train as an operator. She eventually served on a balloon site around Sheffield.

The work was far from easy. Women learned how to launch and bring down the balloons by day and night, operate the winches, secure the equipment and respond to changing weather. Sandbags still had to be moved, heavy cables still had to be handled and the balloon still had to be controlled whether it was cold, wet or the middle of the night.

Their clothing was practical rather than glamorous. Nancy remembered being issued heavy boots, thick socks and boiler suits originally intended for men. Life on some sites could be basic too, with women cooking for themselves on paraffin stoves and managing with water delivered in containers.

Then there was the balloon itself.

These enormous hydrogen-filled balloons were controlled from the ground using powerful winches and thousands of feet of cable. Wind could make them difficult to manage, and crews had to understand when it was safe to raise them, lower them or secure them. Hydrogen was highly flammable, while the cables and machinery demanded constant care.

Despite early doubts about whether women could cope with such physically demanding work, they proved themselves very quickly.

By December 1942, more than 15,000 WAAF balloon operators had replaced around 10,000 men in Balloon Command. Those men could then be transferred to other wartime duties.

The balloons did not need to bring down an aircraft every time they were raised to be useful. Their value was often in forcing pilots to climb, alter course or avoid certain approaches altogether. In that sense, the women operating them were helping shape where enemy aircraft could and could not safely fly.

Later in the war, barrage balloons were also used against V1 flying bombs. They were not a perfect defence, and their cables could pose dangers to friendly aircraft too, but they formed an important part of Britain’s wider air-defence system.

What I find most striking is how quickly this unusual and demanding job became normal wartime work for thousands of women. They stood outside in bad weather, operated heavy machinery, handled dangerous equipment and kept watch over the skies above Britain.

The barrage balloons may dominate the photographs, but underneath those great silver shapes were thousands of women doing one of the strangest and hardest jobs of the wartime home front.

Did you know thousands of WAAF women operated Britain’s barrage balloons during the war, or is this a part of the home front you’d never heard about before?