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I was privileged to work as a Balloon Operator, one of the toughest jobs in the Royal Air Force - so my interviewing officer told me - and she wasn't wrong.

I trained at RAF Titchfield, Hampshire for eight weeks learning the technical details of the work involved. Then transferred to a training site in Shirley, Southampton for three weeks. To pass the examination there were eight subjects to take: balloon drill; balloon maintenance; winch driving; winch maintenance; rope splicing; wire splicing; balloon technical; and balloon theory.

Having passed as a qualified balloon operator I was sent to Sheffield to help defend the City of Steel. The site however was a derelict bomb site where houses once stood. There was a crew of 12, which included a sergeant and a corporal.

Two crew members had to take their turn at cooking for a week, whether they could cook or not! Part of our duties was guard duty several times a week, with two hours on, and four off, and that didn’t entitle us to a day off the following day, but more often than not we would be hauled out of our warm beds to either fly the balloon or pull her into wind because of a wind change.

There was often no time to wash or clean up, hence we often looked unkempt. But our job took priority. The shining silver things that flew over most major towns and cities were not all they seemed. They were monsters to control as they were three-quarters filled with hydrogen and a small pocket underneath the belly held air. So with this amount of hydrogen she was always attempting to get away.

When an operation was in progress we each were allocated our jobs. Someone would drive the winch, another shout the balloon drill down a megaphone. If the balloon was bedded down each member of the crew would be allocated to work on either the port or starboard side of Big Bertha to help ease her from her bed in readiness to fly. On the other side of the coin when we had to bed her down, we used 40 pound sand bags and ballast blocks, and guy lines were pegged into steel rings situated around the balloon bed.

During calm weather Big Bertha - as she was affectionately known - would behave at what was called interim height about three to four feet from the ground. But during a gale this became a nightmare, for her nose had to be constantly into wind. We in the crew would be called out several times a night, in the pitch dark - because of the black out - and have to move her inch by painful inch. This was dangerous because the sandbags and ballast blocks would swing like dinky toys as Big Bertha bounced from one side of the bed to the other. Her job was to fly at eighteen thousand feet during air raids in an attempt to stop dive bombing.

There were many incidents during my days as a balloon operator, I experienced a corporal hanging on to a tail guy during a gale and was subsequently flung over the roof of the living hut and landed on her back, breaking it. I was shown a huge red scar around the neck of one of my crew, who had been caught up in the cable, and these are but a few of the accidents that occurred. My experience was hanging mid-air in my winch when my balloon wrapped itself around the chimney of a steel factory!

LACW Joan Vass 2020942.©

-- Continue on to Joan's time in Bomber Command.

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