Operation Outward was the name given to the British World War II program to attack Germany by means of free-flying balloons. It made use of cheap, simple gas balloons filled with hydrogen. They carried one of two types of payload: a trailing steel wire intended to damage high voltage power lines by producing a short circuit, or three incendiary devices - 6-pound (2.7 kg) flexible socks filled with flammable material - that were intended to start fires in forests and heathland.
A total of 99,142 Outward balloons were launched: 53,343 carried incendiaries and 45,599 carried steel wires. Compared to Japan's better known fire balloons, Outward balloons were crude. They had to travel a much shorter distance so they flew at a lower altitude - 16,000 feet (4,900 m), compared with 38,000 feet (12,000 m) - and had only a simple mechanism to regulate altitude by means of dropping ballast or venting lifting gas. This meant the balloons were simple to mass produce and only cost 35 shillings each (£71 when adjusted for inflation).
Read more about Operation Outward: History and Development, Design, Deployment
Famous quotes containing the words operation and/or outward:
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)