I know RAF heavy bombers were fitted with cable-cutters in the wing leading edge, but I’ve no idea if the Luftwaffe used balloon barrages at all extensively.

Actually, thinking about it, the barrages would have been far more effective against dive-bombers; perhaps this was their main purpose?

Apologies for my thinking out loud…

Chris, that’s what I thought about the balloon apron vs balloon barrage too, but it seems that the WWI apron actually went higher than the WWII barrage. Powers says the apron went up to a maximum of 11000 ft, Cole & Cheesman say 9500 ft; and according to Hough and Richards, the barrage only went up to 5000 ft. Since the balloons were much more numerous in WWII, maybe it was an economy measure — higher ceiling (plus weight of extra cables) means bigger gasbags means means more area of material required?

Cole & Cheesman claim that the balloon barrage/apron idea actually originated before WWI. They don’t give any details of that but do give some of somewhat-similar proposals aired in 1916. Also, the Germans and Italians were using balloon barrages in early 1917; somebody from the RFC apparently went and had a look at the Venetian barrage during the Gotha campaign.

E B Ashmore (he of the defence system) invented the balloon apron, and spent some of the 1920s in an unseemly battle with the Treasury over the amount of cash he was entitled to because of it. ISTR that the problem with the apron was that it was too heavy to go much over 5,000 feet.

The OED doesn’t say where the word is from, but according to this it’s from the French barrer (”to bar”). The OED gives 1859 as the first cite for river barrage and 1917 as the first cite for artillery barrage. The Times has earlier ones. The first use there of barrage in the riverine sense is from 1844, and it starts being used fairly steadily after that, nearly always in relation to the Nile for the first few decades, anyway. By the end of the nineteenth century it was clearly a recognised piece of engineering jargon, and not just in relation to Egypt (there’s talk of a Thames barrage, for example). Why a French word was used for Egyptian river barriers is unclear to me — the place would have been infested with French civil engineers when the Suez Canal was being planned and built, but that didn’t start for another decade.

The first uses by The Times of barrage in a military context are a bit more complicated, now that I look at it. The very first was in 1854, from a letter to the editor proposing that the entrance to Cronstadt harbour be blocked up so that when the Neva thawed in the spring, the ice would pile up in the harbour and damage or sink the Russian fleet. The next, as far as I can see, is in an article reporting on the 1907 Hague conference on the laws of war, where barrage referred to the closing of ’straits connecting open seas’, which is clearly similar to the anti-submarine barrage but also fairly close to the river barrier sense of barrage. Then there are no military/naval uses until the war itself, and the first is in a report on the Gallipoli landings published 8 May 1915. One of the subheadings is ‘A barrage of shells’, the word itself is not used again but it is then said that ‘The [Turkish] gunners tried to put a great curtain of shrapnel between the warships and the transports and the shore’. Next, on 29 May 1915 is an article by John Buchan on the battle of Festubert: ‘The enemy attempted to make a barrage of fire behind us, so that it was a perilous business to get up reserves of men and munitions’. Then on 19 June 1915, from a report of the battle for Souchez (emphasis in original):

before every attack there has been a period of several hours of intensive fire, and then the establishment of a barrage of exploding shells through which the German reserves have seldom been able to force their way.

These and other instances would seem to back up the idea that a barrage is a wall or barrier through which soldiers have to move. BUT, then I found another explanation for barrage, from 8 October 1915, in an account of the French capture of a village named Tahure (emphasis in original):

Directly the word is given and the French gunners “lift,” either to bombard a more distant line of German trenches or to create the famous barrage, the French infantry dash in to the assault, and they are so quick and impetuous in this action that the Germans under cover often have no time to get out.

So it looks barrage already had a meaning in French military parlance. (Since it’s essentially a sprint, it may be related to another English use of barrage to mean a heat in a sporting contest.) I initially read this passage as meaning that the artillery was mimicing the infantry barrage (ie by having the line of fire “dash” forward), but from the following sentences it’s clear that it’s the infantry who are doing the barraging here. But there’s also General Hamilton’s dispatch on Gallipoli from 7 January 1916 (incidentally, only the second use in The Times of barrage by the military; the first came a couple of weeks earlier in a GHQ communique), where he refers to the ‘”feu de barrage” of the French artillery’. My not-even-schoolboy French would translate that as “wall of fire” but perhaps it was a standard French artillery tactic related to the ‘famous’ poilu barrage?

So to conclude this now meandering comment, it may be that artillery barrage does not come directly from river barrage, except that they both (probably) derive from the same French word. It may be that the French derivation of artillery barrage has to do with a sprint or a race, but became confused by journalists with the older (in English) sense of barrage as a barrier. It would seem clear that maritime barrages derive from that sense too, either from the English barrage or the French barrage. AA barrages don’t crop up until 1917, balloon barrages not until after WWI.

Phew!