The French army airships

10 August 1914

Yesterday, the French army deployed three of its airships to reconnoitre German positions, and a fourth to perform aerial bombardment.  The results of these operations were decidedly mixed

Adjudant Vincenot departed her base at Toul late in the evening of 8 August on a successful 180-km reconnaissance flight over Dieuze, Château-Salin, and Bénestroff. She returned yesterday morning. The mission was generally successful, and the airship took only light damage from German fire: around ten hits.

Adjudant Vincenot

The fate of Éclaireur Conté could not be more different. Based at Épinal, her mission yesterday came to an abrupt halt when brought down by fire from French troops. Mistaking the airship for a German machine, they scored 1,300 hits on her within ten minutes of her appearing over French lines.  The crew returned Éclaireur Conté to base only with enormous difficulty and she is no longer airworthy.

Éclaireur Conté

The flight of Adjudant Réau was a dismal failure. The airship’s aft engine stopped after an hour and forty-five minutes and could not be repaired in flight, forcing the mission to be aborted. This is the third successive failure for Adjudant Réau: missions on 6 August and 8 August also had to be abandoned when the airship simply could not gain altitude.

Adjudant Réau

The only one of the four airships with a combat mission was Fleurus, which was dispatched from Verdun to attack the German railway station at Konz. The airship successfully reached her target last night and dropped four 155-mm (6-inch) artillery shells. However, damage to the railway was negligible, and so although Fleurus reached the target and returned safely home, the mission cannot be considered a success.

Fleurus

The French army presently possesses seven airships, of which six were judged to be operational prior to the Éclaireur Conté’s being shot down. The other two operational machines are Dupuy de Lôme and Montgolfier, both based at Maubeuge. The seventh machine, Tissandier, is currently being readied at Toul.

Dupuy de Lôme

Montgolfier

These French airships are quite dissimilar from their German counterparts; they are considerably smaller (in the 60-metre to 90-metre range, as opposed to between 140 and 160 metres for German airships) and lack the rigid, internal skeletons pioneered by Graf Zeppelin. Power is generally supplied by two engines totalling around 250 horsepower.

Adjudant Réau and Éclaireur Conté were built by the Astra company of Billancourt. Adjudant Vincenot, Dupuy de Lôme and Montgolfier were all built by Clément–Bayard of Levallois-Perret. Fleurus was built by the army itself, at its Chalais-Meudon workshop. Tissandier is under construction by Lebaudy.