Dan Snow's History Hit - The Apollo Programme with Kevin Fong

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Getting to the moon was no easy feat, no matter how confident President Kennedy may have sounded in his famous 1961 speech. NASA built a team from the ground up, and there were plenty of moments where it seemed as if they weren't going to make it. Kevin Fong tells stories of just how close they came, and how risky it was. After all, it was hard to feel safe when a pen could go straight through the module. Professor Kevin Fong is a consultant anaesthetist at UCLH and professor of public engagement and innovation in the Department of Science, Technology, Education and Public Policy (STEaPP) at University College London and an expert in space medicine.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On this podcast, I'm talking to one of the most brilliant people of my generation. I'm talking to Professor Kevin Fong. He's a great friend. He's an inspiration. He's a legend. He's a national treasure, in fact. Hidden among his, frankly, off-puttingly impressive CV is years spent working for NASA. He is an expert in the effect of space travel on human physiology and worked at Kennedy in Florida for years. As well as playing a key role in the fight against COVID for Public Health England, he's a brilliant broadcaster. His podcasts on Apollo 11 and 13 were smash hits all the way around the world. This podcast is a repeat of my conversation with Kevin Fong.

We talked around the anniversary of the moon landings, and this is that conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Here's the very brilliant Kevin Fong. Enjoy. Kevin Fong, this is a huge pleasure for me to get you on this podcast. We've been friends and colleagues and allies for years. Have you been on before? That is the first time. First time. Well, you deserve it. You to get you on this podcast. We've been friends and colleagues and allies for years. Have you been on before?

No, this is the first time. First time. Well, you deserve it. You're number one on the iTunes. Now you know what you have to do to get on the podcast, dude. It's not good enough being a drinking buddy. You've got to get number one on iTunes. Then you're straight on the pod.

So tell everyone, why are you number one on iTunes? Well, actually, let me start this again. Your new podcast is for BBC World Service. It's about the Apollo moon landings. Let's tell everyone, you're a very modest scientist. You're a doctor. You land, you jump out of helicopters and perform open chest surgery on motorways in the aftermath of car crashes.

An advisor to Virgin Galactic and have worked at NASA and are a space person. So is this podcast coming from that part of your... You're grimacing because it's all true. Is this coming from... And you're so lovely as well, annoyingly. So is this coming from that bit of the Kevin Fong grimacing because it's all true. Is this coming from... And you're so lovely as well, annoyingly. So is this coming from that bit of the Kevin Fong brain? Yeah, well, I mean, this is space. And I guess this is amongst the very confused CV I have.

This is my deep passion. This is one of the first things I remember is being woken up to watch the end of the Apollo project, the Apollo Soyuz test mission in 1975. And that drove my entire life. And all the things I do today in part are because my interest in science and my life in science was driven by, you know, growing up as a kid in the afterglow of Apollo, wanting to be an astronaut. So, you know, and so then there was this opportunity came, I wanted to make a program

about the 50th anniversary of Apollo, which is this July, of course. And I thought, well, I'll make a small series. And then this opportunity came to this epic podcast, 12 parts, to go and find not just some of the astronauts who'd been part of that mission, but also the people who made it happen, the flight controllers, the factory engineers, the technicians, the computer scientists. And that cast of people without whom no one would have walked on the moon.

I think the Apollo program and the moon landings are the most amazing thing that's ever happened in history. And it's just so recent that we still aren't able to process it. I think in 500 years' time, the only human from the 20th century that people will know the name of will be Neil Armstrong. I don't think anyone remembers Stalin and Hitler. We landed on the moon! that people know the name of will be Neil Armstrong. I don't think anyone remembers Stalin and Hitler. We landed on the moon!

I know, and I think I remember that. I think it was written in his obituary, and I think it might have even been in The Economist that said Armstrong is one of the few people from the 20th century who has an outside chance of being remembered in the 25th century, and I think that's absolutely true. And partly because this is a watershed moment for our species, the Apollo programme.

It's the point in history where, to push back the frontiers of science and exploration, it's no longer enough to be an elite individual or even a small group of elite individuals. You need this army of people melded together with technology and science. And together that thing, that complex entity is necessary to be able to make any progress at all. And that's what Apollo is. And Apollo is the first time we do it. And after that, that's how we do everything. So we got the most expensive civilian project in the history of the human race to talk about in the course of this podcast. So where should we start? I mean, how did humans go about landing on the moon? Well, I mean, that's the crazy thing. And part of what this podcast series is about

is how. But how did we do it? Because Kennedy gives that speech to Congress in 1961, setting his country on course for the moon. And you think, OK, well, obviously he knows that someone knows how to get there. But no one knows. No one knows. The furthest they've been from the surface of the Earth is 250 nautical miles. and now he's going, let's go 250,000 miles. And as he gives that speech, at NASA people are scrabbling for, oh my God, how are we going to do this? No one knows. How big does the rocket need to be? How many pieces of vehicle do we need to send?

Who do we need to send? How are we going to get there? And so they have to invent the techniques and the technology, and that has to be done by a workforce that isn't recruited. So they're just hiring people as fast as they possibly can, because it's war. It's the Cold War. It's this ideological war for technological supremacy, United States over the Soviet Union. So it begins there, and they invent all the technologies they require in that short decade. God, it just makes you think what we could do if we put our minds to it. The story, it's almost depressing.

This is, I mean, it's really important. The 20th century, if it taught us anything, it taught us that if you face a complex problem, but that there's no fundamental obstacle to it, if it's an engineering problem and you throw resource at it, then you solve it inside of a decade. It happens with the Manhattan Project. The first time we see nuclear fission is in 1939 in a laboratory, and you weaponise it inside of six years after that.

The Apollo Project, you know, the president says we'll go to the moon in 61, you're on the surface of the moon in 69. HIV is a good example. You know, you realise it's a killer in the mid-90s. It's a fatal illness, and now it's consistent with a normal life expectancy. So, yes, it tells us something really important about us,

about the problems that we face now, which is if there's a will and it's just engineering, we can get there. And I feel like that. I feel there's an important lesson 50 years on for us in nuclear fusion, which would be really, really important. Why don't we have an Apollo-level effort to tell us how far into the future nuclear fusion is? Because if you approached it the same way you approached Apollo, in 10 years' time, if you didn't have it, there'd be something pretty wrong. Exactly. And then we could go carbon negative into the atmosphere and the world

would be a great place. So they throw a lot of resource at this. What are the biggest challenges that they've got to overcome? So now they need a rocket big enough to lift your vehicle, a larger vehicle from the Earth to the Moon. They need to travel faster because you need to go close to 25,000 miles an hour to escape the escape velocity of the Earth to get yourself all the way to the Moon. When you get to the Moon, you need to work out how you're going to land on the Moon, how you're going to split your vehicles up. They choose this bizarre architecture.

They choose to do this thing called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, which means that you send one big rocket, two vehicles, all the way to the Moon together, and then you split those vehicles up. You land one on the surface, and then it has to come off the surface and back up into orbit around the Moon. They have to get together, and then they have to come home. And all of this is just absurd. You know, in 1961, all of these things just are the stuff of pure fantasy. And yet, they do it all. They do it all in the course of that decade. And what about the individuals? How do they start trying to choose the people that are

going to go on this mission? individuals how do they start trying to choose the people that are they're going to go on this mission so astronaut selection is quite a thing you know when when they start doing it at the time of mercury when when alan shepard and john glenn first fly they don't know what space is they don't know what physical threats and hardships space will offer so they just choose the healthiest toughest people they can find who can fly aircraft because they just don't know. So basically they just make the most resilient physical specimens who are also amazing pilots that they can find. That's how you get there, and that's kind of what they select for Apollo.

And you need the best test pilots you can find because this is the mother of all test pilot projects. These guys are going to be flying the most complicated vehicles in the history of the species in an environment where there's nowhere to safely crash land. If you stuff it up on the moon, that's it. Thanks for coming. You're not coming home. So it's a particular kind of person.

But it's not just the astronauts. You know, the astronauts are just the tip of this gargantuan iceberg. It is the tears and tears and tears of people who follow it. You know, there are the flight directors, the flight controllers, but there's the back rooms technical support. There's the guys out in the factory. The success of the mission depends as much on the guy who puts the foil insulation around the legs of the lunar lander

as it does the guy who's behind the desk in mission control. If anyone screws up, everyone dies. And there were bad accidents, weren't there, in the first few years? Well, the episode that we're just actually putting to bed at the moment is all about the Apollo 1 fire, where three astronauts die in a horrific fire on the launch pad in 1967. And so that's one of the things that's worth remembering. So we know that there was an Apollo 1 fire, but actually it hadn't quite occurred to me how late in the game it happens. It happens in 1967.

So two years, just over two years, before they actually get onto the moon and they kill a crew of astronauts. And that story was one that, as we unpicked it during the making of 13 Minutes to the Moon, as we unpicked it, I realised there was much more to it than I thought. You know, up until 67, NASA are basically falling over themselves in their efforts to get to the moon before the decade is out. And actually, it's a bit of a mess.

We talked to people who said, look, you know, in 64, between 64 and 67, everything's behind schedule. The lunar module, the vehicle that's going to land on the moon, is behind schedule. It's not going to be ready in time for the early testing. The command module, the thing that they fly to the moon in, is kind of, it's just a really bad vehicle. It's really bad workmanship.

It's really badly put together. And this pressure and this sort of like pressure to try and deliver, what they call go fever, you know, we've got to go, we've got to go, we've got to go. All of that conspires to create a situation in which in 1967 you put a crew into a badly designed badly maintained capsule you fill it with pure oxygen and there's faulty wiring in that cabin and the rest is history you know you kill gus grissom roger chaffee and ed white and and at that point nasa could have said, well, that's it, we're done, we're not going to the moon. But in fact, what they do is they recalibrate their culture, they reset their culture, they realise that they've got to change everything about their

culture and the way they're doing things, and they redouble their efforts. And in the 21 months that follows that, NASA is a changed organisation. You see, when we tell this story of Apollo, it's as if Kennedy makes his speech, everyone hears his rallying cry, and then everyone executes this perfect eight, nine-year programme of work to get everyone to the moon. But actually, it's a mess.

And it's a mess for probably the first half of that eight or nine-year effort. And so the fire, and we had George Abbey, George Abbey, sort of, you know, huge figure, a really totemic figure in the history of human spaceflight at NASA. He said, it's a terrible, terrible price to pay, terrible sacrifice. But if we hadn't had the Apollo 1 fire, if we hadn't had that to reset our culture,

we probably wouldn't have got to the moon by 69. We may never have got to the moon. Why do you call it 13 Minutes to the Moon? So it's such a huge, huge topic, isn't it? It's a decade of work. It's 400,000 people. There's so much technical information. We thought, where can we focus this?

What is the unique, what is the crescendo of this whole story? And what's the unique thing that we can focus upon? And for us, it was that 13 minutes of descent. So when Armstrong and Aldrin fire the descent engine on the lunar module above the moon to commit them to the moon's gravity to start their attempt at landing, because up until that point in 69, no one has done that. And it's the period of mission, that 13-minute period, taking them out of lunar orbit onto the moon,

that Armstrong most worried about. He said, on record, he said, you know, it was rampant with unknowns. I was worried about it. And, you know, this is a guy who doesn't worry about much. And he was right. He was right. So they're in moon orbit.

They're in lunar orbit. There's three of them in the... What's that spacecraft called? So they're in the command module. Now, the command module is that cone-shaped vehicle that you see. And you've got to think of that a bit like your... It's like a yacht, you know, that has your accommodation and your food and your amenities.

It's actually relatively comfortable and relatively capable compared to the lunar module, which is that spidery angular vehicle that you see, which is flimsy. It's very, very light. It's kind of like the dinghy that you take off your yacht to go and visit a nearby island. In fact, that's exactly the design of that mission. So Michael Collins is left in the command module. We interviewed him. He was fantastic to interview. It was quite hard to interview, actually, but fantastic. And so he waits in orbit around the moon and he's got a big job.

If it all goes wrong, he has to fly down and rescue them. You know, if they're aborting off the moon, he has to kind of fly down and pick them up, you know, as they're coming off. And so people underestimate how important his role. He was the second most senior person on that mission. It's Armstrong, Collins, and then Aldrin. Aldrin's the most junior pilot on that mission anyway armstrong

and aldrin are coming off they're going down to it's ridiculously ridiculous vehicle it looks like nothing on earth because it's never meant to fly on earth it has no aerodynamic features they're inside it it's a thin-skinned vehicle it has to be light it's so thin skin that if you took a pen you could stick it through the skin of the vehicle. That's what they're in. That's what they're sealed in to protect them against the vacuum of space. And they're coming down. And as soon as they start into that descent, things start to go wrong. So Armstrong was absolutely right to worry about the 13 minutes because everything happens. Communication starts to play up. And Armstrong says, we'd rehearsed everything. We hadn't rehearsed bad communications.

They track their progress across the moon surface and armstrong knows that they're seeing some of the lunar features too quickly some of the craters and some of the mountains are coming up too quickly so he's going too fast they're going to miss their landing site and that's important because if they come down in the wrong place they're going to damage the vehicle they're going to get onto the moon and then they're going to get off of it again and then if that's not enough then they have problems with the onboard computer which they absolutely depend upon you know they can't fly this vehicle on their own they need a computer to assist them and that starts to throw up error code after error code after error code and then

if that's not enough as they get close to the surface armstrong has to take some control back from the computer to try and manually affect the landing because they're about to come down in a boulder feel. And he very nearly runs out of fuel. He gets down to about 20 seconds of fuel, 30 seconds of fuel, before he actually sets it down. And everyone in mission control thinks, well, we're done. We're not getting to the moon today. We might crash.

But he still lands it. It was an incredible 13 minutes. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the remarkable crew of Apollo 11. More after this. and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. and then they land successfully on the moon did did have they ever told anyone did they did they celebrate were they just thinking about the next five ten minutes an hour or what was that moment like when they're sitting on the moon's surface?

That's what you think, isn't it? So once you've landed on the moon, it's time for massive, massive celebration. But we talked to them about this. In fact, we talked to not just some of the astronauts, but the mission controllers. And here's the thing. When you land on the moon, your problems are far from over. So actually what you hear in the mission audio is them sort of saying, we've landed. After the landing,

they've got the stay, no stay decision. So just because you've landed on the moon, can you stay there? Or are you going to need to take off instantly? They didn't know what the moon was really made of at that point. Was the vehicle going to sink? Was it going to fall over? If they were on a slope that was too steep,

they were going to have to lift straight away. So they actually, for the first few minutes after they get there, there's a furious work rate for them and the mission controllers trying to make sure that something awful isn't going to happen and they're going to have to just get the hell out of there. Because, you know, the risk is far from over. So there's a very muted celebration. And then they get on with the business of knowing whether or not they're safe.

And I think after that, then, you know, you have to understand muted celebration and then they get on with the business of knowing whether or not they're safe. I think after that then, you have to understand that once you're on the moon, you're still in the most alien and exposed environment any human being in the history, I guess in the history of our species has ever been in. And so Armstrong was all about the job and so he wouldn't have been high-fiving Aldrin for very long, I don't think. From your description of the descent, Armstrong was the difference between success and failure, his skill there.

It's really interesting. I think an awful lot about this, because it informs actually the work I do as a doctor. Armstrong is absolutely essential. You need an Armstrong because you need someone inside the loop of control of this complex system. But he's necessary, but he's not sufficient. So you need Aldrin.

You need Collins up top. You need the guys who built the vehicles. You need the flight director. You need the flight controllers who are running all of the subsystems. No one can see all the moving parts. And this is really best illustrated by one of the interviewers you had, my favorite. We spoke to about five or six astronauts in the making of this. But my favorite interview was actually this junior flight controller

who at the time was 26 years old. His name was Stephen Bales. And he's epic. His story is epic. I loved it. We went to his house near New Jersey, sat down with him. He was a lovely guy. He is like the Luke Skywalker of the Apollo program.

He grows up in Iowa in farmland. He walks out into the fields at night. He looks at the Luke Skywalker of the Apollo program. He grows up in Iowa, in farmland. He walks out into the fields at night. He looks at the sky, dreams of the stars and the adventurous space. He equips himself with an engineering degree. He goes off to Houston to the hustle and bustle. He's a tea boy. He gives visiting dignitaries tours of mission control, but finally earns himself a place to work on the desks

in his dream place. And he proves himself. He proves himself through training and simulation. And so in the end, when they're selecting the team of guys who's going to be in the room to assist the Apollo 11 landing, he finds himself behind the guidance officer's desk, one of the most critical desks. He's 20, 26. And it was funny,

because when we interviewed him, he's still even 50 years on, I don't think he could quite believe he'd been there. You know, he said to us, you know, there I was, this 26, 26 year old kid, and I could stop the space mission. I mean, even then he couldn't. And here's the thing, at one point during the mission, Armstrong sees these error codes flashing up on his crappy computer in the cabin of this this this vehicle 1202 alarm he doesn't know what it means armstrong doesn't know what it means the flight director doesn't know what it means nobody knows and if the computer falls over they die that's it done period so armstrong calls down says 1202 what does it mean it goes to And so now, with only a few minutes left before you're supposed to land on the surface, Armstrong is saying, what the hell's going on?

Do I abort? Am I going to die? What's going to happen? It's come down and all eyes now turn to this 26-year-old boy from Iowa who's sitting behind the desk and is like, well, what do you reckon, Steve? And Steve, fortunately, well, not fortunately, he works hard and so he is prepared for this he

has every single alarm code documented he and his backroom team and they have in 15 seconds they have this little chatter and they say we're okay to go go tell him to go and he makes the decision that saves the mission you know boy for a mile at 26 I don't know what you were doing at 26, but I wasn't saving space missions. And then, so how long do they spend on the moon? So that was Flags and Footprints' job. So they're there for not very long. They're there for a few hours, really. And as the Apollo program continues, so you've got six landings total, 11 through 17. So the first few missions are really just pathfinder missions.

Get out, walk around, get the flag down, get the hell out of there before something unknown happens. As we move on through Apollo 15 is the first time they've got so confident, and then they're taking lunar rovers up there, so they're driving around the moon. So the J missions, which are 15, 16, and 17, they're driving buggies around the moon,

and they're then spending several days, they're camping on the moon and in fact one of the people we spoke to was Charlie Duke from Apollo 16 who actually spent several you know a good couple of days on the moon and he talks about you know camping on the moon

you string up there's a bit of gravity not the same gravity on earth there's a bit of gravity so you string up a hammock but the cabin's so small that you know you can't have this side by side so you sort of have this crucifix hammock arrangement inside the cabin there's not

really enough room for both of you to put your spacesuits on because once you've done that you've occupied all the space in the cabin and you just got to kind of learn to live there and then you know go out for a little walk on the moon and drive on the moon and come back so Apollo 11 really is about getting onto the moon and knowing you can moon and come back. So Apollo 11 really is about getting onto the moon and knowing you can get there, land safely, and staying long enough to pick up a few rocks and get the hell out of there. But the true exploration happens in the missions after that.

It's worth remembering. So while those guys are spending a few days on the moon, that one solo guy is still in the mothership, just orbiting the moon all by themselves. So that's Michael Collins, and we've got almost an entire program dedicated to him because he's kind of like the third man of apollo 11 you know everyone goes there's neil armstrong buzz alton and who's the other guy and michael collins is i mean so

underrated in terms of his role and importance in all of this he is a fantastic pilot he is by far and away the most emotionally i guess in touch and and of all of the people who give accounts of the Apollo period. And we went to interview him, and it was fantastic, because we were told, actually, he's a notoriously difficult interviewee at times. Well, he doesn't suffer falls lightly, and so you thought, I better have all my ducks in a row when I go and interview him. And it was funny, because he was fantastic, and he was very, very generous, but it was like, he's a fighter pilot,

and it was like being in a dogfight with a fighter pilot because you'd think oh i'll ask him this question and as soon as you thought you had him where you wanted him he was behind you and hosing you down with the guns and you thought god but um but he you know he talked to us about how his job was to be there preparing for if it didn't work out he was supposed to be there as the last line of defense if there was an abort during the landing or if something went wrong as they're flying off the surface and the engines didn't work properly he would have to swoop down and fly down somehow and pick this vehicle up you know this isn't just like flying a plane this is flying a spacecraft with completely different handling um and and if it went wrong everything would depend on him so so he was up there, and he had a very quiet time up there while they were on the surface,

but all the time he had to be prepared to effect that rescue, and that's what he was trained for. Well, I'm sure he was difficult, but the BBC sent the right guy. No one gets behind Kevin Fong. And so they spent a couple of hours on the surface. Then how do you—you said they hadn't got any fuel left, so how do they take off and get back to the ship in lunar orbit? So really, the lunar module is kind of almost like two spacecraft in one. There's an upper stage and a lower stage.

The lower stage is the descent stage, and it's got this very sophisticated engine on it that you can throttle. So up until this point, rocket engines were either on or they were off. But the descent stage has this engine on it that you can throttle. So you control the engine of your car with an accelerator pedal. And the upper stage has this boost back to orbit engine on it. And the two are on top of each other. So, yes, they've used up almost all of the fuel in the descent engine.

But the ascent engine, the second engine, is in the top half of this vehicle. And that's what lifts them off the uh the moon so yeah so that they they that's how they get back to orbit so they get back so there's three there's so many different spacecraft all in one here so they get back on this tiny little tiny little special the docking goes so the rest of the mission goes okay well you see this thing this lunar orbit rendez, which means that you first take two spacecraft together to the moon, then you split off, you land one, and then you come off, join up with your buddy Michael Collins in orbit, and you fly back to the moon in the command module. That rendezvous is non-trivial. It requires you to fly in formation, but fly in formation around the moon, 250,000 miles from Earth. And if anything goes

wrong with that rendezvous, if you, you know, prang the other vehicle and spring a leak in it, no one's coming to help you, you're done up there. And so all of that flying was extraordinarily precise and important. But despite the ludicrous description of those maneuvers, it is the best and only way to do that mission. So yes, so they get together and then they come home. But coming home, again, is non-trivial because you're flying home as fast as anyone's ever traveled at 25,000 odd miles an hour. And then you have to reenter the Earth's atmosphere

at exactly the right angle. Too shallow and you skip off and you disappear forever. Too steep and you stoof into the atmosphere and you burn up in a ball of flame so exactly the right angle and then splash down in the ocean and then you get picked up by your navy when we next send people to the moon will will the human factor be taken out of it will computers do all the flying um and i guess i'm asking therefore will they have to send pilots just asking for a friend it's interesting isn't it because in fact the narrative we have of the apollo lunar landing is the popular narrative is slightly wrong you know we say it was this computer that was sort of about as sophisticated as a digital watch and it was up to nothing and in the end it falls over and armstrong takes manual

control flies the vehicle to the surface like a like a space age tiger moth and that's only partly true yes armstrong was a superlative pilot and super cool under pressure but he is the all important interface between this very sophisticated computer and actually the computer does a lot of heavy lifting for them the computer smooths out the difference between the pilot's intent and the actual action. You know, no pilot could have controlled all of the valves and all of the mechanisms that were required to fire the rockets and the thrusters to get the vehicle in exactly the right places. It's just too complicated. So yes, you needed an Armstrong there in the final moments to manage some of the decisions now if history has taught us anything the way to make these complicated systems safe is to paint the

human out the loop wherever you can that's why you and i are 10 times more likely to survive in our cars today than we were when we were growing up and it's why road safety and aviation safety has improved over the you know since the middle of the 20th century that said you always i don't think you will ever get to the point where you can fully paint the human out of the loop of any of these systems because at some point the last line of mitigation has to be a human being able to play some part in that system and you know try and prevent what is about to be an awful failure so when we next go to the moon will there be a largely automated landing yes the computers will assist you all the way down and you may be able to do a hands-free landing you may be able to let the computer do it but there

will always be human pilots in the loop of that just in case something goes wrong you can't it's hard to engineer systems otherwise looks like the kids are going back to flight school i got big plans for them living out my fantasies through my children my daughter's gonna do it okay so kevin um how can everyone listen to this podcast so this is 13 minutes to the moon it's a podcast for the bbc world service so you can get it through bbc sounds or or wherever you're listening to this however you get your podcast you can get it on BBC Sounds or wherever you're listening to this, however you get your podcasts, you can get it on that. Great, thank you very much Kevin Fong, that was brilliant dude. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

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