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The Road To The V-2

v1.1.1 / chapter 1 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* The idea of practical space exploration was invented early in the 20th century, and for decades enthusiasts worked to make it a reality. It took World War II to finally get their efforts rolling.

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[1.1] VERNE, WELLS, & TSIOLKOVSKY
[1.2] HERMANN OBERTH
[1.3] WERNHER VON BRAUN & THE A-4
[1.4] MITTELWERK / V-2 AT WAR
[1.5] THE AMERICANS INHERIT VON BRAUN

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[1.1] VERNE, WELLS, & TSIOLKOVSKY

* Speculations on life on other worlds go back to the beginning of the scientific revolution, when the nature of the planets was first clearly understood. The 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler published a work titled SOMNIUM (SLEEP) in which he dreamt of inhabitants of the other planets in the Solar System. Later writers followed in this vein, or had people fly to other planets, sometimes in a balloon.

These works were really only speculative fantasies, with the proportions varying between "speculation" and "fantasy". In 1865, the French novelist Jules Verne wrote FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, which depicted how a group of Americans build a giant cannon, the "Columbiad", to send three explorers to the Moon. The idea was unworkable, since the explosive power needed to shoot a projectile from the Earth to the Moon was entirely beyond the capabilities of any conventional cannon that Verne might have visualized. Even if such a gun could be built, the accelerations would be tens of thousands of times the force of gravity, crushing any living thing inside the projectile into a thin film. However, although other writers had played with the idea of flying to the Moon, Verne was the first to actually propose how it might be done in technical detail; the fact that his proposal was impractical was beside the point.

Fantasies about visitors from or journeys to another world became increasingly popular after that time, reaching a high point in the novels of the British writer Herbert George Wells. Wells considered an invasion from Mars in his 1898 novel THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, and walked in Verne's footsteps in his 1901 novel THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.

In THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, Martians rampage over the Earth, while in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, two scientists travel to the Moon in a sphere covered with an antigravity substance known as "Cavorite", named for one of the scientists. The elderly Jules Verne was contemptuous of this fantastical plot device, pointing out that he had used ordinary gunpowder, but the novels of H.G. Wells were exercises in imagination and social satire, not technological excursions as were the novels of Verne. The WAR OF THE WORLDS satirized imperialism by envisioning the European powers crushed by an invader, just as they had crushed lesser powers themselves; in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, the insectlike society of the people of the Moon was used to parody the class structures of human society.

Wells' stories were greatly enhanced by his colorful and vivid details and superb literary skills. His writings attracted a large audience and, indeed, are still exciting reading, having aged far better than Verne's writings, which today seem stilted and quaint.

* Verne and Wells made the idea of spaceflight popular. Others would show how to make it practical, at least on paper. The first person to actually look at space travel as a practical feat of engineering was a deaf provincial Russian math teacher named Konstantin Edvardovich Tsiolkovsky. Tsiolkovsky had a deep interest in science and technology, encouraged by one of his teachers, Dmitri Mendeleyev, the great Russian chemist who devised the periodic table of the element.

However, Tsiolkovsky also had a strong streak of Russian mysticism, one aspect of which was a belief in the universality of life. That led him to become interested in spaceflight. Tsiolkovsky was a compulsive writer, eventually publishing about 500 titles, including monographs and short novels.

In 1903, Tsiolkovsky published a paper titled "Exploring Space With Reactive Devices" in a Russian scientific journal. It was a remarkably forward-looking document, which discussed in quantified detail such concepts as liquid-rocket propulsion using hydrogen and oxygen, multistage rockets, engine thrust, and escape velocities. Tsiolkovsky also considered such concepts as space suits, space stations, and space colonies based on solar power. Tsiolkovsky wrote more documents on the details of spaceflight into the 1920s, and was lionized by the Bolsheviks, since his ideas meshed in some ways with the "progressive" utopian goals of the Communist state. Although Tsiolkovsky remained largely unknown outside the USSR, Soviet amateur rocket societies began to spring up in the ground he had cultivated there.

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[1.2] HERMANN OBERTH

* In contemporary Germany, amateur rocket enthusiasts were also forming clubs and performing experiments. The German effort had been inspired by another space pioneer, Hermann Oberth, a Romanian-born German math teacher. In 1923, Oberth published a pamphlet titled DIE RAKETE ZU DEN PLANETENRAUMEN (THE ROCKET INTO INTERPLANETARY SPACE), which outlined concepts for liquid propulsion in mind-numbing technical detail. Oberth followed this publication in 1929 with a much longer and more detailed work, WEGE ZU RAUMSCHIFFART (THE ROADS TO SPACE TRAVEL), that proved highly influential.

Oberth's work infected many people with the "space bug". Among the enthusiasts was a German architect and engineer named Walter Hohmann, who published a technical document in 1925 that described the mechanics for placing spacecraft into orbit around a planet or for sending them to other planets. Half a century later, the "Hohmann transfer orbit" would be a standard tool of spaceflight.

Not all the work of the enthusiasts was so sophisticated. One adventurous German named Max Valier built a series of rocket-powered cars and put on spectacular public demonstrations with backing from the Opel automotive concern. Valier was killed by one of his rocket cars in 1930.

An Austrian named Friedrich Schmiedel came up with a scheme for sending mail using rockets that landed by parachute, and demonstrated "rocket mail" deliveries a number of times in the early 1930s. He eventually destroyed all of his work rather than have it used for warlike purposes, a level of conscientiousness that would be notably missing from other rocket pioneers.

In 1929, another Austrian named Hermann Potocnik, writing under the pseudonym of Hermann Noordung, published a book titled THE PROBLEM OF SPACEFLIGHT, in which he elaborated on the design of a "space station" in great detail. Potocnik's "Wohnrad (Living Wheel)" was, as the name implies, wheel-shaped, and about 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter. The Wohnrad spun to provide artificial gravity for the crew. Although Potocnik died young of tuberculosis not long after publishing the book, Oberth found his ideas interesting, and Potocnik's Wohnrad would be the basis of space station concepts for another generation.

A French aviation pioneer named Robert Esnault-Pelterie, known as "REP", tried to interest the French government in rockets in 1928, but his proposals were rejected. Esnault-Pelterie went on to publish in 1930 a definitive summary of the state of the art of space and rocket science titled L'ASTRONAUTIQUE, following it up with a supplemental volume in 1934. The word "astronautics" was invented in 1927 by a Belgian science-fiction writer named J.H. Rosny SR during an after-dinner conversation with Esnault-Pelterie.

Many European rocket enthusiasts banded together in rocket societies. The most prominent of them was the "Verein fuer Raumschiffarhrt (VfR) / Society for Space Travel", established in Germany in 1927, which eventually acquired members from all over Europe. Valier was a founding member, as was an enthusiastic youngster named Willy Ley, and Oberth himself joined later.

The rocketry fad manifested itself in cinema with Fritz Lang's movie FRAU IM MOND (THE WOMAN IN THE MOON), released in 1929. Although it did not do well at the box office, since it was a silent film when the new "talkies" were all the rage, it was technically surprisingly accurate, as far as the rocketry went, and prophetic for a movie. One of the details of FRAU IM MOND would have a lasting influence. As the Moon rocket neared the moment of launch, a loudspeaker announced: "Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... zero ... FIRE!" Lang had invented the "countdown", if only for dramatic effect. The effect was so dramatic that rocketmen have kept the tradition to this day.

The technical accuracy was largely due to the influence of Oberth, who had a promotional streak and had been a technical consultant for the film. In fact, FRAU IM MOND's Moon rocket was essentially one he had already described and illustrated in DIE RAKETE ZU DEN PLANETENRAUMEN. Oberth had come to an agreement with Fritz Lang to build a rocket and fly it at a publicity stunt when the film opened. However, Oberth was a theoretician, not an engineer, and so he hired a few people who claimed to have engineering expertise to built his rocket.

Oberth never got his rocket off the ground, but one of the men he hired, a fast-talking salesman named Rudolf Nebel, decided to go into the rocket business himself. Nebel wasn't really a very competent engineer, but he was a born salesman and started casting around for backers. Among the organizations Nebel contacted was the German Army. The head of the Army's Weapons Board, Colonel Karl Emil Becker, was very interested in rockets. The Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I had prohibited Germany from construction and possession of a wide range of heavy weapons, including artillery. Unsurprisingly, the Germans were doing everything possible to circumvent the treaty and secretly rearm. Since the treaty did not cover long-range rockets, that meant they didn't even have to keep that particular work a secret.

Nebel managed to talk Becker out of some modest funding, as well as use of an abandoned ammunition dump near Berlin to conduct experiments. Nebel was able to scrounge up a considerable amount of equipment and supplies for his "Raketenflugplatz (Rocket Airport)", as he called it. He would even talk donors out of materials that he didn't need to trade for materials or services that he did.

Nebel was a VfR member and the VfR enthusiasts joined in the effort, though whether it was a case of Nebel working for the VfR or the VfR working for him is a question of point of view. One of the VfR workers was a teenage rocket enthusiast of aristocratic background named Wernher von Braun. They were all unpaid, but it was the Depression, little gainful employment was available; the enterprising Nebel at least managed to keep a roof over everyone's head and keep them fed. Besides, they were working on flying to the Moon. They began rocket test launches in the spring of 1931.

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[1.3] WERNHER VON BRAUN & THE A-4

* Colonel Becker of the Weapons Board had long since cut funding to Nebel, having little liking for Nebel's promise-the-Moon slippery-salesman approach to doing things, and little more liking for the VfR's emphasis on space exploration and publicity stunts. However, he kept himself informed of activities at Nebel's Raketenflugplatz, and when Becker decided that the Army should start its own long-range liquid-fuel rocket program in 1932, he had a source he could mine for talent.

One of Becker's officers, Captain Walter Dornberger, a big fan of Hermann Oberth, was assigned to head the rocket program. Dornberger was particularly impressed by the 20-year-old von Braun. While many children of the aristocracy were focused on prestige and the good life, von Braun was energetic, shrewd in practical matters, and very technically competent, while retaining the bearing and self-assurance -- many would say arrogance -- of the aristocratic elite. The Army hired him on and put him through an accelerated doctorate program at the University of Berlin. This was a peculiar exercise in which von Braun essentially did theoretical military rocket research and was awarded academic credentials for it. His doctoral thesis was classified, and his diploma vaguely mentioned that it was awarded for "combustion engineering".

Von Braun saw his work for the Army as a great opportunity. The VfR had a lot of brains and enthusiasm, but lacked the resources to build a rocket that could actually send people into space. The Army could provide those resources. Of course, the immediate focus of the effort was, as von Braun understood perfectly, the development of weapons. However, over the long run the weapons would provide capabilities that could be used for the exploration of space. There was nothing peculiarly German about this line of thinking. In the next few decades, American and Soviet space enthusiasts would end up thinking along exactly the same lines.

Von Braun had moved beyond the VfR, and not long afterward the VfR ceased to exist. The Army wanted to keep rocket development a secret, and the noisy VfR was a nuisance. A Nazi government secrecy decree issued in the spring of 1934 did it in.

* The Army tried to launch their first liquid-fuel rocket, the "Aggregate-1 (Assembly-1 / A-1)", in 1933, the year Hitler consolidated his hold on power in Germany. The rocket blew up promptly on ignition. Von Braun and his staff went back to the drawing board, and in December 1934 the group launched two "A-2" rockets, named "Max" and "Moritz" after popular comic-strip twins, to heights of over 1,500 meters (5,000 feet). They were working on the next rocket, the "A-3", when the Army came up with specifications for an operational weapon, the "A-4". It would be capable of carrying about a tonne (2,200 pounds) of high explosive about 260 kilometers (160 miles).

The Army development group had been working at a existing Army proving ground, but von Braun realized that it was much too small to be useful for testing really big rockets. In 1935, he went personally looking for a new rocket test site, and found it at an isolated place named Peenemunde on the Baltic coast. The Army accepted von Braun's recommendation, and soon Peenemunde was transformed into a growing military development and test center. Peenemunde was actually two separate but related facilities: Peenemunde-East, which handled Army projects, and Peenemunde-West, which handled Luftwaffe (Air Force) projects.

The A-3 rocket was launched in 1937 and proved a dismal failure. The Peenemunde engineers went back to the drawing board. An "A-5" was developed just to test systems for the A-4. The first actual A-4 launch attempt took place in June 1942. It flopped, as did several more subsequent launches. The first successful V-2 launch took place on 3 October 1942, but was followed by six more months of disappointments before the weapon worked with any reliability. This pattern of technical difficulties in rocket development would also become a tradition for later decades.

The A-4 missile was nearly 14 meters (46 feet) high and weighed 3.6 tonnes (4 tons) empty, 11.8 tonnes (13 tons) when fully fueled. It was sized to fit on railroad flatcars and pass through train tunnels. At the top was a 1 tonne (2,200 pound) high explosive warhead. Below the warhead was a 1.5 meter (4.9 foot) long control compartment, which contained batteries, a pair of gyroscopes, radio receivers, instruments to measure flight velocity, fuel cutoff equipment, alternators, and three compressed air bottles used to pressurize the fuel tanks. The body of the rocket, below the control compartment, contained two tanks: a top tank that contained 4,200 kilograms (9,200 pounds) of ethanol mixed with water, and a bottom tank that held more than 5,450 kilograms (12,000 pounds) of liquid oxygen.

The rocket motor was at the bottom. High-speed turbopumps, adapted from those used on fire engines, fed the fuel and liquid oxygen into the combustion chamber, where they were ignited to produce thrust. The engine provided a thrust of 245 kN (25,000 kgp / 55,000 lbf), making it by far the most powerful rocket engine of any type built to that time. Moveable graphite vanes in the exhaust altered the flow to guide the missile. There were four large fins around the base of the sleek rocket to help control its ascent.

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[1.4] MITTELWERK / V-2 AT WAR

* By the time the A-4 was flying reliably in the spring of 1943, the Third Reich was on the defensive. The interest of the top Nazi hierarchy in advanced weapons had faded after the great victories of 1940, with advanced technology projects cut back or canceled and researchers drafted into the military. Now that the Allies were exerting ever greater pressure against Germany, Hitler became increasingly obsessed with "wonder weapons" that might level the odds.

While the Army was working on the A-4 at Peenemunde-East, the Luftwaffe had been working on another wonder weapon at Peenemunde-West, a simple jet-powered "cruise missile", the Fiesler Fi-103 "flying bomb". Hitler was impressed with both projects and gave them high priority.

The Allies were not entirely ignorant of what was going on at Peenemunde. A packet of papers left anonymously at the British Embassy in Oslo shortly after the outbreak of war in the fall of 1939 had described a wide range of German research efforts in some detail. The packet had been left by an anti-Nazi German researcher. Most of British intelligence thought the "Oslo Papers" were a plant, but the documents still pointed out possibilities. The British had begun aerial reconnaissance over Peenemunde in May 1942. Pictures brought back eventually revealed a small aircraft, a flying bomb, and the shapes of a big rocket, the A-4. In August 1943, the British pounded Peenemunde with hundreds of bombers in Operation HYDRA, focusing on the living quarters there in hopes of killing the technical staff. The raid was not precisely on target, and though the damage was severe and many people were killed, the research establishment was far from out of business.

The Nazi Party military arm, the SS, had by this time acquired a major role in the high-profile A-4 project. While the Army retained control over research and development, the SS was responsible for building the weapons and, later, for launching them. Peenemunde was too obvious a target to be used for producing the A-4. A new site had to be found, preferably one that was hard to effectively bomb, and such a site was found in the form of a mine in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen.

The SS put one of its officers, Colonel Hans Kammler, in charge of building the underground factory, which acquired the nondescript name of "Mittelwerk (Central Works)". Kammler had helped in the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the construction of the Auschwitz extermination camp, and his methods in building Mittelwerk reflected his experience. He set up a prison camp named "Dora", a satellite of the Buchenwald prison camp, and used the inmates for forced labor. The prisoners worked in inhuman conditions and were executed on the slightest pretext. It is estimated that 20,000 prisoners died at Dora.

Wernher von Braun was perfectly familiar with Dora, admitting to interrogators that he had visited the camp several times from 1943, and giving details of the numbers of staff, both voluntary and involuntary, at the site. Documents would later come to light that would show he had requisitioned labor with specific skills from the prison system. In fact, he was a Nazi party member, having joined in 1937, and he also joined the SS in 1940, eventually advancing to the rank of major. He later claimed that he had been simply ordered to join the Nazi Party, and that Himmler had pressured him to signing up with the SS to help further Himmler's ambitions with the rocket program.

* Mittelwerk built flying bombs, A-4s, and jet fighters. The flying bomb was the first to go into action, being fired at London and other English cities shortly after the Normandy landings in June 1944. Nazi propaganda gave the flying bomb the designation "V-1" for "Vergeltungswaffe 1 (Vengeance Weapon 1)", in reflection on the devastating Allied bombing raids on German cities. Some would drop leaflets with pictures of dead German civilians to press the point home.

Improved Allied defenses and capture of launch sites in Northern France finally curtailed the damage by the end of the summer, though the Germans launched V-1s from Heinkel He-111 bombers at a reduced rate for several more months. The flying bombs killed a total of over 7,000 people, mostly civilians.

On 7 September 1944, the first A-4s, or "V-2s", were fired, targeting London and Paris, the French capital having been retaken by the Allies in late August. Only a handful were ever launched at Paris and caused little damage, but before the slow strangulation of the Reich finally cut off the missile attacks early in 1945, over 1,400 had fallen on London and southern England, over 1,600 had fallen on Antwerp, and a few dozen had fallen on Liege. About 5,400 people were killed by the rockets.

There was no way to defend against the rockets or even have much warning of their impact, since they traveled much faster than the speed of sound and the first thing anybody heard was an explosion. The only compensation was that the V-2 tended to bury itself deeper on impact than the much slower V-1, limiting the blast damage. Hitler himself had pointed out this drawback to von Braun during a presentation before the V-2 campaign began -- Hitler in his prime had a lightning grasp of details that people found astonishing, and von Braun was impressed -- and though the Germans investigated a number of "proximity fuze" scheme to allow an airburst instead they never got the technology to work properly.

The deep penetration of the V-2 did have one frightening aspect, however: if one punched through the roof of one of the tunnels of the London Underground beneath the Thames, the entire subway system might be flooded, with disastrous loss of life. The British adapted their radar warning system to give some alert of an incoming V-2, allowing the floodgates to be closed before impact.

The V-2s were fired from mobile launch systems, and Allied strike fighters and bombers tried very hard to hunt the launchers down. Unfortunately, they mostly only succeeded in inflicting damage on civilian targets. However, Allied strike fighters were everywhere over the Reich by that time, shooting up anything that moved. Trains were a particularly important and vulnerable target, and transporting the missiles to launch sites became increasingly difficult.

* The V-2 was the first more or less practical, mass-produced large rocket and included in developed form all necessary subsystems. The V-2 would be the basis for other large rockets for a generation.

The Germans also considered more powerful and sophisticated systems. One was the "A-10", a two-stage missile using a modified A-4 as the second stage, fitted with strakelike wings to extend the glide range so that it that could hit New York. Since there was no way to build a guidance system accurate enough to target the weapon on anything remotely specific at that range, the second stage was to be piloted, with some cockamamie scheme envisioned where the pilot would bail out and be recovered by submarine. Obviously there were substantial practical problems involved with building such a weapon, and in any case the project was filed away in 1942 so that the A-4 could be completed. The "A-11" was a three-stage orbital spaceship based on the A-10, but it was never anything more than a speculative paper project.

A particularly interesting paper project was a rocket bomber devised by a Austrian-born Stuttgart professor named Eugene Saenger that would repeatedly skip off the top of the atmosphere to give it the range attack targets in the United States with 10 tonnes (11 tons) of bombs, and then perform further skips to land in Japan. This flight trajectory would take the rocket bomber to the "ends of the Earth", or the "antipodes", and so was named the "antipodal bomber".

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[1.5] THE AMERICANS INHERIT VON BRAUN

* By early 1945, the Red Army was moving in on Peenemunde, and nobody with any sense had the slightest doubt that Germany would soon be completely defeated. Von Braun had plenty of sense and organized a meeting of his colleagues at a hotel to determine what to do. They agreed that the group should flee west so they could be captured by the Americans, instead of the Soviets.

Peenemunde was evacuated in mid-February. Demolition teams wrecked the place, though as it turned out they weren't thorough enough. The technical staff and their families were evacuated to Nordhausen, with the move planned and directed by Hans Kammler.

On 19 March 1945, Hitler, as part of a comprehensive plan to reduce all of Germany to rubble, ordered all the Reich's research establishments destroyed and their records burned. However, the infamous "Nero order" was widely ignored and, in the chaotic conditions, hard to enforce; indeed, some German military officers posted guards around facilities slated for destruction, with the guards ordered to turn back anyone who came to demolish them. Many of the military and civilian people in charge of the research establishments realized their future well-being depended on their usefulness to their conquerors, and their records would make a valuable bargaining card. Von Braun arranged to have all of the records of the Peenemunde group, tons of them, hidden in a mine at Dortnen, 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Nordhausen, which was then sealed with explosives.

As the US Third Army closed in, Kammler arranged for a second evacuation of the valuable rocket experts, this time to Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. Most of the staff went by train, but von Braun went by car, wearing a cast since he had broken his left arm and shoulder in an automobile accident. Kammler then went into hiding. The Allies might value rocket scientists, but an SS officer with a record of atrocities had nothing to look forward to but a hangman's noose. Kammler effectively disappeared for good; some claim he was killed in action, others that he committed suicide, but no witnesses or paper trail ever emerged to say anything for sure.

US Third Army advance units entered Nordhausen on 11 April 1945. They discovered appalling evidence of the brutalities at Mittelwerk and Dora, houses of death and decay set in the context of a place out of pulp-magazine science-fiction stories. Von Braun and his colleagues surrendered to the Americans on 2 May 1945. Low-ranking Allied intelligence officers, unaware of what they had netted, interrogated the Germans with aimless and ignorant questions. However, once the interrogators reported their catch up the chain of command, they quickly found out that von Braun and his people were a very valuable prize. Von Braun had a bright future with the Americans.

* Although von Braun had changed his allegiances to ensure his future, he still had a past that could never completely escape, stained by his association with the Nazi slave labor system and the enthusiasm with which he drove the development of a weapon of indiscriminate terror.

Making a serious criminal case against von Braun would have been difficult. As a technical director of Peenemunde he had no direct responsibility for the maltreatment of the prisoners at Mittelwerk, and some of his defenders would even claim the arrest of von Braun and some of his people in early 1944 was provoked when he protested the abuse of prisoners. Von Braun himself dismissed that claim, writing that he was arrested because the humorless SS was annoyed with rocket designers daydreaming about space travel when they should have been thinking about building weapons. The actual reason appears to be that von Braun had not been sufficiently cooperative with Himmler in the efforts of the SS to take over the rocket program. The rocket designers found their confinement generally comfortable, and the whole thing seems to have been just one of the continuous power plays of Hitler's Reich.

In any case, German industry had been so heavily involved with the slave labor system that von Braun's association with it was difficult to pick out of the noise, and given his potential usefulness nobody saw much reason to try. There was also no case from a strictly legal point of view against von Braun for developing the V-2. All the combatants developed weapons, often really vicious ones, and singling out the V-2 would have not made much sense. True, it was used to attack British cities indiscriminately, but much the same could have been said of German engineers who had designed bombers. Besides, the Allies were doing far more of the same to German and Japanese cities, and if von Braun had ever been taken to trial any reasonable defense attorney could have cut the prosecution to ribbons.

Indeed, a case could be contrived that the V-2 soaked up resources that the Reich could have used to make more effective weapons, and so helped shorten the war for the Allies. The Nazi armaments minister, Albert Speer, later wrote: "Our most expensive project was also our most foolish one. Those rockets, which were our pride and for a time my favorite armaments project, proved to be nothing but a mistaken investment." However, that would have been a ridiculous defense had it been brought up in court.

If no serious legal case could be made against von Braun, it remained absolutely indisputable that he was tainted by his environment in a way that would never come completely clean. The question of how much this bothered him is too unanswerable, and one way or another irrelevant, to be worth consideration. Von Braun later wrote an autobiography titled I AIM FOR THE STARS. The book was, as is often the case with autobiographies, selective and flexible in its use of the facts. It said nothing about Dora and made no mention of the fact that the author had been an SS major, but it would have been a little surprising if it had. A joker later acidly commented that the book should have been subtitled "But Hit London Instead".