Original subtitles

Abandoned structures hold the secrets of America's past.

Lost in a sea of machinery,

an aircraft that helped America reach new heights.

It has such a unique, special role in history

that no other aircraft can lay claim to.

A sporting arena built in a county that didn't play by the rules.

We didn't have anything, you know, much around here.

In the early days, you had to do something to survive.

And defenses near the capital hide a story that was nearly lost forever.

It was involved in the protection of the United States Capitol.

But in a bigger sense, it was here to serve a mission to protect the world.

Scattered across the United States

are abandoned structures, forgotten ruins of the past,

monuments to a bygone era.

Each shines a light on the story of this land and its people.

These are the secrets of hidden America.

In the hot, dry lands near the border with Mexico is a sight to behold,

and it hides a creation that helped America reach for the stars.

We're on the edge of the city of Tucson, Arizona.

And right here is a pretty unbelievable scene.

We're looking into a vast spectacle

of decommissioned airplanes on a monumental scale.

This is the largest airplane boneyard on the whole planet.

And nearby is a site holding

the select few that really made a difference.

This is like a greatest hits of aviation history.

I mean, all the weird and most effective vessels kind of all in one place.

They won war, shattered records and broke barriers.

But out here is stored one of the most unique looking

and interesting aircraft you'll ever see.

It looks like a bloated,

monstrous whale and staring at it,

it biggest belief that this thing could ever course through the sky.

But looks can be deceiving.

This airplane is one of the most unsung

but important aircraft of the 20th century.

It made America's single greatest achievement of the 20th century possible.

The sheer size tells us that this was designed

to carry some truly heavy cargo.

But the real clue as to what this was for

lies in the little bumps to the edge of the fuselage.

In simple terms, they're just basically hinges.

The whole front of the aircraft would swing open

just like a regular front entrance door to your house.

And that enable the... the crews to load the cargoes.

Regular cargo planes are loaded from the rear.

This approach was a design headache.

However, it helps identify what the plane was for.

So the reason is because the huge diameter the components are putting in,

they weren't able to get them into existing cargo airplanes

through the traditional rear entry points.

What it carried in that big belly?

Well, you know, it had a huge impact on America.

And what they were trying to achieve with this plane was unchartered territory.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal

before this decade is out of landing a man

on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

When President Kennedy addressed Congress in 1961,

it was clear the Cold War had boiled over into space.

So, the space race was an expression

of rivalry between the United States,

between capitalism and Soviet societies under communism.

And this was fought out in many ways, the propaganda, sports,

but most strikingly, perhaps who could get into space first?

Who could put a man on the moon?

America, however, was on the back foot.

The Soviets were worryingly ahead.

They've put the first satellites into space.

They put the first man into space.

This was a huge challenge.

Frankly, when he said it,

the US was still pretty far from being able to achieve anything like that.

It was against this high stakes backdrop that the Super Guppy was born.

Everyone's heard of the B-52s, the Spitfires, the Stealth Bombers,

all the things that are kind of powerful and feared.

And this is like putting like a trailer truck in the sky to haul things,

which sounds less exciting,

but when you really dig into the story,

you realize that this changed history.

And here we are. This is what it's all about.

It's its unique insight as it is from the outside.

It's... it's enormous.

It's... it's a... it's a structure unlike any other aircraft

you're going to ever come inside of.

It wasn't designed to carry just any cargo.

Its mission was very specific.

The Super Guppy was purpose built to carry rocket modules

for the Apollo program to get us to the moon.

The deadline for reaching the moon was set, the end of the decade.

Time was the new enemy.

One of the biggest hurdles was logistics,

especially transporting the components

from the West Coast manufacturers to the East Coast,

where the launch sites were actually to be found.

They were far too big to transport by road and rail,

and if you went by ship, it would take 18 days.

Jack Conroy, a former air force pilot,

teamed up with businessman Lee Mansdorf.

Their vision was to build a plane large enough

to carry some of these components.

He realized that if you could transport them,

you could cut that waiting time

from about two weeks to 24 hours,

and that would give America the crucial upper hand.

So, of course, anything that's being done in a hurry for the first time,

it comes with risks and it comes with challenges.

We were modifying things that hadn't been designed to be modified,

and it could have ended very badly at any point in the program.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing.

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

You'll be sure we are behind and will be behind for some time in man flight,

but we do not intend to stay behind and in this decade

we shall make up and move ahead.

By the time Kennedy made that speech in 1962,

Conroy had been working on his prototype design

of an oversize cargo plane for around a year.

Conroy basically gambled it all, I mean,

remortgaging his house, taking out multiple loans.

And there were no guarantees from NASA

that even if this worked, they were going to use it.

Now, Conroy's first version,

known as the Pregnant Guppy, was ready to test.

September 19th, 1962, first test flight,

confidence was the opposite of high.

They called the police department, fire department,

told everyone to stand by.

But to everyone's surprise, it was a success.

And before he knew it, he was flying to NASA.

A year later,

the Pregnant Guppy flew the second stage of NASA's prototype rocket

to Cape Canaveral as part of the Apollo program.

However, to get a man on the moon

before the end of the decade, they needed to go bigger.

And that came with added risks.

The problem with the aerodynamics nearly ended it all.

It very nearly came crashing down in a ball of flame.

In 1965, against the tense backdrop of the Cold War,

construction of the Super Guppy was underway.

The Super Guppys had their airframe genesis

from these two airplanes behind us.

Basically, these are derivatives

of a civilian B-377 Stratocruiser, which was an airliner.

And it was really well built.

And it was just the right of rugged basis for the Guppy's creation.

Designed to transport the third stage of the Saturn V rockets.

It needed to be both longer and wider than the original Guppy.

Built from three B 377 and one military variant,

the fuselage of the original airliner was extended by 31 feet.

At the same time, the 25-foot diameter upper section was built above.

They framed up a construction gantry,

a grid and built the airframe from that waterline up

and a great big arc to the crown

and then skinned it and built it forward.

This was really a custom bespoke job.

It is absolutely not the normal way of building a plane.

Before the Super Guppy could be thrown

into service, though, it had to pass a series of tests.

Here, an obvious issue that also impacts

later versions reared its head.

The most notable feature of the Guppy

is its massive size, its huge diameter.

Well, that doesn't make it very aerodynamic.

So, you're really pushing a brick through the air, and that's a real challenge.

In flight, it made some terrifying noises.

There were real fears that it might just break up mid-flight.

One of the test engineers

reported that he had walked into the fuselage during the test flights

and he said it was like staring into a willow basket in a windstorm.

Nevertheless, with no failure so far,

on a clear September morning in 1965, she took to the sky once more.

And this time the fears turned into reality.

Now it's time for the final test flights

and you know, you get the easier ones out of the way first.

So this was one of the hardest ones,

a dive from 10,000 feet at high speed.

Suddenly there was this loud explosion.

Someone said it was like a bomb going off.

And then the whole plane started to shake violently.

As they passed the 275 miles per hour mark,

the pressure on the fuselage became too great and it suddenly imploded.

Above the cockpit, there was now a 23-foot wide hole.

The plane was now speeding towards the earth.

The crew had no option but to try to regain control.

They are wrestling to keep this thing in the air.

And, you know, this is them fighting for their lives.

Eventually the Guppy was steadied and the crew

were able to land it on a dry lake bed.

Disaster was averted, but it was close.

The Super Guppy went in for repairs.

Reinforcements were added.

And soon enough she repeated the test and passed with flying colors.

So once the Guppy had cleared its, uh,

flight trials and got its acceptance from the FAA,

it went into service immediately

in support of the Apollo mission program,

moving Saturn rocket components

across the country to Cape Canaveral.

On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 was launched.

Four days later, the astronauts entered lunar orbit.

In addition to flying the major rocket sections for...

for the Saturn rockets, this particular airplane also carried,

uh, the Eagle Moon Lander and the Columbia Command Module.

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

This was a huge propaganda coup.

It communicated to the world that America

was more resilient, more powerful,

more innovative than its Soviet rivals.

It's really safe to say that without this particular airplane,

the United States would not have achieved

its objective of putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s.

Four upgraded Super Guppys were later built,

but the original remained in service until 1991,

when it joined the Tucson Boneyard fleet.

Some planes are stored here temporarily.

Others are used for parts.

NASA felt this one deserved something special.

NASA was very conscious

of the historical significance of the Guppy at this point,

and they approached us here hoping that we could preserve it

in public display storage versus being in secure storage at a military facility.

And we were, you know, very eager to help them out with that.

Soon moved here to the Pima Air Space Museum

alongside other aircraft of historical significance,

ownership was handed over in 2015 and the Super Guppy is now a permanent fixture.

Every one of these airplanes is animated by someone's memory,

by someone's connection, by someone's personal involvement with it.

And the Guppy is unique amongst them

in its role and significance to history.

In the Tar Heel State is a town

where a farming community made their own luck.

Tar Heel is a derogatory term,

saying that people have dirty manual labor jobs,

but it's one that the people of North Carolina have owned for themselves.

As the saying goes, "If God isn't a Tar Heel,

why did he make the sky of Carolina blue?"

In the county of North Wilkesboro,

history pivots on a battered circuit of asphalt.

Clearly, the stands have weathered over the years,

but the concrete is still sound.

However, there are boxes that are falling over.

The track itself is littered with weeds

and grasses that are growing through the asphalt,

but it still isn't hard to imagine cars

whipping around this five-eighth of a mile track and making your head spin.

To many residents of Wilkes County, however, this track is home.

Just about most of the people, I mean,

are here involved in the Speedway in one way or the other.

And the downfall of this place would lead some to take drastic measures.

That's all you could do to survive.

You just couldn't get ahead without something else.

Dean Combs, his family moved to Wilkes County

in the 1940s in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

My mama, she was a green bean raiser

and an uncle, he'd grow the pigs.

And then my mama made better milk.

She made milk. She had three milk cows.

I don't think people got government help back in those days.

It was just manual work is basically what it was.

Manual work.

Farming communities like Wilkes County were slow to recover.

Some families supplemented their income by making and selling moonshine.

It was those that did it and those that lied about it.

Most people did it to feed families, you know,

this was a farming community and there wasn't a lot of money

to go around and moonshine was a way of life.

But then I really didn't know that much about his operation,

but the understanding that I got,

he mostly headed the stilts built

and had other people working for him,

and that's when they got their extra cash, they'd get extra cash,

they knew they can go out and sell a little moonshine or...

or a whiskey here or there, and they could...

they could get a little more money to build up.

And like in so many places across the US

where there's moonshine, there's stock car racing.

In 1946, they laid ground on a track

that would one day become legendary.

The North Wilkesboro Speedway.

The first Speedway was a dirt track with four banked turns,

and back then stock car racing was something else.

In the early 1940, stock car racing was a little haphazard.

You had different competitions all around the country.

You had different tracks.

There really was no regulation.

Stock car racing was still something that was done

on the weekends by local moonshiners and people

who were just enjoying modifying their cars

to make them as fast as possible.

But the new speedway would have

a profound impact on the future of the sport.

In 1947, its opening event was promoted by a businessman from Washington D.C.

a former racer.

A man called Bill France.

Bill France came along and realized the potential

of this hobby and he thought he could make it into a sport.

So he held a race at North Wilkesboro Stadium

to prove that this could not only be a viable sport,

but one that will bring out thousands of people.

The bleachers were standing room only.

The race was won by future legend Fonty Flock.

And it was a smashing success from the get go.

They expected 3000 attendees instead, they got 10,000.

Following the success of North Wilkesboro's first race,

Bill France established the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing.

Most of the NASCAR fans are blue-collar.

Hard working everyday people or farmers

or whatever, that's the one that filled that stands.

Any NASCAR event is going to bring a big spectacle.

It is the place where people go to connect

with their neighbors and their friends

and watch something that is important

to their culture, their heritage, and their history.

The start of the engines, you know, the engines,

you know, the old loud cars, you're hearing them

and the speed and the... and the competition that was there.

It was just... just so exciting.

At 23 years old, Dean Combs made his debut on the starting line.

NASCAR transformed how the North Wilkesboro Speedway operated.

Now tracks across the country all followed the same rules.

Play becomes sport when rules are established

to level the playing field for all competitors.

NASCAR established rules for stock cars and how far you could modify them

and establish the first rule book.

But for a lot of race car drivers, rules are just suggestions.

This was scales where they weighed the race car with.

In other words, they had a rule that you had to weigh no less than 3700 pounds.

Why? Why is because you can think about weight.

Weight is basically horsepower.

The louder you're running, the faster

the car is going to run versus the same horsepower.

But at the North Wilkesboro Speedway,

the tricks of the bootlegger were brought to the racetrack.

Stock car racing has its roots in prohibition

and people trying to escape police.

If horse racing is the sport of kings,

NASCAR is the sport of outlaws.

Everybody worked to try to get lighter.

So your race teams are doing everything

they can to modify their cars, to...

...bend the rules and sometimes break them just a little bit

to be able to give their car and their driver an advantage.

Everybody cheat.

But you didn't cheat till you got caught.

That's the way... that was our theory.

You don't cheat till you get caught.

If you don't cheat, you're not gonna win.

But even a strict rule book can't completely eliminate

the risks that go with stock car racing.

In 1957, at the Wilkes 160 Race,

the axle of one of the cars snapped.

A wheel came careening off, bounced over the fence and crashed into the audience,

killing one spectator.

In the 1950s, NASCAR turned

a farming community into a racing mecca.

But in 1957, a freak accident saw one fan killed.

Fortunately, such incidents are rare

and increasing regulation of the sport has made it safer.

The accident at North Wilkesboro

was an important prompter of those regulations.

But after the incident at Wilkes 160,

the Speedway went from strength to strength.

By the 1980s, the Speedway

was hosting events to sell-out crowds.

Wilkes County had never had it so good.

The economy that brought in,

the people that came in from towns,

you know, that was probably three or four

just little old backyard stores where people stop to buy their drinks,

buy this and buy that and really helped the economy for 'em.

And a lot of times they didn't have enough to sell 'em.

But by the middle of the 1990s,

the county's golden age had ended.

You've gotta bring the spectacle.

As NASCAR grew older tracks like North Wilkesboro

just couldn't keep up with the capacity

and the facilities of the newer tracks.

So unfortunately, by the 1990s, it wasn't used as much,

and even local teams were looking

for other race tracks to race their cars.

At the end of 1996, NASCAR stopped coming

to North Wilkesboro Speedway, taking with it an economy that fueled Wilkes County.

The North Wilkesboro Speedway

has been silent for over 25 years,

but some residents of Wilkes County

have returned to an old occupation and even gone legit.

I've always set out to make a mile strong whiskey

that everybody would like and that wouldn't burn you.

I've probably not changed the way I do it in the last 40 years,

but I started when I was about nine-years-old

and I'll be 76 next month.

So, do the math.

The moonshine culture is kind of having a revival,

especially in this part of the country,

and people have gone back to making it again.

Some people collect stamps, some people make moonshine.

Near the nation's capital is a complex designed

to defend America,

but a classified operation there had consequences on a global scale.

This is one of the most important places in American history.

It's the last turn in the Potomac River

before you reach the nation's capital.

You have thick walls, places where there would have been gun emplacements.

It's clear that the whole site was built with one purpose in mind.

War.

However, this structure is not alone.

There's not one fort here, but two.

Directly across the river is another fort.

The defenses tell a story stretching across two centuries.

But while designed for battle,

their greatest contribution came from something entirely different.

And it's not the exterior defenses that would matter.

It's what went on inside that was important.

Stationed here was a top secret organization

that the public wouldn't even find out about until this century.

Much of the classified story

was revealed after an investigation

began asking questions about a code name, P.O. Box 1142.

We were able to get a phone number for a gentleman

who worked here during World War II.

And when we called up, we mentioned the name P.O. Box 1142.

It resulted in some silence on the other end of the phone.

Finally, his question was, "How do you know about P.O. Box 1142?"

The US was able to obtain vital more information.

The work that was done here was hugely important to the allies victory.

Straddling the Potomac River.

The two forts and additional batteries here

were built with one goal in mind.

Vincent Santucci has worked with the Park Service for around two decades.

We are south of Washington, D.C.

and Washington, D.C. is in the distance.

And this fort was constructed specifically as a way

to protect the American capital.

Completed in 1824, the oldest remaining structure is Fort Washington,

but it's only here because an earlier fort

failed to protect the capital a decade before.

With tensions arising in Europe, America feared war,

so it began to fortify almost every key seaport

with new batteries and new defenses.

No seaport was of as big an importance as this one.

The concern would be that the British

had a tremendously well recognized and respected Navy,

and the Potomac would afford a route right up to the doorstep

of the American capital.

Completed in 1809, the original fort was far smaller

than the one standing today with tall earthen walls

and a stone tower to house cannons.

But during the war of 1812, the fort failed in its duty.

The view from this point on August 24th, 1814,

would be looking to the north and seeing the glow

of the fire in Washington, D.C.

Instead of sailing up the river to the capital,

the British had chosen to land further to the east.

They marched to the city and they set it on fire.

This was a huge blow to Americans strategically, but also to their morale.

Next, the British were heading here.

The fort was undermanned, underarmed.

They used the last of their remaining gunpowder

to blow up the fort, making it essentially unusable to the British.

The British occupation soon faltered,

but it was painfully clear that strong defenses

would be vital to safeguard America's future.

It was such an important strategic location

they decided to rebuild on the same site again.

Fort Washington was just the beginning.

The upgrades around this area continued over decades.

Not only were the defenses of Fort Washington rebuilt and strengthened,

but many years later they decided to build

a second fort directly across the river.

The new structures, however, never saw conflict.

But in the 20th century they'd be called upon

to defend America in an altogether different way.

The protection that was done here during World War II

was not just to protect the capital,

but it was a more global outreach to protect the world.

While both forts had been decommissioned by this time,

in 1942, they were brought back into the fold.

Fort Washington housed the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.

Fort Hunt was requisitioned for a clandestine operation.

The guns had long been removed,

but it became important for something else.

The top secret organization known only by

its mailing address, P.O. Box 1142.

In the early 2000s,

the National Park Service began to research the use of this site

during the Second World War.

There actually were quite a few buildings

throughout Fort Hunt Park that were part of the US Army's

installation here, but most of that is gone,

torn down directly after the war.

Few structures remained.

There was little surviving documentation.

The team needed to find a new source of information.

It wasn't until we had one of our park rangers out

providing an interpretive walk and talk for visitors,

and somebody in the audience raised their hand and said,

"Hey, I know somebody that used to work here.

Would you like to talk with him?"

What followed was a five year project

involving extensive interviews with around 75 veterans that worked here.

We began to uncover a much broader story

of activities that were going on here.

But the primary program has to do

with the military intelligence interrogation program.

Largely, it was trying to obtain information

and intelligence from German prisoners.

Standing near the nation's capital,

the top secret facility known as P.O. Box 1142

was bulldozed after the Second World War.

Using interviews and the few surviving photos

Vincent Santucci has formed an idea of what it might have looked like back then.

One of the most interesting aspects of Fort Hunt, uh,

which is no longer here any longer, are two prisoner compounds.

So the center of the compound would be the prisoner cells,

and it would be surrounded by a gated area

where they can get out and exercise outdoors.

These two large prisoner compounds would be completely fenced.

There would be guard towers.

There were more than 500 prisoner of war camps across the US.

But this site on the edge of the Potomac was something different.

Being close to Washington, D.C.

in the Pentagon was very handy.

The prisoners that were interrogated at P.O. Box 1142

were high ranking officers so that they had the propensity of...

of having more important intelligence

that could help the United States effort.

Intelligence gathering

from the various types of camps proved vital to the allied war effort.

Listening devices were installed,

undercover agents were planted.

And here it's possible that a key German site was first identified.

Headed by Wernher von Braun,

Peenemunde was a key part of the Nazis missile and rocket program

that ultimately brought devastation on London and beyond.

To extract all they could from the eavesdropping

and interrogations, the military had recruited some unlikely candidates.

Many were German born Jews.

They lived and grew up in Germany.

They were impacted by the Holocaust.

They fled Europe, came to the United States and said, "Give me a gun.

I wanna go back and fight the Nazis."

Where they ended up, however,

was a long way from the front line.

The interviews suggest a wealth of valuable intel

was discovered here.

There are no reports of violence or torture being used,

but occasionally the prisoners did require some persuasion.

Here, the older structures had a unique role to play.

With the most resistant German prisoner, uh,

when they finally realized that they weren't gonna get

any information from them, they would blindfold them, handcuff them,

they would take them and they would put them in the back of a truck.

After hours of driving around,

it was hoped they believed they had been transferred far away.

So the vehicle with the prisoner on would drive down

to one of these doors and they would back it in

and then bring the prisoner in and take them into a room

where they take the blindfold off and the handcuffs.

And at that point, out of the darkness,

walk somebody with a Russian uniform.

Even the most resistant pro-Nazi prisoners

usually cooperated better after thinking

that they were gonna go with the Russians.

Following Allied victory in Europe

as part of Operation Paperclip,

a number of leading Nazi scientists and engineers were brought to the US,

including Wernher von Braun.

Reports suggest he was held here.

And by now, the approach to internment had evolved somewhat.

There was one position, it's called a morale officer.

And the morale officer is the person

who actually provides rewards to them.

And so there's some great stories about taking people

that cooperated into D.C. and buying items to send back to their family.

Wernher von Braun went on to play a vital role in NASA's space program.

Alongside him, hundreds of other scientists and engineers

had come through here.

In total, almost three and a half thousand prisoners

were questioned at P.O. Box 1142.

But by the end of 1946, the camp had completed its work.

The structures were bulldozed and documents mentioning its name were burned.

Sworn to secrecy, the sacrifices of those who served at P.O. Box 1142

came close to being lost forever.

Given my background,

it wasn't that easy to be in the presence of a German officer

and quite frankly, it was unpleasant, to put it mildly.

I'd almost feel like vomiting for the very simple reason

I had to be nice to these guys.

But having gone unrecognized for decades,

the work of all those stationed here

was finally commemorated in 2007.

We dedicated this memorial to the veterans of P.O. Box 1142.

These men said that the way that they felt honored and recognized,

made up for the 65 years of being forgotten.