Original subtitles

A devastated ruin in a pock-marked landscape

that turned the tide of the second world war.

Many believe this was a suicide mission.

An extraordinary tall building which became known as the tower of death.

Ever since man has been building things,

there's always with a contest to see who can build the highest.

A concrete structure stranded at sea that came to a gruesome end.

Well, it's creepy. There was really no escape.

This is a tomb.

And a heavy metal monster in a remote field in northern england.

It got an almost... primitive, animalistic quality,

like some kind of extinct dinosaur.

Once they were some of the most advanced structures and facilities

on the planet at the cutting edge of design and construction.

Today they stand abandoned, contaminated and sometimes deadly.

But who built them and how?

And why were they abandoned?

(Theme music)

On a headland in normandy in north-western France

at the top of 30m-high cliffs,

there's a strange and unexpected site.

Through the mist

a large concrete structure emerges, set on the point of the peninsula.

And on top of the building is a vast phallic-like structure

reaching up into the heavens and entirely dominating the region.

Beneath the concrete, corridors lead to empty rooms.

There's no feeling of humanity about them.

These could almost be chambers designed by machines for machines.

And the pock-marked fields that surround it

serve only to deepen its mystery.

Around it there are ominous looking craters in the ground

as far as the eye can see.

The landscape is almost lunar.

This is a place where something has gone dreadfully wrong.

But what has caused such devastation?

The answer lies in a single day that changed the course of history,

when the allies invaded France to liberate Europe

from the Nazi scourge.

D-Day. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history.

In all, 156,000 allied troops were involved, carrying out a plan

that had been agreed

at the top-secret Quebec conference between

the British, American and Canadian governments in August 1943.

At its head were two illustrious names.

Appointed as supreme commander was the us general Dwight d eisenhower.

The man chosen to command 21st army group, which comprised

all the land forces,

was the British general Bernard Montgomery.

Germany knew that it could not win a war on two fronts.

It could not face both the onslaught of the Soviet union

from the east and an attack in the west.

The Germans were faced with a strategic problem.

Coastal France had to be fortified at all costs.

So they began work on an extended defensive wall,

as tour guide Anthony Lewis explains.

The Atlantic wall, which was a system of defence measures,

which started in north Norway

and went along a coastline of France

for some 1670 miles all the way down to the Spanish coastline.

But how did the Germans decide where to concentrate those defences?

Where did they expect the allied invasion to be made?

German high command was split as to where the attack would come.

Hitler was personally convinced it would come across

the shortest route from Dover to calais,

but more experienced minds knew that actually there were better

attack sites that would also have the element of surprise.

The most important fortification along this critical

stretch of the normandy coast was here at pointe du hoc.

It gave an unobstructed view of the English channel

and a clear line of fire onto the beaches below.

Perched on top of a high cliff, it was the perfect position

for a coastal battering.

This was one of two German covered casements

which housed one of the six 155mm cannons,

and each one averaged some 660 tonnes of concrete,

and at the same time strengthening it

with some 50 tonnes of metal bars.

If incoming shells impacted on the building,

then only a small part of it would be destroyed.

These six guns were going to pose

a serious threat to the invasion plans.

They were sandwiched between Utah beach and Omaha beach,

two of the five beaches on which allied troops would land.

Utah beach was 8 miles to the west.

Omaha beach 5 miles to the east.

Now, these 155mm guns had a range of 12 miles.

So, imagine the carnage that they would have reaped on those beaches.

The allies had no choice but to take them out.

The task of destroying the guns fell to an elite combat unit,

the us army rangers.

The rangers were young,

immensely physically fit and very bright,

motivated people who could be given an immensely difficult task

and could be counted on to perform it against overwhelming odds.

The rangers' mission was very specifically to land,

scale the cliffs

and take out the German position on pointe du hoc.

But those cliffs were 30m high and almost vertical,

and the rangers would be facing over 200 German troops.

What were their chances of success?

Many believed this was a suicide mission.

Early on June 6, 1944, nearly 160,000 allied troops

set off from england towards Nazi-occupied France.

D-Day had begun.

This was an armada of 7,000 ships,

the largest amphibious invasion in history,

and it was coming their way.

As those ships started to get closer, the Germans were being

bombarded from the air, bombarded from the sea.

The flashes from all of those guns lit up the June morning.

The rangers' original plan

was to land at pointe du hoc, but there was a problem.

Unfortunately, because of the very high tide that day,

the very strong tide which was running from west to east,

from left to right,

it dragged the boats down beyond the pointe du hoc.

By the time rangers reached pointe du hoc, they were 40 minutes

behind schedule and the us bombardment

of the battery had stopped.

They've stopped bombarding pointe du hoc to let the Americans land

without being blown up,

but there's so much delay in landing

that the Germans are able to come out of hiding,

get out of their bunkers and man their defensive positions.

The rangers had to shoot ropes and rope ladders,

heavy and drenched with water, into the cliffs,

climb those ropes, themselves wearing sopping clothing.

They were under constant fire as they climbed the cliff.

It must have been a terrifying prospect.

The Germans were throwing down potato-masher grenades and those

are shock grenades. They're designed to deafen and stun people.

And the Americans were climbing up,

holding on with their fingertips and toes to tiny rock outcroppings.

When one ranger fell, another took his place.

When his rope was cut, he found another.

They even used daggers to claw their way up.

It's hard to envisage now.

The scene is so calm,

looking out over the gentle waters of the channel.

But then the scene would have been unimaginable,

climbing up a wet cliff face with all of the noise and the incredible

chaos of warfare. It was one of the most dangerous

and spectacular missions of world war ii.

When they reached the top, there was fierce, close-quarter fighting,

but the rangers were totally unprepared

for what they found when they finally made it into the bunkers.

Do they see 155mm French guns with German sights ready to shoot down?

No. They see trees, phone Poles painted black.

And they must instantly have been concerned that the entire mission,

all of the death and effort that they had been put in

to get on to pointe du hoc had all been for nothing.

It must have been a huge blow. Why were the guns not there?

The allies' aerial bombardment of the region

had been so intense in preparation for d-day

that the Germans had moved the guns out of harm's way.

In fact, the guns were hidden down a nearby dirt track.

The rangers hunted them down and destroyed them.

The mission didn't end cleanly.

Reinforcements were supposed to arrive, but they never came.

The rangers were left to defend the position for days.

Eventually the rangers were relieved,

but out of 225 men only 90 had survived.

This battle-scarred area has barely changed since the rangers

took pointe du hoc.

A statue of a dagger commemorates

the men who, against all odds,

clawed their way up the cliffs.

The site is deeply impressive for its vastness,

but underneath that there's a very simple story and it's a very common

story in war about one person facing another person

and the sheer courage and determination

to see the mission through.

In the north of england,

just outside the city of Leeds,

there is a completely unexpected site.

If you come on this thing

through the morning mist, it looks like some kind of a giant factory

sitting on these two platforms

with a huge crane out front.

All of a sudden there's metal everywhere, this huge,

gigantic bit of engineering.

What's it doing there?

And it's got an almost primitive,

animalistic quality, like some kind of extinct dinosaur.

Lying in a remote field is a tangled confusion

of heavy-duty metal, pullies and rusting wheels.

It's got this big, long arm

at the front of it for triangle bits of steel, all composed together.

And it's got these slightly strange-looking

features of either side and it sort of leaves you wondering, well,

what was the machine actually used for?

What's even stranger is that this machine was built in america

before it somehow ended up in the north of england.

But why was this strange-looking industrial object

sent from its original home in the usa to england?

And most importantly,

how is it connected to an environmental disaster here

that changed the northern landscape for ever?

The story begins in the dark days following the second world war.

In 1945 a labour government was returned

under the new prime minister, clement attlee.

It was elected on a platform of social reform,

but its plans were expensive and britain's treasury

was practically bankrupt.

It was called the age of austerity.

Wartime rationing continued and was even extended.

Matters weren't helped when one of the coldest winters on record

began in 1946.

Factories were closed,

the rail system was shut down and coal supplies ran low.

Many people suffered in the severe cold.

So, with britain struggling to recover after the war,

its great ally, the United States, came to its aid.

After world war ii, the economies of Europe were really in shambles

and the us did something really quite visionary.

We recognised that these countries had to get back

on their feet economically, so a lot of the investment

in helping build roads and Bridges and railroads came from the us,

and so did a lot of the equipment.

This leviathan was in integral part of the us rescue plan.

It became known as oddball.

The colossal machine arrived from the us in 1953.

At 1,200 tonnes, it was the second-largest machine

of its kind anywhere in the world.

It was intended to help to kickstart

one of britain's most vital industries.

Oddball is a piece of machinery that's used in mining,

and what it does is that it drags the layers of soil

off the top of coal reserves, so it exposes the seams of the coal.

When you have coal near the surface,

it's usually covered by some soil and some rock that's uneconomic.

It's stuff you don't want in your ore.

So, in order to get rid of that, you use this dragline system.

While it might look like quite a complex piece of machinery,

what it's doing is actually really simple,

'cause in simple terms its using a bucket to drag material up and then

using ropes and chains to then dump that material in a different place.

Roy Lee is oddball's only surviving driver.

Obviously you can see the size - quite a big bucket, really.

When you're stood inside, you can see how big it is.

Capable of holding

well 40, 50 tonnes of a burden.

While it might look cumbersome, oddball was a very effective

piece of machinery.

It only took 30 seconds to scoop up and dump

each bucket of soil and rock,

and it could move the equivalent of its own weight in just half an hour.

It's a very efficient way of mining, because you can drag away

the material, mine it and then dump it behind as you go along.

So you can fill up the gap

that you're leaving as you excavate the coal in your open-cast mine.

Such a huge machine required a deft pair of hands to operate it safely.

So, you slew it with the pedals on the floor, right and left.

You've got a drag lever for pulling the bucket in

and a hoist lever for lifting it up.

You're not using any brakes, whatever, just balancing the pallet

and keeping control of it as best as you can.

Oddball's bucket was a dangerous thing,

particularly when it was full.

I don't think anybody could have got my hands off of these levers

while I was in this seat.

You realise that you've got to respect the machine all the time.

The challenge with these massive cranes is, once they'd dug

all the coal that's in reach of their boom

or their bucket, then what?

You've gotta be able to move them every few hours or every few days

as things gotta move to a new location.

You can see it's got these - it looks like a couple of feet,

really.

And actually, these are the key to how it moves around.

It actually lifts the whole of the unit up on these flat feet

and then sort of shuffles back, a little bit like you were trying

to move yourself back on the ground if you were lying down.

Even though it moved only backwards 2m at a time

and at a speed of 0.3km per hour,

it was still difficult for the driver to see what was going on.

We did have a wing mirror position on here

so we could see the banksmen

and try to lean out as much as we could to get

the instructions from him, when it were safe to move, or to hold us up

if there were anything in the way.

It's totally like nothing you've seen before. It's like star wars

and thunderbirds meets coal mining, that's how I would describe it.

But it's a very, very elegant thing.

And it just lifts it up on these little legs and shuffles around.

Very, very ingenious way of being able to do open cast mining.

By 1988

oddball had been moved here to st Aden's in the north of england.

But it wasn't a lake then.

It was the biggest open-cast mine in Yorkshire,

which had produced 6 million tonnes of coal over a period of ten years.

But what catastrophic event

caused such an enormous site to become flooded?

And how did oddball manage to escape a watery grave?

The mine was very close, probably too close to a river, and so they

were digging this mine in a lowland area, a wet area, and then,

as they dig out the coal, of course they're making this massive pit.

They'd protected the riverbank with a wall of interlocking steel.

But it wasn't enough.

As they were mining, water started coming out of cracks in the side

of one of the coal seams, and a river they'd actually

diverted then started to also contribute to the water coming in.

It took just hours for the steel wall to collapse completely.

It were just like Niagara Falls in a way,

with water vapour and the amount of water coming in.

It were a complete disaster and everybody knew it. That were,

as far as we were concerned,

that looked like the end of our jobs.

More than 15 billion litres of water flooded the site.

Oddball survived,

but it was ten years before they were able to mine the area again.

By the time the flood had subsided

and the mine was actually ready to be excavated again,

technology had moved on pretty quickly, and so modern technology

basically replaced the dragline and the dragline became redundant.

On a misty morning in January 1999, oddball took its final walk.

Today it sits here on the site of the former st Aden's mine,

one of only a handful of machines of its kind ever built.

I'm a big fan of preserving the legacy of our industrial

technological history, especially these massive pieces of equipment,

because I think so many of us,

we don't think about all the hard work,

all the ingenuity, the technology it took to build this modern world.

Out at sea in south-east Asia, at the mouth of Manila bay

in the Philippines,

is an extraordinary structure in the shape of a warship.

This military behemoth is impressive,

immense and completely mind-blowing.

This huge concrete structure

is pierced with slits and openings that reveal incredibly thick walls.

And you can see it's all reinforced with steel bars.

Why is this ancient warship that looks like its carved from stone

sitting in the water at the entrance to Manila bay?

Being inside this huge structure only deepens the mystery.

Its dark interior is littered with crumbling concrete and rusted steel.

And its charred walls hint

that something catastrophic happened here.

You can see where the wall's beginning to buckle.

And then over here you can see

where the entire floor has just given way.

And the sea is just starting to pour in.

There's twisted metal and rubble everywhere. Whatever happened here,

you can't imagine that much could have survived.

What was the purpose of this concrete warship?

And what connection does it have to one of the grizzliest events

of the second world war?

To find out, we need to look to the imperial expansion

of the United States during the early 20th century.

In 1898 Spain and the us fought a brief war, which the us won.

Spain was forced to surrender

most of its empire, including the Philippines.

They became the Jewel in American's crown, and they had to be protected

at all costs.

And this concrete warship was the key to doing just that.

Albert labrador is a local historian.

When the Americans took over the Philippines in 1898,

they basically sailed right in and sank the Spanish fleet.

And so they realised that they needed a defence system to prevent

the same thing that they did to the Spanish.

A major part of the system was this construction,

which was placed on the tiny island of El fraile.

At the mouth of Manila bay are a cluster of islands,

some of them fairly large, like corregidor,

and some of them actually quite small,

like El fraile.

And these make, at the entrance to the bay, actually almost perfect

locations for this new art... New development of coast artillery.

The plan was to construct fortifications on each

of these five islands, and this one was the toughest.

The heavily fortified of El fraile, known as fort drum.

But would it work? They took an island

and they essentially just levelled the island down to the bedrock

and they built a massive concrete structure

with two, what looked like, essentially battleship turrets,

which are ship-killing guns.

You can see the huge, wire-wound 14-inch batteries.

You can imagine the diameter of the shell. Each shell weighed

more than a tonne and it could be lobbed five miles out.

So you can imagine the reach

and cover of these guns across the entire bay.

Fort drum was formidable.

It was packed with searchlights, it had anti-aircraft batteries

and a fire control tower.

And hidden beneath the concrete exterior were another three levels

which housed equipment and up to 240 troops.

We're looking right now at the third and fourth level.

This is where the living space is and the mess would be.

Beneath this would be a further level with generators and water.

These corridors were stocked with everything that would be needed

in the event of an attack.

But who did the us think might make the attack, and why is the fort

now in such terrible condition?

There was this perception in america

in the early 20th century that the Japanese were going to invade.

It was driven by a belief that the peoples of east Asia

were a threat to the western world.

It's inevitable that at some point they're gonna collide.

And collide they did, infamously on December 8, 1941, at Pearl harbor.

On the same day

that the Japanese attacked there, they also invaded the Philippines.

There were several reasons for the Japanese attack.

Japan was determined to build an empire in the pacific

and the Philippines were a vital gateway.

In effect, whoever controlled them controlled the entire pacific.

As well as providing a direct route to Australia and the oceana region,

the Philippines also connect the north and south pacific.

But there was another reason -

the islands were under the control of the Americans,

and the us was Japan's main enemy in the pacific.

The area saw some of the war's most bitter fighting.

When it began, all the fortifications

around Manila bay came under attack, including fort drum.

Somehow it had to be able to hold out against the might

of the Japanese Navy.

Fort drum begins to play a part at the very first day of the war.

And so, for the next five months until 5 may,

fort drum will be both a target of air and gun attacks

from the Japanese.

I'm sure, if you were inside the Garrison of fort drum,

the shelling and other bombardment would have been intense,

but perhaps you would have felt safe in the fact that the walls

were so thick and strong that you knew you weren't gonna die.

Despite being under siege, the troops on fort drum were still

able to inflict heavy casualties on the Japanese invasion fleet.

Nothing it did could destroy the fort's guns.

The turrets are made of armoured steel,

basically the same material that you would make battleships out of,

since they're battleship turrets.

And over here the roof is steel-reinforced concrete,

so nothing the Japanese threw at this was able to penetrate.

But on may 6, 1942, when the battle for the Philippines was lost,

the American troops inside fort drum were finally forced to surrender.

It was able to withstand

constant Japanese bombardment without a single major casualty.

There were no deaths. But this thing was so sturdy

that Japanese forces on either side, lobbying heavy artillery

on to it for months, did no real damage to it.

The island's fighting days, however, were far from over.

For the next three years, fort drum was under Japanese control.

That was until April 13, 1945,

when two us landing craft arrived to take it back.

American combat engineers very bravely approach this structure,

which is bristling with guns, and they pipe a mixture

of diesel fuel and gasoline into it.

And they then fire tracer rounds into the fort.

Down below were Japanese soldiers, who refused to surrender.

They must have known what was coming.

The explosion was so powerful that one of the hatches over here

that weighed about a tonne was thrown 300 feet in the air.

Deep within the fort, the charred walls

are a stark reminder of the horrific fate of the Japanese troops.

So, we've now entered the third level down.

When the Americans poured gasoline down the hatches,

on the surface most of it would have settled down here,

and that is the reason why most of the dead Japanese,

60 of the 68 bodies, were found charred in this area.

There was really no escape.

They couldn't have fought their way out, and so this is a tomb.

But it's creepy... Knowing that 60 people

burned to their deaths in here with no chance of getting out.

It was four days before the Americans could get in,

because the heat was unbearable.

Fort drum was abandoned.

Scarred by the horrors of war,

it still sits in these waters off the coast of the Philippines.

It has been stripped bare by looters, and few people today

even know of its existence - a sad end to an extraordinary piece

of military history.

Defence of fort drum, as impressive as it was,

has basically been forgotten in the annals of military history.

This is a story that really should be told.

In the heart of Russia lies yekaterinburg, the country's

fourth largest city, and at its centre is an astonishing site.

You see this very tall, grey, concrete structure

towering over the rest of the city,

and it's very, very distinct because of its immense height.

What strikes you about it, it's just impossibly thin and tall.

It's hard to believe that something that seems that delicate

could actually stand up and not be at risk of falling down.

At 220m tall, it dominates the skyline.

Giant towers appeal to the wonder in all of us.

Ever since man has been building things,

there's always been a contest to see who can build the highest.

It's hard to believe it didn't have some kind

of symbolic intent behind it. Now graffiti covers its walls,

the concrete is crumbling and a gaping black hole hints

that something dreadful once happened here.

And to the locals it has a dark reputation.

Interpreter: Most of the people in the city refer to the tower

as being a kind of abandoned ghost site.

But what happened here to make this tower so infamous?

And why is it known to the people who live here

as the tower of death?

To discover why, we need to go back to the cold war between

the west and what was then the Soviet union during the last century.

Going back to the early days of the Soviet union,

supremacy in science and technology was vitally important then.

They wanted to prove that their system

could produce better scientists, better engineering.

The cold war era saw huge investment by both

eastern and western governments in technology and science research.

While much of it was aimed at winning the space race

and developing nuclear weapons, many other areas such as ecology,

biomedicine,

agriculture and computer science also received huge state funding.

There was also intense competition between east and west

to prove which side could build the biggest and the best.

And that included the race to build the world's tallest structures.

By the early 1980s, the west was clearly winning,

but the Soviet union wanted to show it was still in the game,

and this was one of the ways it did it -

yekaterinburg's television tower.

Propaganda was essential to spreading the socialist message,

and television was its most important medium.

TV is an enormously effective way to communicate.

If you control the three or four TV channels that are available

in your country, you really dominate the conversation.

At 365m high, the television tower

would be the tallest in Europe, according to engineer danil krisky.

Interpreter: It was to consist of two main parts -

a 720 foot reinforced concrete column

and above that a 460 foot metal antenna.

The tower would house television studios,

have a revolving restaurant at the top

and it would be visible for miles.

However, the builders faced many challenges.

You would need to build some scaffolding tower

in the right shape.

You would have had to build what we call formwork,

which is bits of timber that are shaped,

and it's the mould within which

the concrete is poured.

So you need to be agile in thinking about the design of the tower

in different portions of it, because it was so very tall.

And for the men who helped to build the tower, there was always danger

and the potential for disaster.

They poured rings of concrete one on top of each other,

gradually working their way up.

Each tier would be about 2.5m high and they would have to, you know,

let one begin to cure and then build the next one on top of it

and gradually work their way up as they went, but you can imagine,

as they got high, the challenge of moving all that liquid concrete

up to this enormously tall structure must have been formidable.

Even a shortage of building materials and extreme cold weather

didn't stop construction.

It wasn't just a tower designed to broadcast propaganda,

but the tower itself was intended to be a form of propaganda,

an actual physical landmark that represented

the superiority of the Soviet system.

But when so much had been invested in the tower,

what could have happened to cause such devastation?

Was there a construction accident?

Or could the reasons be connected to the volatile political situation

in the Soviet union in the early 1990s?

Or could the tower have been the target of a terrorist attack?

The reason was more prosaic.

So, they worked on it for eight years.

They still only got about two-thirds of it done,

and the money ran out and the society was

no longer able to function in a way to build this kind of project.

A great symbol of Soviet prestige was now a stark reminder

of its failure.

But there is one more question to be answered.

Why was it known as the tower of death?

Shortly after construction

ground to a halt, the tower began to be used for very different purposes.

And they were ones that would have fatal consequences.

The tower became this magnet for young people to gather

and express themselves. People climbed it over and over again.

There was sort of a non-stop party up at the top.

And then some daredevils started climbing it blindfolded.

And of course, you know, there were accidents and one young man died.

Others climbed the tower

as a way to commit suicide in a very dramatic fashion.

The television tower had now become the tower of death.

Soon it was barricaded up

so that no-one would ever die here again.

On march 24 2018, the local authority decided

to demolish yekaterinburg's most striking landmark.

Now there is nothing left of the tower

that once dominated the city's skyline.

In its place they're building an ice rink.

I can understand why the tower was such a landmark

and sort of beloved by some people in the city.

On the other hand, I don't think anyone wants the symbol

of their city to be something that was a colossal failure,

a white elephant.

When it's not being used, when the fact that it was unfinished

and the fact that you can actually demolish that and then make way

for new cultural activities is a positive step forward,

and I think it is important to move on with the times

and provide the city with what it needs in the modern era.

Now they lie abandoned, but once they were

at the cutting edge of engineering.

There are echoes from history in these decaying structures.

They remind us of terror and war

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

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