Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A ruined village

pitted and scarred by its wartime past.

You see a warzone kind of frozen in Amber.

A ghostly fleet of ships lost in the wilderness,

doomed to destruction.

There's something really quite spooky about it.

A bridge to nowhere,

hidden in the forest that came to a grisly end.

It has this other worldly quality to it,

and it doesn't really feel like it should be,

you know, in our world.

And strange metal structures concealed in dense woodland.

It's deep in the Maine wilderness

far from anything,

what is it and what is it doing here?

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 the arid plains of northern Spain,

265km from its capital, Madrid, lies a ghost town.

(Grim music)

Although the town has a strange beauty,

the ruins of hollowed-out buildings are everywhere,

and rubble is piled up in the empty streets.

(Birds chirp)

The story goes that if you listen hard enough,

you can hear voices from the past.

You see the ruins of a city

that clearly suffered some kind of disaster.

Was it an earthquake, you know?

Was it some kind of rushed evacuation?

What knocked down these buildings

and why were they never rebuilt?

Its name is belchite.

To add to the strangeness, there's another town

with the same name right next to it.

Why are there two belchites side by side?

And what happened to cause such devastation to one of them?

And then you look closer and you see something

odd about some of these ruins.

They're not just eroded by weather and gravity,

they're chipped away.

Look closer and you can see bullet holes,

damage from mortar fire.

This is a unique form of erosion.

This is the erosion of war.

Which army was responsible for destroying the town

and why was it never rebuilt?

(Dramatic music)

(Cannon fires)

For the reasons,

we need to look to the bloody civil war

that ripped Spain apart in the last century.

(Cannon fires)

In 1936,

Spain was a deeply divided country

that was politically torn between the extreme right and left.

The nationalist fascists and the anti-fascist Republicans.

Leading the nationalist side was general Francisco Franco,

a man who would eventually rule Spain

with an iron fist until his death in 1975.

Franco was supported by other fascist countries,

notably Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Nazi Germany.

The Republicans drew their support from the Soviet union

and from the famous international brigades,

the paramilitary units

who fought in support of the popular front government

of the second Spanish republic, during the civil war.

The Spanish civil war started as a conflict

within Spain itself, you had a very left-wing government

and then right-wing forces in the military,

basically staged a coup

against their own elected government.

By the following year,

these right-wing nationalist forces under general Franco

were controlling a large part of Spain.

In an attempt to slow down their advance,

in August 1937,

republican forces decided to attack zaragoza.

The city was the regional capital and the communication centre

for the important aragon front.

It isn't so strategically important,

but it was an important enough city

that it would have been a real blow to nationalist morale.

On route to zaragoza was belchite.

The original republican plan was to bypass the village

but that wasn't what happened.

Instead its forces attacked.

So, here, you have belchite with a few thousand,

not elite, Spanish nationalist troops,

but they are supplied well enough,

armed well enough that they turned the town into a small fortress.

Instead of going straight for zaragoza,

which they could have taken,

they get bogged down in this village of 3,800 people.

Who were the men who fought to take belchite?

And what was their connection to a fighting unit

from the United States?

When the world learned that Franco

and his fascist compatriots were trying to overthrow

the elected government of Spain,

there was really a lot of outrage

and a lot of people wanted to come and help

this beleaguered government.

And so, a lot of people from the west

came to volunteer and assist.

Around 3,000 of those volunteers were from the United States.

They formed the Abraham Lincoln battalion

and made their way to belchite.

By belchite, the Abraham Lincoln battalion

has been through a couple of major campaigns,

they are really veterans,

they're first rate troops at this time,

they weren't when they started.

But at this point, they have learned on the job,

and they're pretty effective soldiers.

It was these motivated and battle-hardened soldiers

that made the assault on belchite.

Juan Simon, a tour guide in the old town,

explains how the Americans and their republican allies

attacked the town.

(Cannon fires)

The civilians who were unable to escape

hid in their cellars as the battle raged above them.

The town was essentially under siege.

They were cut off from the outside food, water.

It was really quite a brutal way to take a city

without much concern for the lives or the welfare of the civilians

who were trapped inside.

But the nationalist forces had a strategic advantage.

From the top of this tower,

which is still disfigured by the shellfire,

they had a clear line of fire down onto the republican troops below.

Once the republican troops had taken out the machine-gun,

the Lincoln battalion was able to force its way

in through the church of st augustine.

These are...

Really the worse kinds of battles.

It's up close and it's personal.

The noise, the explosions...

You're going building to building,

and that means throwing hand grenades,

that means demolishing things,

that means setting fire to buildings

to actually literally burn your enemy out.

It's a high casualty form of warfare.

After two weeks of brutal and savage fighting,

the Americans and their allies finally took control of the town.

It was very bloody,

very devastating to the local population.

When Ernest Hemingway,

who was covering the Spanish civil war

for American newspapers, when he arrived in belchite,

he said the city was less a town than a bad smell.

Decomposing in the blistering summer sun,

bodies from both sides piled up in the streets.

In total, 3,000 people were killed.

Were the gains worth the awful bloodshed?

Abraham Lincoln battalion

talked of this as one of the toughest fights

in the war.

And they aren't sure

why their elite brigade

was diverted to a house-to-house battle.

But somehow, it happened.

It was really one of the big screw-ups of the war,

is the offensive,

they gained a little territory and literally accomplished

no strategic effect at all.

Six months later, the tables were turned,

when nationalist forces retook belchite,

but why was the town never rebuilt?

Franco didn't want belchite to be restored

because he knew it had propaganda value.

This was one of the great battles that the nationalists lost.

You would think that you would want to celebrate your victories, but no.

If you're a dictator and you can point to a horrific disaster

where many civilians lost their lives,

then you can stand up and say,

"if it weren't for me, this would keep happening."

Franco wouldn't let

the local population rebuild the city,

but eventually they decided

they just needed to build a new town next door.

Today, the town stands as a memorial to the thousands

who lost their lives here and as a stark reminder

of the tragedy and brutality of the civil war.

When you see belchite today,

you see a warzone kind of frozen in Amber.

You see the effects, you see the bullet holes,

you see where the mortar shells fell,

and you see the tragedy of war,

and how so often wars aren't just fought between armies,

they're often fought between armies with civilians caught in the middle,

and that's what happened here,

that's what makes it so heartbreaking.

On the western coast of Canada, in Powell river,

a small town 170km from Vancouver is an astonishing sight.

Ships stretch across the water.

One connected to the other, listing gently towards the shore.

It looks like a decaying ghost fleet

with their crews mysteriously missing.

There's something really quite spooky about it.

They're covered in barnacles,

and moss, and seaweed,

it's almost as if nature is claiming them back again.

Heavy rusting chains extend across their decks,

their crews have long since gone...

What secrets do the ships hold?

People think there's still treasure

somewhere deep inside,

and if they can just get in there and see what's there,

maybe they'll find something really interesting.

It's hard to tell how old the ships are

or where they're from...

But there's one thing they all have in common.

The really unusual thing about these boats is that,

unlike most, they're not made of steel,

these ones are made of concrete.

They've definitely inspired a sense of mystery growing up.

You start to wonder, like, "what are these things?

"Where did they come from?

What is their story?"

How are they connected

to one of the deadliest weapons ever made?

The answers are rooted in the desperate days

of the end of the world war I.

There had already been three years of trench warfare

on the western front,

which had resulted in a bloody stalemate.

The allied big push on the somme in 1916,

which was supposed to break the deadlock,

had lasted four months and gained practically nothing.

The allied corps received a boost in April 1917

when the United States declared war on Germany.

Within 15 months,

there were a million us troops in France.

Although these vast numbers were committed to the land war,

the us also urgently needed to expand its naval fleet.

But it was running out of raw materials.

It had to find a solution to the problem.

They come up with the idea "let's try concrete."

Well, problem with most concretes is they're too heavy.

Now, they had to develop, and they succeeded

in developing a new type of concrete that was light but still

very, very strong.

During world war I, they were a go-to option

because they didn't take up the important raw materials,

like steel that were needed for the war effort,

and they could be made cheaply

and much more functionally out of concrete,

and concrete, of course, does float.

The ships so impressed the us government

that they ordered 24 of them.

And they're completed just as the war ends,

but they're put into service

and they actually worked pretty well.

Once you've made a concrete ship,

it is actually quite a long-lasting thing.

Concrete, unlike steel, doesn't get metal fatigue,

doesn't wear out, it doesn't rust.

So, potentially,

you have a very easy-to-maintain kind of ship.

In fact, the ships were so effective

that when there was a shortage of steel

during the world war ii,

naval architects once again turned to concrete.

All of them had a very similar purpose,

which was mainly to act as freight ships

and for storage because they're very good at holding

large amounts of material and keeping it dry.

But what are ten cargo ships from two world wars

doing here in British Colombia.

This is the ghostly fleet that the locals call the hulks.

Around the beginning of the last century,

paper mills sprung up all along the coast,

including here at Powell river.

The logs used to make the paper

were transported to the mill by water

and then unloaded into a log pond.

It had to be big enough to store the logs

and be protected from the elements to keep it safe for the workers.

The only problem here is it's exposed to severe winds

from both the north and the south,

and they needed to find a way to shelter the log ponds.

So, the mill owners decided to build a breakwater,

a barrier built into the sea to protect the log pond

from the force of the waves,

as mechanical engineer Matthew denniston explains.

So, typically a breakwater structure

would be made of large rocks, dumped in big piles

and they would build up from the sea floor

to make that protection,

where in our case,

it's far too deep to make this type of breakwater.

So, I think the light bulb just came on,

"hey, why not use ships instead?"

Steel being in salt water in the ocean

deteriorates very quickly if it's not protected.

And we found that we would have a steel ship

that would come in and it would maybe last 20 years

before it had to be decommissioned,

where these concrete ships were already 40 years old,

coming into replace them,

and had still lasted another 50 plus years.

In 1948, the first concrete ships arrived in Powell river.

But how effective would they be as a breakwater?

The ships were anchored down and chained together to form a,

sort of, artificial reef.

To help them withstand the elements,

they were weighed down with gravel and they list to one side,

so their decks are angled towards the shore.

They're actually much heavier than ordinary ships,

so much more effective in keeping the water

and the weather at bay.

One of the ships is the 'quartz', and it has a hidden past.

So, one of the most unique things about this ship

is that it was actually a part of some of the first nuclear testing

that the us military did on bikini atoll,

and this ship specifically was part of the nuclear test baker.

(Loud blast)

The test bomb propelled

a dome of water 1.5km wide into the sky.

It created a wall of radioactive mist

that contaminated many of the surrounding ships,

including the 'quartz'.

They were simply there to see

the effect of the nuclear blast on ships.

So, you know, they had ships of every type and description

at bikini atoll and they wanted to get radioactivity readings,

they also wanted to see the blast effect

of the nuclear weapons would have at different ranges.

Ten years later and radiation-free,

the 'quartz' arrived at Powell river to join the other concrete ships.

The service life was supposed to only be 15 years,

when in reality, here we are 75 years later,

and they are still holding strong.

So, why are there now plans to sink some of them?

(Instrumental music)

Today,

the paper mill no longer needs such a large log pond.

The plans now are to sink some or most of the ships

and allow them to become a natural reef,

bringing to life again

the underwater maritime colony and community.

The ships are an extraordinary story of creation and technology.

They were born out of desperation,

out of a need to find a way to build ships with new materials,

and yet when that need was gone,

they found another use here acting as a breakwater,

and when even that role is completing,

they're now gonna find another one down on the seabed as reefs.

They really are a testimony to the creativity and creation

of what can be done with new materials.

Hidden deep within woodland in south-east Germany,

600km from its capital, Berlin, is a strange sight.

(Eerie music)

A cold and bleak landscape disfigured by charred rock.

There's a real air of foreboding.

You can tell that something bad happened.

It looks entirely natural

until you see metal spikes puncturing the stone.

You're walking along, and suddenly the floor turns to concrete,

and then you see an embedded footprint there,

and you keep walking,

and then further along, there's another footprint.

And immediately, you think, "what went on here?

"Who made these footprints?

And what happened to them?"

The mystery deepens the further you go.

Rusted corroded steel and badly weathered concrete

is twisted violently out of any recognisable shape.

Whatever happened here would take one heck of a force

to cause this much damage.

And there's more.

Concealed beneath the forest floor is a mysterious tunnel...

Nearby, just visible through the trees

are strange depressions.

And what's most sinister is an arch...

A bridge to nowhere.

How are they all connected?

You've got what looks like a giant rib

of some massive dinosaur sticking out of the earth.

There is something really fantastical about it.

It has this other worldly quality to it,

and it doesn't really feel like it should be,

you know, in our world.

Who constructed this arch?

And why did its builders die in their thousands?

And what cataclysmic event caused its destruction?

(Dramatic music)

In the final years of the world war ii,

the allied bombing campaign against Germany reached its peak.

The Germans have lost control, not only the airspace over France,

the allied landing areas,

but they have lost control of the airspace

over their own country.

(Loud blast)

Despite the millions of tonnes of bombs

dropped on German cities such as Hamburg and Cologne,

there had not been a complete collapse in civilian morale,

which had been part of the aim,

nor had Germany's industrial capacity and production

been severely reduced.

That changed towards the end of the war

when targeted attacks on German infrastructure

and her industrial heartlands began to take effect.

Allied bombs were destroying German factories,

severely affecting her ability to continue fighting.

(Loud blasts)

So, the Germans had to find some way

to defend themselves against the allied onslaught.

(Loud blasts)

So, German high command

decided to move production of certain armaments into caves.

The problem the Germans have

is that it's really, really hard

to make caves in rock.

Their clever solution is

they're gonna make giant artificial caverns

where there was no cave before.

And this is the result, weingut eins,

a vast concrete structure that the Germans hoped

would allow them to keep their war machine running.

But what were they going to build here?

And why was it hidden

deep within a forest in south-east Germany?

Local historian, dr erhard bosch,

explains that the site had to match a very specific set of requirements.

In order to be able to build concrete buildings,

you need gravel, you need water, you need cement,

and you need steel, and all that was here.

It was weingut's sheer size that sucked in resources.

This bunker presented all sorts of engineering challenges.

It would consist of 12 separate arches

and be a quarter of a mile long.

Each arch would be over a hundred feet wide.

It's a major construction project.

A workforce of over 10,000 was gathered together,

and construction of the first arch began in July 1944.

Building arches is a challenge.

They're very strong shapes when they're actually finished.

But while you're constructing them,

you have to keep them supported in order to keep it stable.

Usually, a timber or steel frame was used,

but dwindling resources

meant that the builders had to use another material.

You need as much gravel as possible

because the construction method you're gonna use

requires mountains of gravel.

They could pile up this gravel into an immense shape,

this arch shape, and then create their concrete arch on top of that.

But how would these vast mounds of gravel

be moved from one arch to another?

A few hundred kilometres away, there's a clue.

This was an underground tunnel with mine carts on a rail track.

Once each arch was completed,

the gravel that was beneath it

was dumped down through hatches into these waiting carts,

which would then take the gravel along to the next construction site.

The pressure was on to finish the bunker,

to begin production of a plane

the Germans hoped would change the course of the war.

It was the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft,

the messerschmitt me 262.

Overhead was a roof that was virtually bombproof.

We are here under the 7th archway,

the foundations to the left and right go 17m deep.

In the lean concrete layer, you can see it up here,

it has broken away in some places.

The first reinforcing rods can be seen.

They reinforced 5m of concrete.

When complete,

the factory would have seen production on a massive scale.

They wanted to dig further down from here

and would have had eight factory floors.

When you consider the overall area that they would have had,

the manufacturing area,

that's an area of 114,000 square metres.

That is approximately 14 football pitches.

Who built these enormous arches?

And what is their connection to these deep caverns,

hollowed out of the ground, just over 3km away?

These craters are all over this particular area,

and it's hard to tell exactly what happened here

to create these holes just by looking at them.

But their size and their depth are ominous.

What were these craters?

And how were they linked to thousands of deaths

deep in the German woodland?

It was because slave labourers from the death camps

were forced to build weingut.

Their huts once stood where the craters now are.

They had no heat, they had no toilet facilities,

they had no washing facilities, they didn't even have fresh water.

They didn't have enough to eat,

so you can imagine that they became emaciated very quickly.

If they did try to escape, they were shot if they were caught.

Four thousand of the weingut slave labourers died here.

By the end of April 1945,

only seven arches had been completed.

But the allies were already sweeping through Germany.

The area was liberated and placed under American control

the following month.

So, why is there now only one arch left standing?

The clue is in the twisted steel and concrete.

If there were another world war,

the Americans thought they might adopt a bunker like this

for their own military installations back in the us.

But first, they wanted to see just how strong it was.

So, they decided to blow it up.

The us blew the arches up one by one

until they had discovered how much explosive power

each structure could withstand.

So, all of the cold war era nuclear bunkers

are based in their structure

on tests that were done in 1947

here at weingut eins.

After it was destroyed, weingut was abandoned.

When I look at the ruins of weingut eins,

that terrible slave labour project

that was designed to keep the Nazi war machine going,

I look at its failure.

And I know that when power

is untrammelled by justice,

it can only go so far before it destroys itself.

In a remote forest in Maine

at the north-eastern tip of the United States

is something you don't expect to stumble across.

(Eerie music)

You're in this part of Maine that is overgrown

with trees and low forest and it's very scenic.

And then in the middle of it,

you can see the remnants of old cables and machinery.

There are two identical structures made of metal,

completely rusted out with what appears to be a pipe,

coming out of the back of it.

You can see a large old engine...

Clearly something technical and industrial

used to dominate this space.

It looks like some mad experiment gone wrong...

An eccentric scientist who decided to create something fantastical

in the middle of nowhere.

But what is it?

And how is it related to these two dilapidated locomotives?

You come across what looks like a pulley system

and these rusted and corroded pieces of metal,

which looks like broken pieces of trash.

(Birds chirp)

The entire woodland is full of mystery.

Normally, tracks connect something...

But these just end abruptly...

But are they somehow joined and, if so, how?

And then you have the fact that it's so remote,

it's deep in the Maine wilderness, far from anything,

so the question is what is it and what is it doing here?

To find out,

we need to look to an industry that helped define Maine

and make america great during the 19th and early 20th centuries...

The logging industry.

Northern Maine has 18 million acres of forest land,

and at the turn of the last century,

it was the hub of the logging industry,

at the time when timber was king.

The usa was growing fast and so was demand for wood,

but it was not only domestic demands that were driving the industry.

During the late 19th century,

the industrial revolution was in full swing

in countries such as Great Britain.

It too had an insatiable appetite for lumber.

In fact, it is estimated that at one point,

Maine had the largest shipping port for lumber in the world.

And so, forests were being felled at breakneck speed

by lumber barons eager to profit from these huge new markets.

Matthew laroche, superintendent of the allagash wilderness waterway,

explains how it worked.

The loggers would come up the river systems cutting pine,

and as the pine got depleted,

they would just keep moving up the rivers.

You know, cutting down the tree is the easy part.

The hard part is getting that giant log out of wherever it fell

and into some kind of transportation system

that can get it to the sawmill or the paper mill.

The nearest sawmill was in bangor, 145 miles away.

The only problem was they needed to find a way to transport

all these logs between one lake and another

across a really narrow strip of land.

This isolated stretch of land

lay between eagle and Chamberlain lakes.

And it was only about 3,000 feet, just a little more than half a mile,

but if you were gonna drag all those logs by oxen,

it might as well have been 50 miles.

How would they overcome the problem of hauling

thousands of logs across this narrow strip of land?

A way had to be found to bridge the gap.

And this is what they came up with...

An ingenious system of rails, cable, and iron,

powered by the technology of the day.

It was called eagle lake tramway.

Essentially, the tramway was a small railway

that was pulled by a cable loop and powered by steam.

But this narrow strip of land was in the middle of nowhere.

How would they be able to transport the parts?

So, all the material came by rail to Greenville,

up moosehead lake with steam boats,

and then landed at north east carry,

and from there, it was brought in with horses on sleds

in the middle of the wintertime.

We're talking about a 35-mile trip with sleds and horses

to get this material in here.

It took 12 arduous months to build the tramway.

But would it actually work?

When they originally put this together,

they had to bolt all of these dollies to the cable,

and it turned out that

they tightened the bolts down all the way

but it wasn't quite tight enough,

so everything slipped and nothing worked.

And they then had to take thousands of bolts back out

and it turned out the threads didn't go far enough down the bolt.

So, they had to get out a filing system

and extend the threads a little bit one at a time

and then put it all back together.

(Birds chirp)

Once it was finished,

the workers watched nervously as the trucks crawled along.

And they noticed it wasn't going as fast as they had expected.

That was because there's a bump along the path.

And once the logs got over the bump, the weight of the logs

helped it pick up steam the rest of the way.

Would the tramway system be able to move

thousands of logs over land to mills in bangor and beyond?

The tramway ran on these rails right here.

There was a top layer and a bottom layer.

And these trucks, and there's one right there,

the logs went onto those little pointed things.

The logs would be pulled on the eagle lake end,

and they would travel on this top layer of rails

all the way to Chamberlain lake,

and then roll off the end of the tramway,

and dump into Chamberlain lake,

and then from there, it was log drive down to bangor.

The logs moved at 5km an hour, powered entirely by steam.

These are the boilers which created steam,

ran through these pipes up here, over to this engine,

that would drive this belt.

And the belt drove the machinery over here.

These reduction gears

and the big final drive over there with the u-shape cut outs in it

was where the trucks fit into.

The cable fit right into there

and it would drive the logs over there

and dropped them right into Chamberlain lake over there.

It was quite an engineering model for the time.

The tramway operated from 1903 to 1909,

carrying in total 100 million board feet of timber.

But why did the lumber barons abandon such an effective system

after only six years?

Eventually, a small railroad was built

that was able to move the logs in an even more convenient fashion.

And in fact, this was the way that logging was being done

across new england at that time.

There were dozens of small little rail lines being built

into all kinds of wilderness areas

for the sole purpose of extracting the timber.

They did not remove the tramway

from this location when they stopped using it

primarily because it was such a remote area,

they couldn't really take it out.

I suppose they didn't really know if they would use it again,

but they never did.

Once they had shut it down, it never got used again.

(Birds chirp)

Now, the tramway is rusting away

and gradually being reclaimed by nature.

When I come here and I see people looking at them

and they are asking a bunch of questions,

"how did they get it here, "what did it do,

"when did it work, how much did it move",

it kind of renews your enthusiasm for the site.

When I see this kind of thing,

it just makes me think about the enormous effort,

the sweat, the ingenuity that went into these kinds of projects

and into building the United States.

(Instrumental music)

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.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV