Original subtitles

Tom voiceover: An underground compound

that symbolises the terrors of the cold war.

To even get an idea of the immensity of this place

you really have to get down there.

It will blow your mind.

A pioneering complex that played a central role

in a famous world war ii plot.

It's rare to be sad about a death averted,

but in this case, I think we can be.

A remote and desolate landscape with a mysterious history.

As they started digging way,

they found bodies that showed evidence

that they have been murdered.

And ruins on a beautiful Caribbean island

that speak of a turbulent past.

This is the centre of a struggle over something

worth a great deal.

Decaying relics ruins of lost worlds.

Forged by years of toil, but now haunted by the past.

Their amazing secrets are now waiting to be revealed.

(Theme music)

In a remote part of Washington state in the usa,

miles from the nearest town lies an extraordinary secret site.

The area now is desolate with barren land

and a junk yard all around

with rusting buses and old metal work.

There aren't a lot of people, there's not a lot going on.

So, if you wanted to hide something, it would be a good place to do it.

You have some bare farm land far from anything.

There are these large concrete pads,

there are these structures in the ground

that you can't quite place.

Something here is a bit different.

Large iron doorways leading down staircases.

Something else clearly once happened here.

The site gives very little indication

of what it is that's underground.

To find out, you have to investigate.

To do that you have to go very deep underground.

This is clearly highly engineered structure.

And the fact they put so much underground

indicated they must have had a really good reason

not to just build and build it on the surface.

It's completely dark underground

with rusted tunnels leading off into the darkness,

giving the impression that the site is far larger

than the human eye can see.

If you want to actually find out what's there,

you need somebody to get their scuba suit on and go on in.

With so much water in the tunnels,

it begs the question whether this was the cause

of the end of operations at this site.

Scuba diver Jim brockus has spent many years

exploring this intriguing place.

So, if you're looking for clues to what this site

and this area actually was,

you really don't have to look any further for the biggest clue

because I'm standing on it.

These are actually two very large doors.

They weigh 125 tonnes for each half.

So, you imagine the size of these doors

what it would take to lift them up.

This structure is something enormously engineering

that was behind all of it

and the capabilities to build something out

in this remote area of this magnitude.

It just makes your mind spin of what could this possibly be.

So, why put all this engineering in the middle of nowhere?

The answer lies

in the cold war politics of the 1950s

when the United States and the Soviet union

seemed to be on the brink of a nuclear war.

The threat of the cold war

was real and very frightening.

America had never been in this position before

with the spectre of annihilation seemingly round every corner.

The logic of nuclear weapons is absolutely terrifying.

There was this crazy logic

called mutually assured destruction, mad.

The only way to really be safe

was to convince your opponent that even if they hit you first,

you could still strike back and wipe them off the map.

The us needed a weapons program

that would act as a deterrent against Soviet aggression.

And with Soviet ground forces growing in numbers

along the border region of Western Europe

time was running out.

Once the Soviets acquire nuclear weapons,

deterrence for the west is absolutely central

because the western forces are vastly outnumbered.

Their answer was to build a weapon

that had the power to destroy an entire nation.

The titan missile.

These rockets was state-of-the-art technology.

It was the sort that NASA was using.

They had a range of 6,000 miles

and reach speeds of up to 25 times the speed of sound

by the time the engine is cut out.

But to be able to strike back,

you would first need to survive an initial attack.

That was the purpose of this hidden facility.

The Larson airbase, titan I, missile silo.

Well, right now, we are about 40 feet underground.

To even get an idea of the immensity of this place,

you really have to get down there and see the size

of those launch tubes

and the other supporting structures that are down there.

It will blow your mind.

Today, much of the facility lies under water.

When you get to the launcher,

you will be on the service elevator

and the service elevator is permanently stuck

at the top of end of the missile,

which is where it was frozen to place

from the water and lack of service.

And that's what you step off of when you begin to dive.

That's really where you see the enormity

of the launch tubes themselves.

You look overhead

and you see those launch doors are closed,

125 tonnes a piece.

The site has three of these silos.

The three silos were all linked by tunnels

containing living quarters, a medical centre,

and most crucially a command and control centre.

And these were all centred around the missiles

to maximise the speed

with which they could be got ready and fired.

So, we are in a control room,

this is definitely the heart of the facility.

The control systems in this room control the fuelling,

the liquid oxygen, the rocket propellant,

the whole launch sequence.

The raising of the antennas because those also had to be done,

and the initialisation of the countdown,

which we have to remember took 15 minutes

from the time that they hit the go button.

The men with the controls at their fingertips

had the power to unleash a nuclear holocaust.

One tiny mistake would have had catastrophic consequences.

There would always be probably six people in here.

They were very isolated, very lonely, I'm sure,

but they were probably a real close group

with the other four or six guys that were here.

I mean they were family,

but at the same time

they were gonna take it very serious.

But they knew if they were called into service,

it might be the last service they ever do.

The base was on high alert

24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

It was just one of hundreds of similar sites across the country.

Titan wasn't the only program the Americans were running,

simultaneously, they were also developing

the atlas program.

And this was an indication of just how desperate they were

to make sure they had the best technology

at any given moment.

But why go to all the effort to Bury these missiles

so far underground?

You put missiles deep in the ground

with massive armoured covers and concrete around them.

And unless you score a direct hit

on that complex,

that is going to survive.

And if it survives a nuclear strike,

then you can fire your retaliation.

That's what they were gambling on.

That enough missiles would survive an attack

that we could then open up the silos and launch back.

However, putting everything underground

caused some serious problems.

One key danger was that the ground water level

at the site was high

and the water had to be pumped continuously

to keep it out of the system.

Technologically, it's a simple problem to solve,

but looking around at the flooding today

its clear quite how catastrophic it could have been

if it had gone wrong.

Water was not the only danger the silos faced.

Storing hundreds of tonnes of highly flammable rocket fuel

was also fraught with risk.

Fuelling the missile is a very complex process

and it's very, very dangerous.

And if you make the slightest mistake,

it can be very, very fatal.

Fortunately for us all,

the missiles here were never launched.

In fact, it was only active for three years

before it was abandoned.

But why?

This period with the titan missiles

didn't last that long.

Ultimately, they designed better missiles,

more reliable that didn't require these dangerous liquid fuels.

So, the program was actually being phased out

by 1965.

Today, the site is abandoned and alone,

but its cold war history is a valuable reminder

of the reasons it was built.

Looking back it seems so insane.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars

on these missiles in holes in the ground.

The Soviets pretty much wrecked their economy

trying to keep up in building their own missiles,

and yet in a perverse way it worked in a sense

that we never had a major war either nuclear or non-nuclear

during that entire period of the cold war.

South of Germany's capital Berlin

is a former celebrity hangout

and the birth place of a deadly plan

that nearly changed the course of human history.

You come upon this site

and it is surrounded by farmlands, fields

with some broken tarmac around it.

It's got these big cavernous buildings.

The design is clearly meant to incorporate

all of the most modern materials

of mid-20th century technology.

This has to have some kind of important purpose.

Here we have a building

that has got very few internal supports,

very high roof, thin walls.

The building is designed so that you can build

very big things inside.

There are some things here that don't quite add up.

What explains the mysterious graffiti inside?

Inside there are defaced with all kinds of graffiti

in multiple languages, especially Russian.

And that, of course, begs the question

why are these buildings in the heart of Germany

filled with Russian graffiti?

The 1930s saw the dawn of a new era of human achievement.

It was a time when the skies were quite literally the limit.

The 1930s is really the golden age of flight.

At this time, pilots were celebrities,

they were adventurers of the sky.

You've got Charles Lindbergh making the transatlantic flight

in the spirit of st Louis in 1927,

then in the early 30s you've got the flights

of Amelia earhart and italo balbo.

And we are seeing European and American flyers

crossing the Atlantic,

expanding the boundaries of flight more and more and more.

The heart of all this was here at rangsdorf.

It was originally home to the buka aeroplane manufacturer,

who were renowned around the world

for building and testing sports planes.

Knut hentzschel is a historian of the site.

Rangsdorf was very popular among the pilots.

Many famous people trained at the flight school in rangsdorf.

Even the famous ocean pilot Charles Lindbergh visited.

So, this is a place that's not far from Berlin.

And in the early 20th century,

the most exciting thing you could do

was learn how to fly a plane.

And people with money would come from Berlin

and they would get their flying lessons here.

But the onset of the war in 1939 changed all that,

as events began to take a more sinister turn.

The Germans were banned by the treaty of versailles

from having any offensive weapons.

So, they weren't allowed to have heavy artillery,

they weren't allowed to have tanks,

they weren't allowed to have submarines,

they weren't allowed to have big battleships,

and they weren't allowed to have aircraft.

So, the German government encourages private individuals

to join flying clubs and learn how to fly.

And the German government encourages companies

to build private planes for people

who want to learn how to fly.

And they would have these sport airports like rangsdorf,

where flyers could practise flying

and say they were doing it for sport not for military use.

But meanwhile this was basically the seeds of the luftwaffe.

Rangsdorf was at the very heart of the subterfuge.

A visitor today would note that it looks very different

to a modern airport in one key respect.

Unlike today, when every airport

has one or more runways made of concrete,

planes started and landed on grass.

At that time the engines were quite weak,

so they always had to start against the wind.

The round shape of the airfield

allowed planes to take off in every direction

wherever the wind came from.

Once war broke out,

there was no longer any need for the cloak and dagger approach.

Along with most of industrial Germany,

rangsdorf was commandeered for the Nazi war effort.

Inside these hangers it was now military planes

that were being built and not civilian aircraft.

We are standing here

in front of the so-called special building.

This building was built especially for war production.

The aircraft parts

that the Germans built at the rangsdorf airfield

using foreign prisoners of war

were for some of the most important planes

in the German arsenal,

like the stuka dive bomber, like the focke-wulf fighter.

We are in the final assembly hall where planes were assembled.

The aircraft stood very close together, side by side.

The engines were installed, the wings were mounted and finally,

the aircraft were weighed.

Here you can see the remanence of the aircraft scale,

where the centre of gravity was measured.

After they were done with the measurements,

the big hall gates were pushed open

and the planes were driven out to the field.

The parts and planes made here were vital

for the German war machine.

So, it's ironic that a place so crucial to the rise of Hitler

was to play an important part in the famous plot to kill him.

The airport really cemented its place in history.

On July 20th 1944, when a high ranking officer

named claus Von stauffenberg

boarded an aircraft to fly

to Hitler's high command post for an important meeting.

He carried with him a briefcase with two bombs.

Von stauffenberg was one of the leading members

of a plot to kill Adolf Hitler

and remove the Nazi party from power.

The d-day landings had convinced the plotters that the war was lost

and that only the death of the fuhrer

followed by an immediate armistice could save Germany from total ruin.

As early as 1943

Von stauffenberg had written a list of demands

to which the allies would have to agree

for an armistice to happen.

It's hard to imagine them doing so,

but the plot gathered pace anyway,

driven on by Von stauffenberg.

When he arrived at the meeting,

he found an excuse to go off to the toilet.

He armed the bomb, he came back and put it in position.

When stauffenberg leaves Hitler's bunker in rastenburg,

hears the explosion,

assumes that Hitler is gonna be dead

'cause he placed his briefcase bomb

essentially Hitler's feet under the table.

Unfortunately, for Von stauffenberg the briefcase

and bomb were moved behind a heavy table leg,

which took most of the force of the blast.

Hitler was wounded but he survived.

The July plot had failed.

We still have the original flight order

documenting his return flight.

Stauffenberg landed in rangsdorf,

probably not knowing

that the assassination attempt had failed.

Eventually, stauffenberg and all the other plotters

are rounded up and brutally executed.

Some shot, some tortured, interrogated,

and then hung on meat hooks to die a slow deaths.

And Hitler watches the videos of those executions.

The war dragged on for a further bloody year and eventually,

rangsdorf would have new occupiers.

But who were they?

The place was vacated in late April 1945,

the next day the Soviet army took over this airfield

and also flew their attacks on Berlin.

The Soviets were great at taking over infrastructure

and putting it to new use.

So, they took over the manufacturing facilities

and used it to build engines, specifically jet engines.

They built helicopter pads

so they could use it as a base for helicopter operations.

And they occupied the airport for many years.

Following the reunification of Germany in 1990

the Soviets left rangsdorf for good and the airfield was left to decay.

Today, rangsdorf stands empty and forgotten,

but its important place in 20th century history is assured.

We look at a lot of Nazi sites

and we see a lot of darkness and evil and despair.

And it really means something

when we look at this airfield

to think about the small number of people

who had the moral courage

to put their lives on the line to stop the darkness.

Deep in a remote corner of Colorado,

usa is a remarkable landscape

that was for decades forgotten and unexplored.

The environments have really remarkable,

topographical feast.

You've got these plunging canyons and valleys.

You've got flat top hills everywhere.

It's a visual feast.

The high desert of western Colorado is a beautiful landscape.

It's a land of cliffs, narrow spaces, mysteries.

You could hide away in here for a long time and not be found.

And it seems someone wanted to do exactly that

because hidden away deep in the rocks

are some fascinating remains.

What's unique about this site is if you were walking along

and you didn't happen to glance up, you might miss it.

This is an area that holds a lot of history,

but it's not always visible on the surface.

You could walk up and down the valley

for many, many days and weeks and not even notice these villages.

And the remains here are not isolated or dotted around,

they are everywhere.

They go on and on and on.

It's not just a few small dwellings.

It's actually, you know, a sort of town,

almost like a city in the cliffs.

They're truly are inspiring, not only because of where they are,

that they are on rock face, that they are high up,

but the sheer size of them.

There are little cliff dwellings tucked in, almost everywhere.

Very hard to see in some cases.

Far off the ground, incredibly remote and inaccessible.

So, why are they here?

And from what dangers were those that built them hiding?

In the late 19th century

a group of men made an amazing discovery.

So, I have something pretty incredible to show you,

but first we have to get up to the top of the ladder.

Cristy brown is a guide at the site.

She has spent 15 years studying the ruins

and learning more about the people that built them.

So, we just climbed 32ft up this ladder,

but we are hundreds of feet above the canyon bottom

and we are about to go into balcony house.

The men who discovered the site

stumbled upon it by complete accident.

The first, you know, people that we really credit

with discovering these site were the weatherils.

They were a ranching family out of (inaudible).

And they started recognising, you know,

what they were seeing as dark shapes on the cliff side

was actually a cliff dwelling.

Can you imagine what it was like to scramble up here

and walk in to these ancient homes,

and realise you might be the first person

to set foot in here since the original inhabitants left?

In fact, the group had accidentally discovered

one of the most important ancient sites

in North America, mesa verde.

After its discovery, you can imagine as an archaeologist

this would be an absolute playground.

So, there was a lot to be uncovered.

And as they started digging away, they found more and more and more.

So, just like any true curiosity,

you know, the more we learn

and the more the earlier archaeologists learned about

what was going on here, the more questions they had.

The mysteries were many,

but there are clues in the buildings that help identify

who these people were

and when the buildings were constructed.

So, we look at the openings of these sites

and we think that they're windows because they're so small,

but in actuality they're doorways.

And that helps us understanding

how tall these people were in stature.

And we look back in history and we can start dating,

you know, when these people might have been around this area.

Once archaeologists really began

to investigate these cliff dwellings.

They realised this was an era of native American life

that we didn't know anything about.

And it pre-dated all of the tribes and peoples

that were in that region

when the first people of European descent

started to come in to that area.

The archaeologists discovered that this was home

to a civilisations called the ancestral puebloans.

The culture spanned the present day four corners of the usa.

There's still some debate about

when the ancestral puebloans emerged as a distinct culture,

but the latest research places it around

the 12th century bc.

They were, it seems remarkable people.

The ancestral puebloans had to have been very skilled

not only in terms of making baskets,

making pottery,

making things that would sort of help serve everyday life.

They engineered this space,

and it's something to really marvel at.

Numerous discoveries were made,

but the most fascinating was that the 800-year-old

cliff dwellings were only the beginning.

This was just a small piece of a bigger parts of a huge puzzle.

The archaeologists have unearthed some 4,700 sites

over tens of thousands of square miles

that these people have made a success

over many, many years living in this area.

Curiously, these precariously placed sites

were not their first homes.

So, although the cliff dwellings

were some of the first sites to be discovered,

the archaeologists realised that the history of these people

went back much, much further.

What we're seeing here is one of those dwellings

that they were living in before they were in the cliff dwellings.

This pueblo-style construction allowed them

to be closer to their crops

and at the same time allowed them

to take advantage of habitation for their expanding population.

The ancestral puebloans thrived on these mesa tops.

At its height there were perhaps 30,000 people living in the area.

They developed roads, built sun temples,

constructed reservoirs, and farmed the land.

The ancestral puebloan people were able to command

around 40,000 square miles of land.

This puts them on par with the sort of most important

ancient civilisations in the america,

and so they're incredibly significant.

They were able to establish an empire if you will.

But then something changed,

and it appears that they decided to give up

all they had on the mesa tops

and migrate from the flats to the cliff enclaves below.

One has to wonder why it is that a culture

that was doing so well on the mesa tops

moved into these cliff dwellings.

And then the mystery deepens whenever you realise

they were only here for a short period of time

and then they left.

Whatever drove these people from their open villages

and their mesa top farms into these remote, dangerous,

difficult cliff dwellings, it must have been a powerful force.

You have to wonder whether there were ecological concerns

or whether they were trying to find more secure dwellings.

They might have been at war with other indigenous people,

and so there are all sorts of things that are kind of hard to know.

There must have been something that was so terrifying

that they would take these risks of dragging their families,

their babies up these cliff faces

to live in these tiny cramped little rooms.

But whatever it was that they were fleeing

from made it worth it.

But time was running out,

what caused the civilisations final demise?

Because the civilisation is so undocumented

and there's no written language associated with it

in terms of archaeological finds,

there's no real way of fully understanding

the great extent of this civilisation.

What was its final demise?

We'll probably never know.

For decades, historians and archaeologists have searched

for the reasons behind the fall of this great ancient civilisation.

The site seems to have been populated for a mere 100 years

and a grim discovery suggests it may have had a violent end.

They found bodies that showed evidence

that they have been murdered.

And so that led people to start thinking well,

certainly something's happening in terms of a conflict.

Now, whether that's internal or external,

we can postulate.

Although, there's a lot of theories about

why these people left,

whether it was conflict with groups of people coming in,

whether it was just societal changes in general,

whether it was a drought or change in climate,

we really don't have a good answer as to why they left.

Whatever the reasons,

these haunting ruins still stand as an astonishing legacy

to the vanished people that built them.

When you look at these beautiful cliff dwellings,

you look at the effort that went into them,

you look at all the engineering work and brilliance

and then you realise they were only here for a heartbeat,

you know, maybe two generations.

So, it's a tragedy.

On the paradise island of st Lucia in the Caribbean,

there are ruins that echo a dark period

in the island's history.

It's a tropical paradise with these brilliant beaches

and you see these crumbling European buildings.

There's another structure here,

which looks like it dates to the late 19th century.

Clearly, this site was gonna see a lot of different uses.

It was obviously in use for a good long time

and was worth a great deal of investment,

and now it is absolutely going to pieces.

Why were these buildings constructed

on such a remote tropical island so long ago?

This place is clearly very, very important.

This is the centre of a struggle over something worth a great deal.

It's hard to believe that an area so idyllic

can be a site for so much violence and conflict.

What did st Lucia have to offer

that saw it become one of the most fought over islands in the world?

The Caribbean with it's fertile soil and warm climate

is the perfect place to grow crops like sugar,

which were in high demand in 18th century Europe.

Sugar islands in the Caribbean meant money

for the home country.

Every country in Europe wanted to have a sugar island or two.

But there was another important feature on the island,

it was Castries harbour.

A deep water harbour, that's the real value of the place.

It has tremendous strategic importance.

France and Great Britain,

the two super powers of the period

fought over the island time and again.

The conflict began with two failed British attempts

to colonise the island in the early 17th century.

Within a few years the French had arrived and purchased it

for the west India company.

The British, of course, were not best pleased

and planned to allay to invade the island.

The first of these attacks came in 1778,

and the scene was set for a series of prolonged

and very bitter battles.

These ruined fortifications bear mute witness to that struggle.

Dr Gregor Williams is an expert on the island defences.

We're walking towards the half moon battery,

which was built by the French

when they started serious fortifications in st Lucia.

And each of these would have been an eight-inch Cannon.

The French then with those cannons would be defending

the entrance to the harbour from the British ships

that would have wanted to go in.

In st Lucia they talk about seven times French,

seven times British,

meaning they passed from French to British control

seven times as these great powers fought for control of this island.

After years of bloodshed,

the fighting between the French and British

eventually came to an end and the military structures

that dotted the island were abandoned.

And that was the way they stayed

until the outbreak of world war ii in 1939.

When the war started,

these buildings had been unoccupied,

there are sitting here and doing nothing.

So, the British engaged these buildings

to house soldiers of the world war ii.

The Caribbean becomes a vital front during world war ii

because you think about the allies in Europe, the red army,

the us army, the British army,

they were all basically supplied with oil from the United States.

And so all this oil transited through the Gulf of Mexico,

through the Caribbean in tankers headed for Europe.

The German kriegsmarine spotted an opportunity to choke off

these essential supplies.

The Germans are trying to use very efficient weapons,

small warships and submarines

to sink as much britain bound,

commerce including American ships as they possibly can.

But the main threat to merchant shipping

came in the shape of the deadly German u-boat.

It's sort of cat and mouse stuff

as the allies are hunting these German u-boats,

the German u-boats are trying to dart in to inlets

and coves trying to resupply themselves

and avoid detection by the allied destroyers.

Every port in North America,

the Caribbean was filled with people

nervously scanning the sea for periscopes.

So, new fortifications were constructed

to play their part in the fight against the Nazi war machine.

We're on meadows battery.

First of all there was an old French fortification there,

then the British came in and then they established

this during the world war ii

when they were fighting against the Germans.

Another thing that these structures tell us is the immense scale

of the world war ii and how it really touched

every corner of the globe.

No place was spared from it.

On the 9th of march 1942,

a very young Michael chastanet saw the island fortifications

swing into action once more.

In the hours of 9:00 at midnight we heard this very loud explosion.

So, we were immediately awoken and we looked out at the veranda,

and we saw a number of people and when they were questioned,

they said that we were under attack.

There was a lot of pandemonium.

The Meadow battery spat out machine gun fire

into the dark waters but it was hopeless.

A u-boat had managed to get into the great

deep water harbour of Castries, the results were devastating.

The German u-boat u161 sneaks silently into the harbour

fires it's torpedoes and sinks two massive British freighters

that are anchored there.

An 8,000-tonne freighter,

a 5,000-tonne freighter both sink very quickly

with great loss of life.

The German u-boats actually came in from this end.

Yeah, they came up quite quickly, it's not a long harbour.

They knew we were ill prepared.

The st Lucia policemen,

the constable who is looking down at the harbour

from these old fortifications,

where these creaky nordenfelt machine gun

is able to bring the u-boat under fire

and able to force it back out of the harbour.

Fortunately, u-boat 161 was the last to invade the island.

After the war, the military structures

that had dominated Castries for so long were finally abandoned.

Today, they are still silent,

but they remind all who see them

of a peaceful beautiful island's turbulent past.

When you go to Castries today,

you see one of the propellers from one of these freighters

which is still displayed as a kind of memorial.

You're reminded this was a place that was brutally contested

by the great powers because of it's economic

and strategic importance.

The world war ii is not just a story of the big countries

and the big battles, here it is a story

that is as intimate as a small island's own harbour.

Now, they're abandoned crumbling ruins.

Many remind us of dark times,

but some were once beacons of hope and progress.

Lasting testimonies to human imagination,

enterprise, and spirit.

(Music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV