Original subtitles

Narrator: A peculiar mix of structures left derelict

in a parisian park.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it,

it's all just smashed together in the same spot

and that's part of the wonder and mystery of this place.

A watery graveyard forgotten by time,

the silent protector of an English village.

This isn't just one old rowing boat tossed aside,

these things dominate the landscape.

A network of relics forged through deception on a grand scale...

Audacious doesn't cover it,

you had a team of 1,000 overseers

watching to make sure they adhered to the rules

and if they were caught breaking those rules,

it could have started another war.

..And a site on america's east coast harbouring vast secrets.

Inside you're presented with this large cavernous void

and then as you venture deeper,

you see these rusting elements that suggest that something hefty

was being hoisted or lifted up and down here.

Decaying relics, ruins of lost worlds.

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

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Paris, France.

The city of light.

Gay Paris it's a proper Metropolis,

a real melting pot for cultures around the world.

Liberty, equality and brotherhood

it's really a particular vision of human democracy,

of equality that really resonates in France.

But on the outskirts of the city

are a series of crumbling structures that don't seem to belong.

You have this park that combines some features

of seemingly far away cultures.

There are facets of architecture

that look like they've been airlifted from around the world.

Vietnam, Tonga, China,

there's a bridge there that looks vaguely Japanese,

appropriately surrounded by bamboo.

Alone each of these things are really beautiful

but they're smashed together rather curiously.

The items in this collection are relics of a past that parisians

would rather forget.

You wonder when they're bought together what they mean,

what they were used for

and why they were placed in juxtaposition.

The story begins at the dawn of the 20th century

with the opening of a garden.

In 1899, the French government decided to open a garden

with a greenhouse to grow exotic plants.

Catherine hodeir has studied the garden's dark secrets.

In the greenhouse you had plants such like cocoa beans,

or coffee beans or vanilla beans.

But this wasn't just an ordinary greenhouse

growing garden tomatoes,

this was an institution of scientific study

and where were all these plants coming from?

The French colonies.

In the 19th century,

France had an empire that stretched across 8% of the world's surface.

Alongside england and Germany,

France has colonies that really are all over the globe.

You have French colonies in the Caribbean,

you have a French colony in South America,

you have them in Asia and in Africa,

north Africa and west Africa.

The 19th and 20th centuries were a time of rapid discovery

and the major global powers competed for scientific superiority.

So the work that these French experts were doing here

has real potential

and any new commodities that they discover

can then be processed and redistributed across the empire.

But all that doesn't explain these buildings.

For seven years French botanists studied the samples gathered

from the colonies.

But by 1906, the garden was broke.

This garden needed some cash.

The ordinary French population just didn't seem that interested

in the work that was being done here,

even though it was very, very important work.

They needed to get the French people excited

about the colonies and their products again.

To raise capital for the garden,

they decided to stage a grand exhibition

and at it's centre were new buildings inspired by the colonies.

Imagine a turn of the century Disneyland,

so you were going to see the orient right next to the African jungle.

And it was a huge hit, thousands of visitors came

and they even got the president of the French republic

to come and check it out.

The samples of architecture

in this garden were French Guyana from indo-China, from Tunisia,

Morocco, Madagascar.

The noise would have been incredible

from music to squawking animals and the hub bub of people

and there would have been a cocktail of rich odours

from spices to camel excrement.

This was quite an exhibition,

the rarest treasures from the colonies were on display.

There was nothing you couldn't see here including human beings.

Mongolians, Chinese, africans,

they would have been presented in what would have been considered

representative indigenous wear,

clothing that may or may not have had ceremonial purposes

but they would be presented sort of as exotics in dress.

And in speech and in behaviour.

It was meant to be a cultural exchange

but the exchange was in one direction.

With people who were on display

being gawped at, almost like being in a zoo.

The owners of the garden hoped to make big money

from their exhibits.

History had taught them

that the human zoo could draw a crowd.

These type of colonial exhibitions or human zoos if you will,

were not limited to, to France,

you had similar examples in terms of england,

in terms of the United States.

London, Berlin even New York, put human beings on display.

High minded scientists would come

and perform a systematic study of non Caucasian people

to try to classify the differences

but the conclusions they came to,

today they would be considered extremely racist.

To raise enough capital for the garden,

they needed the most eye catching displays

from France's most distant colonies.

There were adventurers who would travel

to the four corners of the French empire

and they would offer to pay these people handsomely

if they would come to France

and talk to French people about their culture.

The recruiters offered things like a percentage of ticket sales

but that often never materialised.

And the vast majority of these people

didn't speak any French,

so they were completely at the whim of the adventurers

that had bought them there.

The colonial exhibit of 1907 raised thousands of dollars

for the garden, ensuring it's future.

But a global crisis less than ten years later

would see the garden put to a different purpose.

So during world war I,

the garden was converted in to a war hospital

because the people from the French colonies

were bought here to fight for France

on the French western front.

France's colonial subjects

were recruited by the hundreds of thousands

to fight on the side of their own colonisers.

Buildings that used to be exhibition spaces or ticket halls

were now things like surgeries

for France's foreign and native soldiers.

They even built Paris' first mosque for Muslim colonial troops.

And you'd think that this would be some type of watershed moment,

now that these people had fought for France,

that they'd get recognition, if not as equals

then at least more respect

than being put on display but you'd be wrong.

Over a decade after French and colonial soldiers fought

as brothers in arms,

France threw their biggest colonial exhibition, ever.

For this 1931 exhibition

there are some 32 million tickets sold over six months.

There was even an entire nomadic tribe of people from Senegal.

You have to wonder how they were convinced

to participate in such.

This would be the last time

this kind of display was seen in France,

the colonial exhibitions soon went out of fashion.

The park was again closed to the public

and the buildings left to rot in this quiet corner of Paris.

Today, historians like Catherine

dedicate their work to recording the history of the colonial era.

So, today, the garden is partly abandoned.

It became very important in 2005

to reopen the garden to the public.

Although these exhibitions end,

the legacies of colonialism has a very, very long after life

but that idea some how that allure,

that exoticism still persists

and we should blame at least part of that

on the history of putting people on display.

Standing in the waters off the New Jersey coastline,

is Sandy hook,

a sandbar littered with the remnants of war.

Looking around Sandy hook today,

it's like a kind of a yard sale of military technology.

Some look like very typical cold war era installations,

others look as though they date back as far as the civil war.

The assortment of structures and weapons on show here,

makes you wonder is this your typical military base

or something entirely different?

The sites position seems to offer the first clue as to it's purpose.

This long narrow peninsula points like a dagger

right at New York harbour

and this hints at it's strategic importance.

Because any deep draft vessel approaching New York harbour,

is going to have to swing right by this peninsula.

Yet, this wasn't a place with just one role to play.

Or one story to tell.

I see construction from times

when america was just another colony,

parts that show america's rise to military superiority,

I see evidence of the moment

when the United States stopped being just another country

and became the military colossus it is.

Here it is, on this little Sandy bit of ground.

Towards the northern end of the peninsula,

an old light house provides a commanding view

across this baffling complex and hints at it's beginnings.

The construction of this lighthouse

points to Sandy hook's significance in American history,

dating all the way back to the mid 1700s.

It's need was driven by New York's merchant traffic.

This is a harbour that has been strategically important

to anyone trying to hold the north Atlantic.

It was an important Dutch, English and American harbour

and when you look at that lighthouse,

it shows how long people have needed

to navigate safely in and out of New York.

Park ranger, Tom Hoffman, knows the danger of these shores

better than most.

Even on a clear day,

Sandy hook is so low and flat it blends in with the ocean water

and imagine that's the day time

and at night time, you don't see anything,

the night they lighted it

for the first time

was 11 June 1764

and it's been standing here on this location ever since.

But these ruins show the treacherous coastline

wasn't the only danger here.

The story of war written across this place,

actually began at the lighthouse

when the British hoped to defend this vital navigational aid

during the American revolution.

The British dispatched two frigates

and anchored them right out here

and had an armed guard here and sure enough who shows up?

But 200 American soldiers with two Cannon...

..In 1776, they're sneaking up the hook,

the commanding officer ordered the cannons

to fire at the lighthouse

but as he put it in a report,

"we bombarded the tower for over an hour

"but could make no impression."

Continuing to shine for centuries to come,

the lighthouse would oversee a dramatic transformation

of this land.

In 1874, nearly a decade after the civil war ended,

thunderous shots rang out over Sandy hook,

fired from this now silent platform.

A now united nation was weary of external threats,

this empty landscape had become the us armies first proving ground.

A proving ground is a place where you can take in new design

and where you can take samples of all of your military production

and you can prove them.

They would check to make sure that the rounds worked,

the fuses worked, the range accuracy,

the detonation, the explosion.

They would test every aspect of the projectile

and the gun firing it

and so you needed a place where you could fire freely

without risk to, you know, civilian life.

Over the coming half century, hundreds of thousands of rounds

would be fired from the Sandy hook proving ground.

And some of the largest,

most ambitious weapons ever created were tested here.

Yet as some of the structures here testify,

this site was about more than simply testing weapons

or helping ships navigate these waters.

What if the fight came to Sandy hook and america's own shores?

We're talking about the two big stories of Sandy hook,

one's the lighthouse and that will guide any ship

from around the world in to New York harbour

but in times of war,

you have to have some kind of defence

to stop enemy warships from coming in.

In the mid 1890s, war with Spain appeared inevitable.

So more emphasis was put on nearby defensive structures

like fort hancock.

The us did not have the capacity at the end of the 19th century

to build a big enough Navy,

so instead of building a lot of ships,

the United States builds a lot of batteries of guns

to defend all of it's major harbours.

What you had here were four 12-inch calibre mortars

and you can see their bases had been circular,

that's because a mortar fires projectiles high up

to come back down on your enemies ships.

As a proving ground for the military

and with access to the latest technology,

Sandy hook was set as an example to follow.

The decision is taken in the United States

to protect every valuable harbour with these shore batteries

and so breach loading eight, ten and 12 inch naval guns

are delivered to forts like hancock,

starting in 1895 to defend america's harbours.

While the Spanish never came within range,

other enemies would soon threaten these shores.

And while the us had always trailed

the European powers in military might,

here at fort hancock, that old dynamic was shifting.

European gun makers are developing artillery pieces

that can shoot smokeless powder, fire quickly, disappear

and Sandy hook is where the American versions

of these guns are being developed.

Here is where American technology

is keeping up, thanks to us government research.

This is the very first and only steam powered

disappearing gun battery,

so you load the guns while inside

then it lifted up through openings in the roof

to fire at enemy ships out in the ocean

and of course, once you fire, now you've got to reload,

so the gun comes back down on the elevator

and it's a disappearing gun.

Within a few years of being completed however,

this battery was already outdated.

But the race to keep ahead was still on.

In 1918, a u-boat reported fired 16 shots at fort hancock

and the guns that stood here responded in kind.

The German submarines were a sign that the times were a changing.

The two big threats to American ports in world war ii

were enemy bombers and enemy submarines

and those big coastal gun emplacements designed

to defend American port facilities were no longer as important.

What remains is a legacy of both the history of this site

and the route america took on it's journey to the modern era.

By the 1950s, Sandy hook entered it's final chapter.

We're walking in the last defence system

used by the us army here at fort hancock,

the Nike air defence radar site,

designed to shoot down Russian bombers

if the cold war went hot.

Once Russians have atomic weapons

then everyone in america instantly understands

that American cities

are immensely vulnerable to Russian attack.

After more than a century defending New York from the sea,

attention now shifted to the skies

and the gravest threat the us ever faced.

For hundreds of years, Sandy hook's military installations

had helped protect the waters around New York...

..But by the 1950s,

they were also defending the city from the air.

Nike batteries were part of the us army air defence command.

These were placed strategically near cities across the country

to prevent the destruction of the centres

of america's great retaliatory and productive might.

The Nike positions around New York City

are designed to stop another Pearl harbour style sneak attack.

So we just went under one of the platforms

that held the missile tracking radar

because the missiles were a mile south of us

and once you launch the missile,

the radar here guided the missile up to the target

and then another radar, the target tracking radar,

was tracking the target and through a computer system

bought the two together and guaranteed a hit.

Yet, like all the weapons and defence systems on show here,

it's lifespan was short.

In 1974, with the Nike missile programme outdated,

the last of the equipment

and military personnel left the peninsula.

Left to the elements on this windswept coastline,

what remains here paints a picture not just of the story of this site

but of the birth and history of a nation.

All of these artefacts taken together,

reflect america's rise to world power

from this vulnerable colony of the British empire

to a nation that then projects power

and then has the latest cutting edge technology

to defend the free world against the communist threat.

It's all right here on Sandy hook.

Southern england,

in a quiet village called purton,

lying beside a mighty river is a fleet of the dead.

They certainly look like boats but they appear to be made of stone,

can you make boats of stone?

Are they statues?

These monoliths stand half submerged

in britain's longest river, the severn.

Some of these boats, you can only see the very tip

of their rotting bow just poking out from the ground.

They draw a line 1.5 miles along the shoreline.

There are so many of them,

but they definitely all seem to have been there for a while.

It's almost as if they've been put here for a purpose,

as if it's been designed

but yet they're completely enveloped by the land.

The river and a much calmer body of water next to it,

both connect the village of purton to the rest of england.

We have a major river right next to the canal,

I mean talk about belt and braces, why would you need both?

Nearly 50 years ago,

a young boy and his family came to this river bank in southern england.

When I came here as a child, this was a great place to play.

Paul barnett and his father found strange shapes

sticking out of the mud.

But they had no idea what they were.

Well, my father being an ex sailor,

he had his own curious sort of observations

as to what this may be and he just naturally assumed

it was just a great and easy place to get rid of vessels.

We didn't know, we really didn't know.

The secrets of the site and it's boats made of stone

would remain buried,

until Paul returned to solve the mystery 20 years later.

Well, the first thing that I chose to do

was to carry out a research project

at the local archive,

the information held therein was very sparse.

I was absolutely astounded by the lack of information.

These things dominate the landscape,

you would have thought that if they'd been put here

for a reason, that there would be an official record.

But the archives were empty.

Paul's investigation had hit a wall.

But a clue would be found in the river severn's storied past.

Although it may not look it, this is an immensely dangerous area.

Nobody had ventured out in to the river severn,

it's incredibly treacherous,

the tide itself actually runs in at about 13 knots.

The river severn is deadly

but next door is a more placid body of water.

Directly next door to this powerful river is a canal,

200 years ago, canals like these were the main ways of moving freight

around britain and people came to rely on these,

these canals were the arteries

for moving goods around britain, including here at purton.

The sharpness canal opened in 1827,

the people of purton

were now connected to the rest of england.

But less than 100 years later,

the canals existence was under threat.

The canal, a major piece

of infrastructure for trade

is protected from this very dangerous river

by a very narrow mound of dirt.

That mound in some places, just 20 feet thick,

is all that keeps these two bodies of water separate.

With the full force of the river coming in,

it was hitting the bank

and as a result of which it was now prone to erosion

which was happening almost on a daily basis.

The river bank literally holds back the tide

without it, the river would consume the canal.

For nearly a century the canal and the river co-existed in Harmony.

But in 1909, that Harmony was shattered.

A massive storm hit the south west of england

and the river severn began to over flow

and spill over in to the canal.

The full force of that storm came into the bank

approximately 60m of it was removed.

One hit and it was swept away by the river severn

and it's fast flowing waters.

Tonnes and tonnes of dirt and silt were carried away down stream.

Nearly 200 feet of the bank was swept away.

The canal was now in real danger of breaching.

Something had to be done.

The storm almost obliterated the river bank

but a fleet made of stone was about to change it forever.

They had no money for big restoration projects,

this was a very small part of britain

that had very limited means and very little time.

But the chief engineer for the canal had a radical plan.

The engineer for the dock company made a request,

are there any barges that could be bought to his point,

run up to the foreshore and add their strength

in order to protect that waterway.

For the plan to work, they needed a whole fleet of boats,

so they asked the locals to volunteer their old tugs

and they rallied to the cause.

In total, 15 wooden vessels were bought to purton.

This was actually one of the first vessels,

in actual fact, the first vessel to be beached here.

20 minutes before high tide, the vessel with a full head of steam

would come thundering in to the bank.

The plan was to then drill holes in them to let water in,

this would allow silt and mud from upstream

to come down then fill into the boats

and around the boats

and effectively rebuild the river bank.

The barges were beached on the river bank,

protecting the canal from the severn,

they became known as the purton hulks.

It appeared the canal had been saved

but the celebrations were short lived.

The one thing about wood is that it rots.

What was happening was the timber, were now rotting

and as a result, they once again, the canal was in danger.

So wooden boats rot and metal boats rust,

fortunately history provided the answer.

In the years after world war I,

the price of timber and iron Rose sharply,

it became too expensive to make river boats.

So boat makers turned to an unlikely material,

the concrete boats could be made really fast

and really cheap but apparently they were a nightmare to drive.

Old concrete barges were the solution

to protecting the river bank, permanently.

In the 1960s, eight were bought to purton, the final purton hulks.

60 years later, the banks thickness has doubled.

The canal was saved.

Knowing how you can work with the sea, you can't work against her.

Absolutely astounded by the real seamanship

that would have taken to get these vessels in here.

The purton hulks now stand as silent guardians

made of wood and stone.

For the last 60 years they've been there,

protecting the canal from the powerful river severn,

a testament to engineering by the seat of your pants.

In a remote region of western Poland

an engineering giant is hidden in plain sight.

When you approach this site, it really doesn't look like much.

And then as you get closer,

you see that there are pillboxes dotted around the landscape.

Once you spotted one, you then see another

and as your eye carries on,

you realise this line goes on almost forever,

this is a really major piece of engineering.

So it reminds me of the marginal line in France,

but we're not in France, so it couldn't be that.

These pill boxes draw an outline of a fortress buried underground.

There is an immense network of tunnels

that seems to go on just forever

and in one of them, there's a railway line.

People worked here and then they left

but they left some clues

as to what they were doing down there.

A room with a sign above it that says maschinenraum,

machine room.

This is a place where clearly

an immense engineering effort went in

but ultimately, it came to nought.

Almost 22 miles of tunnels are buried in the Polish countryside.

But a clue on the surface points to a history of deception.

There's this one above ground feature,

this odd bridge.

That's the key to understanding the structure.

What secrets are buried beneath the surface?

A mammoth engineering project spanning nearly 40 miles,

stretches across and under the Polish countryside.

Most of this site is underground,

it's miles and miles of tunnel, the train tracks

but the clue to what this site is about

is right here in this one above ground part of it,

the bridge, a bridge with an odd hinge on it.

Historian and architect, Robert jurga,

has spent his career exploring

one of Poland's most overlooked historical sites.

Translator: "The plan of this bridge is still protected

"by the patent that's kept in Berlin.

"The level of security was so high

"that the operators consisted

"of a specially trained group of soldiers."

Swing Bridges are common on major rivers

to let large ships pass through.

But the water here is practically a trickle.

The swing bridge is here because this entire set

of fortifications is actually illegal.

In western Poland,

just 40 miles from the German border,

a swinging bridge was part

of an illegal fortification programme.

The origins of this structure date to the end of world war I,

when this part of Poland belonged to Germany.

Think back to what happened

in Germany at the end

of world war I.

They were defeated by a big allied coalition, they were disarmed,

they lost territory,

they lost citizens to the treaty of versailles.

The treaty was punishing to Germany,

they had to give up their entire empire

they had to allow the allies to occupy

part of their industrial heartland

and they also had to limit their army to 100,000 men.

Germany was also forbidden

from building any new fortifications along it's border.

Leaving the country virtually defenceless.

The Germans felt a great sense of vulnerability about their border

because after world war I,

they were a universally loathed nation

but they had enemies on their right,

there was Poland and behind Poland of course,

the Soviet union.

With limited defences,

Germany was vulnerable to invasion from the east.

It's biggest weakness was a stretch of land sandwiched

between two rivers.

This region was flat and had no natural barriers.

It was a highway that led straight to Berlin.

If the Poles or the Soviets wanted to invade Germany,

that was the perfect route

'cause it gave them a direct path to Berlin, the capital.

This was a huge hole in Germany's defences

and they wanted to plug it.

But with the treaty making the contraction

of new defences illegal,

the German government concocted a rouse.

The rules of the treaty of versailles

limited Germany's spending on the military

and on fortifications but it didn't say anything

about water management,

so they bought in engineers

and dug up hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of earth,

redirected rivers and essentially created a new natural barrier.

Translator: "The main tool against the tanks was water,

"many tactical canals were built

"and they became the main barrier against the enemies tanks

"on those channels, they built a line of tactical Bridges."

A series of Bridges across an artificial waterway,

each with a mechanism to stop an enemy advance.

Translator: "Those Bridges were closed in case of the arrival

"of the enemy and in normal times, were used by the civilians."

Over five years, a line is drawn

between the varta and odor rivers...

..This is the beginning of the ostwall.

Audacious doesn't cover it,

you had a team of 1,000 overseers,

watching to make sure Germany adhered to the rules

and if they were caught breaking those rules,

it could have started another war.

An embolden, German government began to add tunnels and bunkers,

making the ostwall a state of the art battle fortress.

But in 1938, Germany's leader comes to inspect it.

He was not happy.

When Hitler visits the ostwall in 1938

he is definitely underwhelmed,

Hitler is somebody who wants to see, you know,

parades of panzers in the street,

flyovers by luftwaffe bombers, dive bombers and fighter planes.

Goose stepping infantry,

he does not want to see these subterranean fortress

with just a little machine gun turret poking out of the pine trees.

The ostwall failed it's inspection and the construction was put on hold.

The following year,

Hitler marched his troops past the wall and into Poland.

Once Germany had conquered Poland,

this fortification lay in the middle of German controlled territory,

so was militarily useless

after a decade of pouring so much effort and money into this line,

it was left as a lame duck.

This speaks to Hitler's conception of warfare,

that the German army had to be on the move,

it had to be attacking

and it was not going to sit passively behind fortifications.

With the ostwall cancelled, the tunnels were left empty...

..Until the furore found a new use for them.

After Hitler stopped construction on the ostwall,

it was largely unused

but when the allies begin their strategic bombing of Germany,

it finds a new purpose,

they move machinery down here to build aircraft engines.

With most able bodied soldiers fighting on the front lines,

only a small regiment was left to defend the wall.

Regular troops weren't stationed there,

you just had militia,

which were mostly poorly trained Hitler youth

and men too old to be sent to the frontlines.

Conditions were dreadful, it was dank, it was dark,

it was under funded, there were no resources,

the people who were here really had been forgotten about.

Remember the front line was hundreds of miles away,

until everything changed.

By the end of 1944, the Germans were being pushed back

and the Soviets were creeping closer to Berlin.

So Hitler was not by any stretch of the imagination a military genius

and he insisted on this tactic of no retreat

and what happens is,

hundreds of thousands of German troops are surrounded

and captured by the red army

until one of the last things in-between the Soviet war machine

and Berlin is this one bit of fortification.

The ostwall and those defending it, were about to be put to the test.

Translator: "Enemy was approaching from that side, approaching slowly.

"Firstly he had to overpass the antitank barrier on the road."

So, these Hitler youth and these old guys,

militia they stand no chance against the Soviet army

but that doesn't stop them, they put up resistance

and they were determined to defend the border

and defend this fortification.

In just days, the wall was breached

and the red army rolled towards Berlin.

The slightly pathetic thing about the line really,

is that after so much deviousness, so much planning,

so much hopes for it, when the time actually came,

they weren't prepared to put the manpower or the resources

in to using it

and the lame duck became a damp squib.

Translator: "Had this fortification been completed

"the way it was designed,

"most likely it would have been very precious to the German army.

"Unfortunately for them, they completed it only to 30%.

"And without anti tank weaponry, the soldiers didn't have a chance

"against the power of the Soviet army.

When the war ended and the treaties are signed,

the borders are redrawn and this area ends up inside Poland,

the very nation it was built to keep out.

Now the ostwall lies empty...

..Rumours speak of Nazi treasure still hidden in the walls...

..But all that fills the dark corridors today

are some 35,000 protected bats.

Abandoned, disintegrating, reclaimed by nature.

Structures once at the cutting edge,

bearing witness to the forces,

pioneers and villains that define the world today.

Emblems of a shared past standing in our present.

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