Original subtitles

In England, the nerve center of a heroic rescue operation

that remains the pride of a nation.

You cannot overestimate the effect this had

on the country's morale.

A dilapidated mansion in Virginia that found itself

perilously close to the front lines.

Until one day the fighting arrived

right at their doorstep.

And a palatial ruin in Estonia

that hosted a formidable empress.

She would make it her mission to uncover

the secrets of its wealth.

Overlooking the English Channel is an ancient stronghold

with a modern secret buried below.

We're on the south coast of England, looking out

over the White Cliffs of Dover, towards France.

There is a medieval castle that stands out on a promontory

and commands the entire terrain.

There are holes carved out of the cliff face,

concrete and metal constructions.

These windows offer a glimpse into a subterranean labyrinth.

And as you get into the chambers

underneath the ground,

you see desks, you see typewriters,

you see all the things you need to run an office.

There's electrical equipment, huge machinery.

It's like a time capsule.

One wonders, what's happening here?

Why is all of this infrastructure

under the ground?

You feel like you're seeing something

that had to be protected,

The nerve center of something very, very big.

This facility was called into service

during a moment of national crisis.

The survival of Britain's army and Britain itself

hung by a thread.

Dover Castle has been standing guard

over Britain's southern coast

since the 12th century.

It's been adapted for defense through the ages,

and by the late 1700s,

Britain was at war with Napoleon Bonaparte's France.

Tunnels were excavated to meet the threat of invasion.

So the original tunnel was constructed about 1797,

and were designed really just to be extra accommodation

for lots of troops.

There were about 2,000 soldiers living down here

at the end of the 18th century.

But that invasion never came,

and they were soon shut up and abandoned.

That was until the arrival of a new threat from Europe

in the 1930s.

War with Nazi Germany seemed inevitable by 1938,

So, the Dover Castle tunnels, safe from aerial attack,

were converted into naval headquarters.

Retired Admiral Bertram Ramsay

is brought back into service

to organize the defense of England.

He had his own quarters here,

but also he had this amazing view

right out to the harbor beneath us

and into the channel.

Ramsay and his team's job was focused

on controlling the channel.

But very soon, the workers in this facility

found themselves directing a rescue mission.

This operation would become famous around the world,

known simply by the name of the French town

where it took place...

Dunkirk.

In 1940, very rapidly, the German armed forces

encircle the British and French armies

in and around Dunkirk.

Loon and Calais had already been taken,

and they found themselves more or less surrounded.

Nearly half a million British and Allied soldiers

found themselves marooned on the beaches.

The British and French armies

are about to be annihilated

by the Nazis.

If they didn't get the men off those beaches,

the remaining Allied forces would be destroyed,

and Britain would be defenseless to Nazi invasion.

Ramsay is ordered to plan and organize

Operation Dynamo,

to bring back across the channel

as many soldiers as possible.

With less than a week to prepare,

Ramsay and his team worked around the clock,

making plans, gathering resources,

and mobilizing ships.

The main docks had been destroyed

and the beaches were shallow.

Even at high tide, British destroyers

could get no closer than a mile from shore.

Troops would have to be ferried out to the big ships

on small boats, under constant artillery fire

and aerial attack.

Ramsay's team scrambled for solutions.

But they soon ran out of time.

On May 26, 1940,

the order came in to commence Operation Dynamo.

The first few days were disastrous.

Only a small number of soldiers

were actually able to escape those beaches,

less than 8,000 on the first day.

But a discovery soon offered hope.

In Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk,"

the title of the first timeline in the film

was "The Mole."

It's actually the name of a concrete breakwater

which provided a vital lifeline back to England.

Built to protect the harbor from rough seas,

it was more than 4,000 feet long,

heading out into deeper water.

You could pull destroyers alongside The Mole,

and you could get soldiers

to walk out onto the end of The Mole,

and get aboard the destroyers.

For the troops waiting in line, however,

they were sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe.

Diary entries described the psychological terror

as the soldiers anxiously awaited the dreaded scream

of the German stukas.

I mean, they really are harrowing weed.

They speak of the desperation, the fear of the potential danger

that was coming their way.

Despite these stuka raids, The Mole was working,

and the numbers of rescues began to swell.

So Ramsay desperately requested more destroyers.

The Admiralty were worried about the fact

that they were losing ships out there.

They didn't want to lose those ships.

Ramsay actually had to persuade the Admiralty

that the larger ships were necessary.

But Nazi forces were closing in,

and Ramsay knew he couldn't rely

on The Mole alone.

He called on the seafaring people of Britain for help.

Ramsay decided to enlist the support

of the little ships.

Some of them civilian boats,

some of them commercial boats and ferries,

who had a shallow enough draft

to be able to get close into the beach.

Gradually, troops began to see more and more rescue vessels

on the horizon.

The British people had rallied to Ramsay's call.

Fishing smacks, lifeboats, sailing barges,

watercraft of all kinds, crewed by volunteers,

bravely ventured into enemy territory

to pick up stranded soldiers.

In just over a week, Ramsay's operation

had been able to rescue 338,000 Allied troops.

A remarkable feat.

This was over ten times what they'd hoped,

and in large part thanks to civilian boats.

90,000 men are left behind,

but it's seen as a great victory

and proves to be a pivotal turning point in the war.

The next day, Churchill gave his famous speech--

"We shall fight on the beaches.

"We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets."

You cannot overestimate the effect this had

on the country's morale.

In the months that followed,

the Royal Air Force repulsed Hitler's aerial assault

and secured victory in what became known

as the Battle of Britain.

The island was now safe from Nazi invasion.

And when the U.S. joined the war

in December 1941,

it could be used as a base from which to launch

the biggest seaborne invasion in history.

From 1942, Dover Castle functioned

as a center for Allied headquarters

to direct the invasion of Europe.

And it would involve using one of America's greatest generals

as bait.

2 Beginning in 1942,

a network of tunnels under Dover Castle

was used in the planning of D-Day.

So this space would've been known as Q Dover,

and it was part of an elaborate hoax.

Q Dover was set up as a communications base

to direct a hugely ambitious deception plan.

In the run-up to D-Day, Operation Fortitude was set up

to feed false intel to the Nazis.

The Allies are going to convince the Germans

that they're going to go across the Channel

from Dover to Calais,

shortest distance.

Meanwhile, the Allies are gonna land in Normandy.

There's got to be a convincing picture

of an Allied army properly positioned

to cross from Dover to Calais.

George Patton is selected to lead this army.

He was the leader the Germans feared the most.

They considered him the Allies' best general.

So while Omar Bradley, and Bernard Montgomery,

and Dwight Eisenhower are running the real invasion,

George Patton is put in command

of First United States Army Group,

which doesn't exist.

Fake tanks and trucks, as well as fake camps,

are created as part of an entirely fictitious army,

positioned in the east of England

to support the idea of a Dover-Calais crossing.

They create fake radio networks

communicating all around the fake unit.

And the center for coordinating

all of the deception operations of Operation Fortitude

is right here in these tunnels.

June 6th, 1944.

D-Day.

Operation Fortitude has completely deceived the Nazis.

German commanders hold back from committing

against the Allied invasion in Normandy.

They're still waiting for the real invasion

to come across from Dover to Calais.

Two months later, some German commanders still believe

that Patton's phantom army is real.

It was one of the greatest deceptions in history,

and the Nazis bought it,

hook, line and sinker.

Much of the complex is still empty

and closed to the public,

but it's possible to visit parts of the tunnels

and stand in the spaces that were so crucial

to Britain's survival and Europe's salvation.

Near the town of Farmville, Virginia,

nestled among poplar trees,

is an unusual relic of the Old South.

The classic grand home in Virginia would be

a white wood, columns.

This is different.

It's got an elegant turret, an ornate slate roof,

and a beautiful arch welcoming you in.

When we move inside,

the rooms have pretty much been stripped bare,

but there are still the trappings

of wealth on display.

But when the nation split apart,

this mansion was caught in the crossfire.

And the fortunes of the war went, you know, back and forth,

until one battle changed the entire direction of the war.

It was the largest cavalry clash in American history,

and the man who lived here

was right in the thick of the action.

And the family waited uneasily for news from the front lines,

until one day the battle arrived

right at their doorstep.

Ann Stone spent her childhood summers

visiting this old mansion.

It was overwhelming as a child,

'cause this house scared me. It was dark.

And I can remember sitting on the floor,

and playing with the little soldiers.

My brother, the oldest one, this is where he found

the Civil War uniforms.

Constructed around the 1830s,

Ann Stone's great-great-grandfather

moved in when the nation was on the cusp of war.

John Hughes Knight, Jr. was a prominent

planter and lawyer, born just 30 miles away.

In 1860, he bought this place and moved his wife

and three children here.

The mansion was just part of a vast estate

that covered a thousand acres.

They had stables for the horses,

a smokehouse for preserving meat,

even an ice house to keep themselves cool

in the summer.

The Knight family lived here in ease and luxury.

But this privileged lifestyle was built on the backs

of the oppressed.

Thirty enslaved workers ensured they were

waited on hand and foot.

The country was increasingly divided

over the issue of enslavement,

with the abolitionist movement

gathering pace in the North.

With some states wanting to suppress

the spread of slavery

and other states wanting to perpetuate it,

the battle lines were drawn

and both sides prepared for war.

Virginia joined the Confederacy,

and like much of its population,

the Knight family supported the cause.

On April 12, 1861, the first shots

of the American Civil War are fired.

John Knight immediately signs up to fight.

As a relatively wealthy man,

he can supply his own horse and tack,

so he joins the cavalry as a sergeant.

His Confederate regiment immediately skirmishes

with Union forces, who had crossed into Virginia.

In the Civil War, cavalry played an outsized role

because of the huge spaces of North America.

Basically, cavalry units had the mobility and the range

to raid, and to forage, and to strike terror

into the other side.

And the South generally had the better cavalry units,

at the beginning of the war.

So John Knight is in one of the elite units

of the Confederate Army.

John's family back at Poplar Hill

would have little idea what was going on

or whether John was even still alive.

This was a time when press accounts of the war

were very sketchy.

The Knight family relied on letters from John,

which would wend their way very slowly,

back from whatever front line he was on.

Ann recalls reading her great-great-grandfather's

accounts from the front lines.

But I remember the feel of it.

There was a lot of personal, you know, recollection.

"Kiss the babies for me." Very personal.

Where you could see...

it had to be agony.

He wrote about the meager rations,

living on one meal of crackers and poor-quality beef a day,

and the difficulties sending and receiving mail from home,

which left men feeling isolated, hungry, and cut off.

In 1863,

General Robert E. Lee's thrust northward

threatens to take John, now a lieutenant,

further from his family.

This Gettysburg campaign, which is Lee's bold foray

into the north to try to win a great victory on Union soil,

John Knight is part of this.

His Virginia cavalry unit marches with Lee's army.

But Knight's campaign is soon cut short in dramatic fashion.

On the night of June 8th, John Knight and his men

are camped near Brandy Station, Virginia,

a hundred miles north of the Poplar Hill mansion.

But little did they know...

they were being watched.

2 On the night of June 8th, 1863,

Lieutenant John Knight is camped near Brandy Station,

100 miles from his home,

when he's woken by a cacophony of noise.

Bugles rent the air and gunshots sounded,

as 11,000 Union cavalry charged Confederate positions.

Knight and his comrades are caught totally off-guard.

Startled, they leap onto their horses,

many half naked and without saddles.

And it becomes intense, brutal, close-range combat

fought with sabers and pistols.

Brandy Station was, you know, 14 hours of mayhem.

The biggest cavalry battle of the American Civil War

and the biggest cavalry battle ever fought

on the North American continent.

Confederates claim victory, but a vastly improved

and more organized Union cavalry

proves they can finally compete.

And it's kind of a morale turning point.

Afterwards, the Union cavalry forces

feel that they can contest

with their Confederate opposites on nearly even terms.

In the aftermath, Knight falls sick with a fever,

and is sent home to Poplar Hill.

While the Knight family waited to see

whether John would recover,

word of the disastrous Confederate defeat

at Gettysburg reached the house.

The news only motivated Knight to return to the heat of battle

Once fully recovered, he rejoined his regiment,

but they were forced on a long retreat by

the new Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant.

After Gettysburg, when Grant takes command

and starts pressing on Richmond and pushing into Virginia,

Poplar Hill Mansion finds itself near the front line.

Eventually, they were pushed back to Appomattox,

just 20 miles from his home at Poplar Hill.

You can just imagine the Knight family holed up in this house,

watching the horizon.

And it was all women hustling around

to get the valuables out and all that.

And I wondered, were they up here

and, you know, on the watch out?

Were they on the lookout?

One morning, the children living in the house

look out the window and they see smoke.

And out of that smoke emerges grizzled men in blue uniforms

marching towards them.

Hungry stragglers cut off from the main Union army arrive

at the front of the house, where the family has gathered.

They're standing outside with six children,

including a baby wrapped in a comforter,

as the men start ransacking the house.

And they start looting the place

and looking under furniture and beds

and taking anything of value.

The men leave the house a mess, but intact,

and the family unharmed.

These Union soldiers are merely hungry and desperate.

John Knight is present at Appomattox

for General Lee's Confederate surrender, on April 9th, 1865.

Knight rushes back to his family,

possibly that same day.

And then after the war, Poplar Hill Mansion

and its surrounding estates had kinda returned to "normal."

But, you know, what was normal after the Civil War?

Because Poplar Hill Mansion had been the center

of a slave economy,

and suddenly all these enslaved people

were technically emancipated.

And yet the losers of the Civil War, you know,

they don't really admit that, and they expect, you know,

that they're gonna retain control over these people,

if not through formal slavery, through some kind

of indentured servitude or sharecropping arrangements.

There was a lot of debate among the political leaders

of the country and the victorious Union

at the end of the war.

And really the watchword was

"reconstruction and reconciliation."

So there was not much push at all to ensure

that the formerly enslaved population was treated

with any level of respect, let alone equality.

Many African Americans did migrate north

where they had a chance to start a new life,

but for those who didn't,

their options were extremely limited.

The mansion remained in the family for generations,

and Ann recalls how they clung to the old ways.

The great-grandmother died in 1960 and they had maintained

this antebellum lifestyle right up to the day she died,

and when you realize these people really did live like that

there's a level of embarrassment and guilt.

The last enslaved man born at Poplar Hill

doesn't die until 1935,

and one wonders what would have been more amazing

or disappointing to them,

how much things had changed

or how much they'd stayed the same?

Life at Poplar Hill was reflected in the wider region,

which was hugely resistant to change.

In fact, the county in which this house resides was one

of the very last in the country to integrate its schools,

and they only did so after a Supreme Court ruling

forced the issue in 1964.

Ann's family sold the estate in 1960, and since 2000,

it's been left to gather cobwebs and dust.

A local preservation group has been established

with aim to secure funds to buy it and protect it.

If successful, they hope to turn it

into an education center.

In Estonia, 30 miles from the capital Tallinn,

is a grand ruin that once hosted a formidable empress,

stamping her authority on her new kingdom.

The forest stretches out in every direction,

and you can see a smattering of villages in the distance.

Then you notice the settlement.

There are compounds

that could've been farmyards or stables.

At the heart of this complex is this huge grand building

with tall, imperious columns rising up around the entrance.

And when you go inside, oh, my God, I mean,

these rooms are just absolutely palatial.

High ceilings,

beautiful mouldings,

fixtures for, like, enormous chandeliers.

Whoever built this place was certainly wealthy,

but where did all this money come from?

During a moment of great upheaval across a vast empire,

this lavish building drew the attention

of one of history's most powerful women.

She would make it her mission to uncover

the secrets of its wealth.

2 Nele Reial is a local historian

who grew up in the shadow of this extravagant structure.

When I was a kid, this was my playground.

I had no idea that the great world leaders stayed here

or the decisions that changed hundreds and hundreds

of people's lives were made here.

This manor house is one of the oldest in Estonia,

with roots going back to the 13th century.

By the mid-1700s, it fell into the hands

of a man called Carl Magnus Stenbock.

Carl Magnus and his descendants

would build one of the grandest

and certainly the largest manor complexes in Estonia.

So now we have entered to the welcoming hall.

All the walls were covered

with the portraits of the ancestors.

The Stenbock family's rise to prominence coincided

with an era of great change in the Russian Empire

and the arrival of a now iconic empress.

In 1762, the Russian emperor's wife

launched a rebellion against her own husband.

She forced him to abdicate

and possibly even ordered his assassination.

And almost overnight, she becomes the ruler,

the autocrat of the entire Russian Empire,

including this wedge of Estonia.

She would become known as Catherine the Great.

In 1764, Catherine embarked on a tour of her new kingdom.

High on her list was this complex,

Kolga Manor.

With Catherine coming, you had to put on a good show.

They had to really put out the best silverware

and the best food and drink.

The white wines, the champagne,

had to be chilled in the cellar.

There were 20 different kind of meat.

You only name it, they had it.

But the Russian leader wasn't only here

to enjoy lavish banquets.

Catherine was an extremely enlightened tsar.

Western-looking, reform-minded, who was determined to import

a lot of foreign technology, foreign practices into Russia

to modernize it.

So she would go on these trips around different regions

of the empire.

The manor and all the land around it

were making a huge amount of money,

and Catherine wanted to know how they were doing it

and whether it could be replicated across the empire.

She found a vast estate sprawling across 130,000 acres

and stretching out to the coast.

Within it were various profitable industries.

She wants to see the farming operations.

She wants to see the forestry operations.

She wants to go out to the coast,

and see the shipbuilding.

But it was all based on an ancient system

of exploitation.

The manor was super wealthy, because on this land

were living around 10,000 serfs

who were working for free.

Serfdom was a form of forced labor, which tied peasants

to the land they worked on and the nobles who owned it.

These servants had no real freedoms to speak of,

could be bought and sold, and lived in extreme poverty.

For the nobles like the Stenbock family,

it was incredibly lucrative.

It's not hard to make a fortune

when you don't have to pay the staff.

On taking the throne a few years earlier, in 1762,

Catherine had given serfs certain rights

and even considered plans to emancipate them.

However, having seen the riches on display at places

like Kolga Manor, the Empress had a change of heart.

Realizing the support of powerful nobles was crucial

to her empire, she would go on to strengthen the system

she had once condemned as inhuman.

By the time of her death in 1796,

she personally owned half a million serfs

and enabled landowners to sentence them

to hard labor in Siberia.

If serfs get poorer and poorer, the Stenbocks

and other such landlords get richer and richer.

In the mid-1800s, Catherine's great-grandson

finally seemed to offer hope to the impoverished peasants

across the empire.

In 1856, Alexander II declared his intention

to abolish serfdom.

But the peasants at Kolga quickly grew frustrated

at how slowly these reforms were being put into place.

By the summer of 1858, they'd had enough

and refused to work.

The landlord responds by bringing in 450 soldiers.

The serfs quickly backed down.

A man called Mick Keevy was identified as the leader

of the uprising and singled out for special punishment.

So in this spot in front of the big barn,

200 soldiers formed two lines, and Mick Keevy had to run

four times through this corridor of men,

each man beating him with a wooden stick.

They deport this barely-living Mick Keevy to

a penal colony in Siberia.

So you see what happens if you try to, like,

you know, buck the system.

And so, really little changes for the peasants there

until the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The Emancipation laws of the 1860s

did little to improve daily lives of peasants,

but crucially, it gave them the freedom

to organize.

And in 1917, the floodgates opened.

In the wake of the Russian Revolution

and the First World War, Estonia won its independence,

but peace at Kolga wouldn't last.

The estate was soon caught up

in the biggest military campaign in history.

2 During the carnage of the Second World War,

Kolga Manor was captured by Hitler's Nazi army

and turned into a military hospital.

With Germany's defeat in 1945, Estonia fell once more

under Russian control, this time the Soviet Union.

The manor house was converted into a state farm

until Estonia won its freedom in 1990.

Amazingly, in 1993,

the Stenbock family actually managed to regain possession

of Kolga Manor.

But by that time, it was really in a terrible state.

Today, the Manor house has a new owner, who is looking

for the funds to restore it to its former glory.

And Nele works for a museum on the site,

dedicated to preserving the story

of nearly a thousand years of life here.

Kolga Manor tells a great story of how Estonian people

preserved their folklore, their culture,

their language throughout the different oppressions.

So it can be also a symbol of the resilience of the people

working for the manor.

In the heart of America's Motor City,

a commanding structure stands watch

over the Detroit River.

Right in the middle of this area is this huge looming building

made out of substantial stone blocks.

As you get closer, you can see a faded red sign that says

"Marine Corps Reserve Center,"

so clearly this is a military structure.

Despite its stark, functional exterior, inside is a riot

of color and artistry.

Several rooms have some really interesting, ambitious artwork.

Most military bases are not decorated in this way.

So what is this wonderful artwork doing here?

This building has a legacy that goes well beyond

its original purpose.

It becomes a launching point

for America's longest-serving president and is a part

of the origin story of one of its greatest boxers.

Nowhere is anyone celebrated like my father is

in the city of Detroit.

And that all started in this building.

In the late 1800s,

the U.S. government was expanding its global reach

and turned to the citizens of states like Michigan

to provide support in times of war.

Detroit became a center for naval training.

It seems kind of incongruous.

Detroit lies hundreds of miles from the ocean,

but the Great Lakes region has been part

of America's naval history

going back really to the founding of the Republic.

Several Great Lakes states formed naval militias,

and these were the forerunners

of the U.S. Marine Corps and naval reserves.

With their numbers growing, a modernist-style facility

was constructed.

It would become known as the Brodhead Naval Armory.

This armory opened in 1930, but almost from the start,

it was more than just a place for military training.

The Great Depression, which hit the Detroit area

especially hard, forced its owners to adapt the site.

To raise money to maintain the armory,

it became a premier civic event site.

Its popularity was such that it was chosen as the locale

for a seminal moment in the lives

of two great Americans.

The first was a charismatic politician determined to solve

the country's economic turmoil.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal reformer was running

against the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover,

who many people saw as responsible

for this Great Depression.

In October of 1932, both candidates came to Detroit

to give speeches.

Roosevelt chose the armory as the location for his address.

Roosevelt, of course, won the election.

He also won the state of Michigan.

Roosevelt's promise of a new deal

had won him the election.

Now it was time to take action.

Broad executive power

to wage a war against the emergency.

In his first 100 days, the new president

passed an astonishing 77 laws through Congress

and signed an unprecedented 99 executive orders.

FDR was able to push through a whole host of public policies

aimed at getting people back to work.

There were massive public works projects

building infrastructure, bridges, highways.

However, the New Deal didn't just support blue-collar jobs.

The program involved something called the Federal Art Project,

which employed some 10,000 artists across the country.

That project would transform the country's public buildings,

including the Brodhead Naval Armory.

The Federal Arts Project employed artists

like David Friedenthal and Edgar Yaeger to decorate

the armory's mess halls, bars, corridors, staircases.

The large halls were also used to host sporting events,

and a future icon would literally make his name here.

The day my father walked in this building,

he didn't know the future he was about to embark on.

2 In 1932, Detroit's Brodhead Naval Armory

would host the debut of an American icon.

Joe Louis Barrow II's father is considered

one of the country's most celebrated athletes.

My father relocated with his family to Detroit

because Detroit offered

a future that Alabama just simply could not.

Long before black lives mattered anywhere else,

black lives mattered in Detroit, right?

You could get a job at Ford.

You could become a part of the automation boom.

Joe's mother was worried he might fall

into the wrong crowd.

So she was giving him money to go and take violin lessons.

Every day, he would leave house for school with his violin case,

but never turned up at the violin teacher.

Young Joe told a little fib to his mother.

Instead of going to his violin lessons,

he enrolled at a program to learn boxing.

In 1932, age 17, he entered his first

amateur fight, here at the armory.

Perhaps he was trying to hide this activity from his mother,

but Joe Louis Barrow had himself listed on the card

simply as Joe Louis,

a name that would go down in history.

He was knocked down, I think, seven times,

but he kept getting back up. He kept getting back up.

The judges unanimously ruled that he lost.

And the result of that was a newfound

determination and discipline.

Defeats bring about the character

that is required...

to be a great champion.

Lewis would go on to become heavyweight champion

and held the title for nearly 12 years.

But December 7th, 1941, changed all that.

Pearl Harbor changed all that.

My father was at the height of his career.

He knew he needed to go, and so he enlisted.

Being heavyweight champion of the world didn't alleviate

that obligation to him.

He was asked to fight segregated exhibitions.

He said, "I'll fight exhibitions,

but they will not be segregated."

And that was the introduction for the armed forces

to integrated audiences.

While Joe Louis toured the front lines

as part of the Special Services Division,

the armory spent the war serving on the home front.

After World War II and the Vietnam War,

the U.S. military began reducing its footprint

across the nation.

The armory ultimately closed down in 2004.

After decades of neglect, there's finally hope

for the Brodhead Armory.

Plans are underway for the nonprofit

behind Detroit's Thanksgiving parade to restore the building,

providing a space for veterans

and bringing marching and drilling

back to this grand old hall once again.