Original subtitles

In Oklahoma, a place of learning created

with a disturbing objective.

They wanted to change the children,

to take them from their culture and their language.

A small Greek island

caught in a chilling web of controversy.

Suddenly, this facility was on the front pages of newspapers

all across Europe, and it was an international scandal.

And in Oregon, a military facility linked

to a mysterious wartime mission.

It was a 68-hour battle against an imaginary enemy.

Six miles from Oregon's Pacific Coast

is a staggering remnant

built during a time of national emergency.

The first thing you see and you can't miss it,

is this vast structure.

The thing that's just mind blowing

is just how big it is, how tall it is.

Makes you wonder, what could you possibly store here

that would demand this much space?

Then you see something that gives you a clue.

At the front is a large plane.

So, was this an aircraft hangar?

Yet, the aircraft that reside here today are not the ones

it was built to protect.

The structure itself is the key to unlocking this mystery.

On closer inspection,

you can see something remarkable.

The whole thing is built out of wood.

They started construction in the fall of 1942.

And the reason that they used wood versus steel

is that all the metal was being used for the war effort.

The Japanese had already launched an attack

on America's mainland,

and they could do it again.

The airships that flew out of this building were crucial

in defending the country.

One of these warships of the sky became embroiled

in one of the most bizarre military incidents

of the Second World War.

Personnel from here were sent to fight an unseen enemy,

but of course, everything is not as it would appear.

Everyone knows about Japan's devastating attack

on Pearl Harbor.

But not many people remember that, just a week after,

a number of Japanese submarines made it all the way

to the West Coast of the United States.

In June 1942, a long range Japanese submarine successfully

managed to shell Fort Stevens, in Oregon.

Japan also sank two ships.

They fired on a couple of locations in California.

It pretty quickly became clear that the U.S.

didn't have sufficient infrastructure

to defend their coastline.

Christian Gurling is passionate

about the history of American aviation

and is an expert on this vast facility.

So, a total of 17 of these wooden hangars were built

to act as a protective ring around the United States.

But they weren't going to rely on conventional airplanes.

They would turn to a very different technology

to safeguard American lives.

They were a secret weapon.

They were...

airships.

Airships were perfect.

You could fly low enough and slow enough to be able

to spot an enemy submarine.

But given their enormous size,

you need somewhere equally big to house them.

This is Naval Air Station Tillamook.

Construction began on the first of two hangars in October 1942.

But building these behemoths was no easy task.

Supplies of steel and aluminum were critically low

because of the war effort.

But there's one building material that the northwest

has in abundance, and that was wood.

The race was on to get the hangars finished before

Japan could once again threaten America's national security.

A bitter winter hampered early efforts,

and the hangar that survives today

took nine months to build.

The primary challenge that they faced

in building the hangar was weather.

And, of course, on the Oregon coast,

it rains considerably.

But when completed, it was a record breaker.

Hangar B at Tillamook is the largest freestanding

clear-span wooden structure in the world.

The hangar itself is about 1,000 feet long,

300 feet wide, and 200 feet tall.

They used in excess of 3 million board feet of lumber,

which is enough lumber to build 279 three-bedroom homes.

The hangar's actually so long, you could literally lay

the Chrysler Building down inside of the hangar.

In February 1943,

the first of eight airships arrived after being constructed

at Goodyear manufacturing plants,

in Ohio and California.

On March 16th, the first patrol mission was launched.

Fortunately, the crew was equipped with more

than just binoculars.

So the airships also use a very primitive form of radar called

a "magnetic anomaly detector," where they would look

for magnetic anomalies in the earth's surface

to find these submarines.

Anti-submarine warfare is mostly hour after hour

scanning the waters and not seeing anything.

It was the same story, day after day of nothing.

That would soon change.

On May 19th, 1943,

Tillamook's communication building

received an urgent dispatch.

About 10 miles off the coast of Cape Lookout in Oregon,

the USS PC-815, an anti-submarine vessel,

started picking up irregular signals on its sonar device.

The ship's commander quickly ordered his crew to fire

on what he believed was a Japanese submarine.

After six attempted attacks, the USS PC-815

runs out of ammunition.

They were potentially a sitting duck.

So the call went out to the two airships that were then

operating out of the base, K-33 and K-39,

to assist this Navy surface vessel.

The blimps, in addition to submarine detection equipment,

were also armed with depth charges, and a machine gun.

Their role was to defend the U.S. ships

and help scout the water for any signs

of enemy submarines.

Eventually, four other surface ships were called in,

to assist as well.

Soon, the ship's crew picks up another signal.

Now they're convinced that there's a second Japanese sub

in the vicinity.

By 4:46 P.M.,

13 hours after the pursuit began,

the PC-815 was finally restocked with depth charges

by a supporting vessel.

The ship's commander desperately continued

hunting down the Japanese submarines,

launching attack after attack.

The fear now is that it's staking out its target.

The race was on,

and American lives were at stake.

2 On May 19th, 1943,

two airships from the Tillamook Naval Air Station

were dispatched to assist the PC-815

in its pursuit of two Japanese submarines.

The fight continued on through the night

and into the next day.

But the enemy is nowhere to be seen.

After 68 hours, the commander of the ship

was ordered to call off the search.

On return to base, the commander of PC-815

reported that he believed

he destroyed one or both of the submarines,

as neither launched a counterattack.

Yet, Navy officials immediately commenced an investigation

to establish what took place.

The commander had used five ships, two blimps,

deployed over 100 depth charges,

and failed to supply any of the evidence

required to confirm a kill.

The final report contained some astonishing findings.

No subs were ever found.

No wreckage was ever found.

The airmen on the blimps, for example, didn't think

there was any sign of submarines in the area.

But the commander of this vessel was still convinced

that he had destroyed two enemy vessels.

So who was this mystery commander?

His name was L. Ron Hubbard.

After the war, he would become

a very successful science fiction writer

and then go on to found

the Church of Scientology.

Now, L. Ron Hubbard was known to,

let's say, stretch the truth at times.

Even in his After-Action Report,

you can see that Hubbard has a certain literary flair.

But there was one piece of evidence

from the Navy investigation

that no amount of creative language

could disguise.

It turns out that the area where Hubbard and his crew

first picked up these strange signals is well known

for having natural magnetic deposits.

So it seems, Hubbard may well have been fighting

an imaginary enemy.

For the next two years, airships from Tillamook

continued to patrol the Oregon coast.

Only one vessel under the protection of an airship

was ever sunk,

an oil tanker named the Persephone.

That's a pretty impressive service record.

The war in the Pacific dragged on until September 2nd, 1945.

And at that point, of course, the Tillamook base

was no longer needed.

In 1948, Tillamook Naval Air Station

was decommissioned.

Today, hangar B is home to the Tillamook Air Museum.

We call it "history housing history."

You have this amazing structure from World War II,

an engineering marvel.

These hangars show what we can accomplish

when we're under threat.

On the Greek island of Leros,

stands a commanding structure

with a shameful secret.

Following along the coast, we find this amazing,

vast, and powerful building.

It looks like security was really tight here,

but who was being kept inside?

It looks as if people were living here.

The question is, why?

Upstairs, there's a lot of beds.

There's colorful decorations on the wall,

but also medical equipment.

Could this have been a hospital?

This was once a showpiece,

designed to demonstrate the might

of a conquering nation.

Its days as a glorious symbol of power did not last long.

As time passed, it became a den of depravity,

and the subject of a controversial exposé.

It created an international scandal that humiliated

the Greek government.

Because of this complex, Leros became known

as the "Island of the Damned."

I first came in 1966.

It was October 5th.

It was so beautiful that it left me

with the best impression.

Petros Akoglanis was 22 years old when he started working

as a nurse in this building.

For me, this place is very sacred because this is where

I lived my best years.

There are some other feelings now.

I'm saddened by this space.

The story of this now derelict shell

began long before Petros arrived,

during an era of European occupation.

Since 1923, this was under the influence

of Mussolini's fascist Italy.

It was built as accommodation for troops

using the nearby seaplane port.

Italy and then their Nazi allies controlled the island

until the end of the Second World War.

But eventually, these structures and the island

were handed back to a united Greece.

Life on Leros eventually returned to normal.

But by the 1950s, a crisis was brewing on mainland Greece.

This structure would be part of the solution.

After the war, Greece was in the midst of profound change.

The population was increasing and urbanizing.

And all of this impacted the way that people

with mental illness and physical disabilities were cared for.

The hospitals in Athens and in other major cities

were filling up and were reaching breaking point.

They had to de-congest the other mental hospitals

because they were overcrowded.

And they found a suitable place

and brought them here.

In 1958, this facility admitted its first patients,

more than 300.

It was officially called the "Colony for Psychopaths,"

and later became known as the "Leros Asylum".

And it was very important for the island.

There were no other ways of working in those years.

From the first moment, I loved this place.

The patients, we would pick them up from the boat,

bring them here, have their food ready.

But within just a few years,

there was around 2,500 patients at this facility.

It was designed to care for about 600.

Some of this meant that there was poor sanitation.

A few toilets, hundreds would have to use.

It was even said that there was only one qualified psychiatrist

for a thousand patients.

Of course, there were problems.

There were cases of patients attacking staff,

attacking their fellow patients.

We, the staff, dealt with these incidents

as much as possible.

The outside world had no idea just how bad the situation

inside the Leros Asylum had become.

In 1989, the devastating truth of what was really going on

in this facility was revealed.

2 In the late 1950s, a new psychiatric hospital

opened on the Greek island of Leros to help care

for people with mental health conditions.

By 1989, it had become so dangerously overcrowded,

a team of journalists exposed its appalling story.

Reporters from the British newspaper, The Observer,

recorded the squalid and terrible conditions

that patients were suffering in.

You had patients living naked and even tied down

to their beds, bearing the marks

of this really inhumane treatment.

The shocking photos that accompanied the article

revealed the brutal reality of life within these walls.

Look, we didn't react negatively.

We accepted the publication.

Up to a certain point.

When the story was published,

they called this "Europe's Guilty Secret,"

and there was condemnation all around,

forcing the Greek government to react.

We did not rise up and say that, because these things

are happening, it should be closed.

We never accepted that.

Slowly, things started to improve,

and a different climate started to prevail.

We tried to bring better working conditions

for the staff, but especially for the patients.

The reforms that were enacted

went far beyond the Leros Asylum.

All over Greece, mental health institutions

were thrust into the spotlight

and found wanting.

Across the board, wholesale changes were required

to overhaul the broken system.

Those improvements would usher in the end of this site.

The admissions of patients began to decrease

because the general hospitals began to establish

psychiatric hospitals.

And in order for a patient to get to a psychiatric facility,

they had to first go through the general hospital.

As a result, the number of patients

being sent to Leros rapidly declined.

Over the following years, patients were gradually moved

into community care, and the institution's buildings

were eventually shut down.

By the late 1990s,

the Leros Asylum was completely abandoned,

and this distressing period consigned to the past.

But it's far from the end of its tragic story.

In March 2011, Syria erupted into civil war,

following a wave of pro-democracy protests

that spread across North Africa and the Middle East,

known as the Arab Spring.

The repercussions would be felt on the small island of Leros.

By 2015, more than a million refugees had arrived

on European shores.

Human traffickers would take these refugees,

smuggle them to islands near Leros,

and leave them to be rescued by the Greek Coast Guard.

In March of 2016, the area in front of the hospital

was opened up as a camp that was designated to be

the initial meeting point

of refugees entering the European Union.

According to some estimates,

there were up to 1,500 people arriving

on Leros every day.

For the next five years, the old Leros Asylum

and the grounds that surround it,

served as a neglected home

for desperate immigrants seeking a better life.

A more humanitarian answer needed to be found.

In 2021, the Greek government created a new reception center

on the island for these people, and this camp in front

of the hospital was finally abandoned.

Today, there are no plans to restore or demolish

the old asylum.

But in the building's shadow,

a growing tourism industry now thrives.

I am proud of my island.

Leros is here, it's beautiful, and everyone should visit.

In southwest Oklahoma, are the remains of a complex

built during an era of disturbing change.

The buildings are all solid and functional.

They're constructed with the same type of bricks,

and flat roofs, and minimal decoration.

When you enter the site, it's clear that the buildings

are all in really bad disrepair,

and inside are identical rooms.

It looks like a dormitory, but who's staying here?

Discarded toys and small chairs,

suggest this was a space used by children.

Over the years, hundreds of students

would walk through these doors.

For the most part, they came here forcibly

and against their will.

This site wasn't a one-off.

It was part of a much larger program across the nation.

This is the start of a dark chapter of American history.

What happened inside these walls would shape the lives

of children across Oklahoma for generations.

The kids came from many different tribes.

They all spoke in different languages,

and they would get punished physically.

I'm sure that it was a scary place.

2 In Lawton, Oklahoma, is the ruin of a building

with a troubling legacy that still runs deep.

So this place is very significant

to the Native American community.

Don't think there's very many people

that don't have a connection.

It's incredible.

Yolonda Ramos works closely with the Kiowa, Comanche,

and Apache nations to maintain this site

and to document its unsettling past.

There were many students who came when they were

about six years old.

And, in the early days,

there were a lot of bad stories.

and, in the later years, there were better times.

The origins of this place

are tied to a number of government acts

that tried to limit Native Americans' rights.

This included the notorious

Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Thousands are forced to give up their land and relocate

west of the Mississippi River.

This created a territorial divide

between the United States and Native Americans.

A series of violent conflicts between those two communities

would result in an extraordinary meeting.

In 1867,

the representatives of multiple Native American nations

met with representatives of the U.S. Government.

They came together to negotiate what became known

as the Medicine Lodge Treaty.

From the very start, the indigenous communities

were at a disadvantage.

The multiple languages spoken by the Native American nations

required numerous interpreters, which created confusion

and the opportunity for exploitation.

In addition, pressure was applied to accept the terms

of the deal by using the threat

of military force and starvation.

In signing the treaty, tribal leaders agreed

to relinquish valuable lands and important hunting grounds.

Part of that agreement was to educate the native children,

hence the boarding schools here being built.

This one was called Fort Sill.

It originally opened in 1871

and moved to this site in 1892.

Its distressing goal would never be forgotten.

One of the purposes of this residential boarding school

is to separate these children from their families

and communities, thus making them vulnerable

to indoctrination with a new culture.

These schools were built to assimilate the children.

I think their idea of assimilation was to make

the kids good little Christian boys and girls,

to assimilate them to the white man's way

and to pull them from their old ways.

The main focus of the studies for the boys and girls was

agriculture and home economics and English, of course.

The curriculum the school enforced was influenced

by Captain Richard Henry Pratt,

a veteran military man turned educator.

In 1892, at a national conference,

Pratt makes his famous statement that essentially says,

"Kill the Indian in him and save the man."

This motto became the core philosophy of over 500

Indian boarding schools across the country.

The schools achieved assimilation by operating

with a strict military-like regime.

Culturally, we wear our hair long.

When the kids came here, they cut the kids' hair

completely off, and then they ultimately

moved on to making them dress in military-style uniforms.

Just like the military, when children stepped

out of line, they were given harsh punishments.

It was a part of them teaching the kids discipline

and another part of teaching them to become more like them.

At the Native American school in nearby Anadarko,

which operated on similar principles as Fort Sill,

a tragic story demonstrates the climate of fear

the children lived under.

After a young boy was severely whipped,

he and two friends attempted to run away.

They were later found frozen to death

outside the school grounds.

They were just too terrified to come back.

There are a lot of negative stories.

There is so much history here.

I gotta take a second, sorry.

It makes me a little emotional.

Essentially, it's ethnocide, and this practice of attempting

to strip away people's culture

continues well into the 20th century.

It wasn't until the Great Depression struck in 1929

that indigenous communities' rights

slowly started to progress.

Native American families are hit really hard

because of lack of financial opportunities,

structural racism, and generations of land loss.

In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt introduced

the Indian Reorganization Act.

The law ushered in long overdue and often gradual improvements.

And this would become a catalyst for change

at the school.

2 In the 1930s, the harsh conditions

at the Fort Sill Indian School slowly began to improve

after the introduction of the Indian Reorganization Act.

This new law protected and restored land

to indigenous Americans and encouraged self-government.

It also supported the preservation and revival

of Native American practices and traditions.

They started to...

work on building new buildings for the campus.

In 1936, the gymnasium.

And in 1939, they built the school building.

So, Fort Sill Indian School ultimately became

somewhat of a lifeline for the Native families.

I am half Comanche.

A lot of people thought we were here for punishment,

but it wasn't.

I stayed here because my mother, she couldn't take care of me.

Jimmy Ray Caddo enrolled at Fort Sill in 1938

when he was six years old.

At first, I was scared.

I stand over there in the corner of that building

over there looking down that road

every Saturday or Sunday, looking for my mother.

I stayed here until I was 21 years old,

and I never went home.

The ethos of strict discipline still existed,

but the policy of forced assimilation had ended.

The education Jimmy received was now more focused

on just teaching vocational skills.

The goal of this school was to teach you to be farmers.

We had about 35 cows we had to milk in the morning.

School here, it taught me a lot.

You know, I joined the Navy, from here.

I stayed until I was a chief petty officer.

I learned from here

how to get along with other people.

That's why, when I joined the Navy,

it was right down my alley.

So I did very good.

I've seen the world.

In the years after Jimmy graduated in 1953,

Fort Sills started to offer a more well-rounded

education to its students.

The quality of education did get better as time went on

because they started to expand into more subjects.

One student that I talked to said that she actually loved it

because she was able to be around other students

that looked like her.

They were all Native American students

and they all had a very strong sense of culture.

Fort Sill continued to function

through the 1960s and '70s,

but its end was drawing near.

In 1980, the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the school

due to a lack of federal funds to keep it going.

Most of the kids at that point had been integrated

into the public schools, and so they didn't feel like

there was a need to provide further funding to the school.

To date, 526 Native American boarding schools

have been identified in the United States.

Their impact should always be remembered.

Research is ongoing to uncover the long legacy of trauma

for those who were confined there.

There are plans to build a new school on the site,

which will be used by indigenous and Native American children.

It is going to be a huge project.

I absolutely do feel a responsibility.

I feel like that I have to do my part in protecting our land

and protecting our culture

and in ensuring that the language continues on.

And that's very important to me.

In Scotland, on the outskirts of the capital, Edinburgh,

is a clandestine site built

at a time of widespread paranoia.

Following a rough dirt track, you come to a clearing

with small brick buildings.

It doesn't look like much, frankly.

A fence still runs around the outside of the property.

Whatever it is, it's still an air of secrecy

that surrounds it.

As you get closer to the unremarkable structure,

it's impossible to ignore the solid steel doors.

Their presence suggests this is a place with something to hide.

What were they guarding?

The answer lies deep within.

The first thing you see is a long sliding tunnel

leading underground.

At a time of war, this was a subterranean headquarters,

key to Britain's survival.

Few people knew about it, and even fewer

ever saw behind its walls.

This was part of a much larger network

that protected the whole country.

Rumor was that the queen herself would be hurried here

if there was a doomsday scenario.

I was conscripted into the RAF in September 1954,

and after basic training,

we were brought here and introduced to the place,

and was very impressive, actually.

A super state-of-the-art building in those days.

Alan Treloar was 18 years old when he was called up

for national service.

For 18 months, he was posted at this top secret facility,

which was built in 1953.

You weren't allowed, really, to tell anybody anything

of what you were doing.

When I went home on leave or for a weekend,

parents wanted to know what I was doing, and I told them

the bare minimum of what I knew I was allowed to do.

There was a very good reason

the military personnel based here

were forbidden from revealing their activities.

Their mission was to safeguard the United Kingdom

from total annihilation.

In the early years of the Cold War, the main threat was

long-range Soviet bombers carrying deadly nuclear weapons.

To counter this danger, Britain's Air Ministry

developed a new radar network, code named ROTOR.

If an attack from the Soviet Union

were to come over the North Sea,

Scottish radar would be the first to detect it.

The Royal Air Force needed somewhere secure to coordinate

the ROTOR radar network in Scotland,

where no one would ever see it.

What they built was a subterranean fortress,

three stories deep, the complex covered

an area of over 37,000 square feet.

It was called Air Defence Notification Centre ,

and formed part of the United Kingdom's first line of defense

if World War III ever erupted.

It was the largest nuclear bunker in Scotland,

but barely anyone knew it existed.

In time, that would change with dramatic effect.

Exposed by a civilian espionage group,

it became a target for protests and sabotage.

2 In Scotland are the remains of a subterranean bunker

built in complete secrecy during the Cold War.

Its mission was to help keep the United Kingdom safe

against the threat of communism.

It was a maze of corridors and rooms

around a huge central atrium

where a map plotting table allowed RAF officers

to compile a full picture of any potential incoming attack

from Soviet bombers.

Most days, day-to-day work

was reporting flights which were planned

by RAF Bomber Command.

And it was up to us to plot them and identify them

using radar and the other means that we had.

On numerous occasions, the Soviets tested

the UK's new defense system.

And, of course, sometimes they were

Russian airplanes which shouldn't be there,

and we were able to scramble aircraft,

and to go and intercept them

and accompany them out, out of the area.

But in 1958,

just three years after this facility became operational,

it was already obsolete.

Missiles could be fired from thousands of miles away.

The weaponry was now more advanced

than Britain's radar network.

That didn't mean the bunker's use to the country was over.

Although the bunker no longer functioned

in its operational defense capacity,

the engineering behind it

was still immensely valuable.

The British government believed that the bunker would have been

able to withstand a three megaton bomb

dropped in the city center of Edinburgh.

So the bunker's designation was switched

from defense to survival.

It was known as a Regional Seat of Government,

or "RSG" for short.

Dr. Sean Kinnear

is a historian and expert on Scotland's Cold War history.

Here at Barnton, there would be about 400 people

specifically chosen, so after a nuclear attack,

they would be the central nucleus

to try and restore some form

of government and society in the aftermath.

And, although it's never been confirmed,

it has been suggested

that this would be the place of refuge for the queen

if there was a nuclear strike

while she was in Scotland.

Yet, as the government made preparations

to survive a doomsday attack,

some members of the public

became increasingly worried

about the spiraling nuclear arms race.

While many protested peacefully,

others resorted to more militant methods.

The location and function of the bunker remained a secret

until 1963,

when an anti-nuclear group called the "Spies for Peace"

managed to break into another government bunker

in the south of England.

There they found a load of classified documents.

These outlined the locations

of other RSGs around the country.

And these directed them to a previously undiscovered

base right outside of Edinburgh.

They wanted to expose this network of bunkers

that they were saying was for the privileged few,

and the rest of the population were just gonna have to take

what was coming, in terms of a nuclear attack.

So, when they exposed sites like this, it was to say,

"We have found your network.

It's not as robust as you thought,

and now everyone knows about it."

The government was terrified.

Barton bunker became the target for regular

anti-nuclear demonstrations for the next decade.

They demanded the site to be shut down.

But as the looming threat of the Cold War faded,

the protests began to ease.

In 1983, the bunker was officially closed.

So, at that point, the site became an attraction

for local vandals, who would break in and slowly,

bit by bit, tear the place apart.

Arsonists eventually found their way into the property.

All the equipment and furnishings

that hadn't already been stripped out were destroyed,

and the bunker was left a blackened shell.

In 1996, the derelict site was purchased

by private owners.

They are now in the process

of restoring the Cold War relic.

The intention is to bring it back to resemble

what the structure would have looked like

whilst it was in operation during the 1950s

and give back to the community, allow them in

to see what they weren't allowed to see

for so many years.