Original subtitles

Narrator: A desert canyon where fortunes were made

and fates were sealed.

There's not much here besides desert and rock,

what would draw people here?

Well, in these remote inhospitable locations

the answer is usually the same.

Money.

A mighty cliff top complex on the island of Malta.

It was damp, it was dark,

it was like being in a cell in many ways.

But things would have been much worse in battle.

A rural area in Poland that once connected the world.

A lot of the electronics are still here,

this two megawatt transmitter it's, I mean it's just unheard of.

That's enough to power a small town.

And an island fortress in Scotland with a dramatic back story.

It was armed to the teeth with guns, canon and anti-air defence.

But all these guns were useless

against the main threat of that time.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

The wilds of Nevada usa,

in a hostile desert

are the haunting remains of a settlement.

This place is only a 45 minute drive from Las Vegas

but it feels like a million miles away from the casinos,

the bright lights and the glamour.

I mean you can see that there are a number

of man made structures around, there's some large tanks,

there's bits of machinery.

Old wooden buildings are echoes of the 19th century.

But scattered around are remnants of the 20th.

There's this rusting old abandoned truck,

a crashed plane.

This place looks like it's trapped in some type of time warp.

This is a wild place.

If the climate doesn't get you then nature will.

Humans were never designed to live in a place like this.

The place is filled with decaying machinery.

But what was it all for?

If you're gonna go to somewhere so extreme,

you have to be drawn by something

and usually in places like this

it's something to do with what's in the ground.

This entrance had been covered up for 80 years

but when we popped into this thing,

there's a half a mile of tunnel in here

that nobody had been in for years and years.

People came here to make their fortunes

but for some life would turn out very differently.

There's nine different levels in here,

there's three miles of tunnels and it goes 600 feet deep.

Tony werly first came to the tunnels 25 years ago.

They were dug as part of a search for a precious mineral.

This is an extremely hard rock,

this is like a number seven hard from one to ten,

this is a seven which is stronger than cement.

To come here, you need a pretty good reason

and in the most extreme locations like this

that's usually to make money.

What they were looking for

was not only hard but glistening white.

This is a vein, you can see it runs from here

all the way over into here

and you see it's running up the mountain.

The white rock here would be the source of untold wealth.

The first person to recognise it's value

was a man called John moss.

John moss was your classic frontiersman,

they really should be making movies about this guy.

He was the first non-native

to descend the Colorado river rapids by raft.

He spent three-and-a-half days being drenched,

ducked and pounded by the river

as he travelled through the Grand Canyon.

Originally from utica New York,

moss was on an expedition into western america.

He apparently had a real gift for languages

and he spent a lot of time travelling around

with almost two dozen different native American tribes

which allowed him to immerse himself in their culture.

Moss was drawn to Nevada by rumours

about that strange white rock in the mountains.

He suspected it was quartz, a mineral that forms in veins

when hot magma interacts with ground water.

Quartz is sio2, it's silica,

it's one of the most abundant minerals on the planet,

it can occur in certain different ways

as these veins, rich in silica

but rich in other minerals like lead,

zinc, silver and sometimes gold.

Moss analysed the mineral and his hunch was confirmed.

This is El dorado canyon,

home to the richest gold deposits in southern Nevada.

Once the miners found this white coarse vein,

they never left track of it, they just keep it in sight,

and so they'll chase it wherever it goes.

As you go into the mountain, the geology changes,

maybe your vein suddenly goes off on a different angle.

So you'd follow that

if that's where the potential resource was.

However, following the trail of quartz

was only the first part of a complicated process.

It's important to note here,

they're not finding big gold nuggets,

in this situation a lot of the gold is small particles in the veins.

Carts filled with quartz were pulled out of the tunnels.

But extracting gold from it was not only expensive

but potentially deadly.

You have to crush this rock up as fine as you can,

all the way down to the texture of flour.

The crushed quartz was then mixed with a very toxic chemical.

You would mix it in these big cyanide tanks here

and the cyanide would pull the microscopic pieces of gold

and silver out of the ore.

But with high risk came big rewards.

El dorado was making money hand over fist.

The gold mining that took place in El dorado canyon is phenomenal.

About $200 million worth of gold and silver came out of that mine.

For every tonne of quartz, 28g of gold was extracted.

But the greater challenge

was getting the gold out of El dorado.

Everything has to be shipped in by water,

trucked up the canyon through the Colorado river.

In the mid 1800s,

there was only one port in the canyon.

A small dock on the river called Nelson's landing.

But despite the harshness of the conditions,

despite the difficulty in getting the supplies there,

what's being produced is so valuable

that you actually get pretty heavy traffic

in and out of the canyon

and Nelson's landing turns out to be one of the busiest transition points

for supplies in the whole region.

Cut off from law abiding society,

El dorado eventually became a hotbed for criminal activity.

At a time when much of the us was under prohibition,

here there was a thriving black market.

It's said that the alcohol produced there for you know,

pennies was actually sold

for up to $1 a gallon just across state lines.

Nelson's landing had turned into a pirates bay.

Back in the late 1800s,

El dorado canyon was one of the most violent

and lawless places in america.

Yeah it's a bad place to be,

in the 1880s not even a killing is a good enough reason

to bring the sheriff out here.

200 miles away,

he tells them they have to fend for themselves out here.

Local miner, John riggs, later wrote,

"I never think there was another place

"in proportion to the population

"where so many murders were committed.

"And the perpetrators never bought to justice or even apprehended."

Greed, vice and murder

made El dorado Nevada's first sin city.

But it wasn't the arrival of the law that eventually bought it down.

When world war ii started,

all the miners that worked at the mine went to war.

This mine right here is where they were when they left,

when they came back from world war ii,

they never opened this mine again.

It's said that $1 million in gold was left in the El dorado mine

but nowadays it would cost 2 million to dig it out.

The mine has been silent for 80 years.

But the wrecks of military vehicles

are signs that the drama here continued in a different way.

Hollywood came to El dorado to film '3,000 miles to Graceland'.

Big names, a big budget, car chases and a crashed plane.

But it was a bomb.

But good film or bad film,

the legacy remains and we see it before us now.

Hidden in plain sight on the south east coast of Malta,

a great complex stands guard over the shore.

Got these azure seas, rocky Sandy beaches,

you've got these tall cliffs rising out of the sea.

And as your eye follows these rocky cliffs,

your eye suddenly realises

that you're not looking at a cliff anymore.

Look at those bars on the windows.

If I didn't know any better,

I'd think this was a place designed to lock up

the most desperate criminals.

It has a almost prison like quality

and yet given it's placement right on this important coastline

that argues that this is probably a fort.

Viewed from above, the distinctive features confirm

that this place was built for defence.

Here we can see elements of a fortress

that date back years

but we also see elements that are clearly modern.

That are clearly meant to withstand 20th century weapons.

When you think about all the Greek, Italian,

Spanish islands that aren't fortified,

why is this island fortified?

It must have some real strategic importance.

It was once preparing to face a colossal naval assault

but who was the enemy

and did those inside live to tell the tale?

The story here dates back to the 19th century

when Malta was under British rule.

Matthew balzan is a local historian

who has made detailed studies of the complex.

Here we are in tunnels

below the main sites which run all the way across.

From outside, one would not realise what lies beneath here.

Although most of what remains above ground was built later,

the original defences here were hidden from view.

Here we are seeing an example

of a 12.5 inch 38 tonne rifle muzzle loading gun.

The time when it was put in place here in 1880

was the largest example of rifle muzzle loading technology

the British army had at it's disposal.

Comparing it to the size of a human being,

one can immediately realise the sheer size of such artillery.

What's more interesting about this example,

is that these are the last remaining examples in the whole world

where we still see the original gun

on it's original carriage

and platform in their original locations.

This represents the alchemy of gun technology at the time.

It's rifled, meaning it can fire accurately

at a much longer range,

more penetrating power,

fires a bigger shell with far greater accuracy.

It's purpose is to kind of spar and jab with assaulting fleets.

But one of these guns alone would not have been enough.

As the many openings in the cliff suggest

half a dozen of them were once trained upon the horizon.

One can just imagine the sound which would be created

when a gun of this size would be fired.

To give just a small example, a gun powder cartridge when fired

inside the chamber of this gun

would expand in volume 20,000 times.

And all of that has to go out in smoke and noise.

Located just a few miles south of the capital city of Valletta

is fort delimara.

The British, they learned some valuable lessons

from Malta's past,

they learned for example that it's not enough

to fortify the grand harbour around Valletta,

you have to always fortify the secondary harbour,

marsaxlokk at the end of the island.

What had happened previously

is everybody had left marsaxlokk undefended

and powers like the French had just sailed in there,

off loaded their amphibious forces

and taken the island essentially through the back door.

So what you see the British do in the 19th century

is pouring millions into these new fortifications

in this secondary harbour, the marsaxlokk harbour.

Once again, it was the French who were threatening to attack

but now the fort was ready for them.

These massive guns were put here

because this was a desperately sensitive spot

for the royal Navy to defend.

Moats on the landward sides protected it to the rear.

But the real key to defeating an invasion force

was the invaluable element of surprise.

The fortifications are deliberately small

and almost invisible from the sea.

They're low profile, they're pushed up,

they're built out of the bedrock

so they blend into the actual hill itself,

into the cliffs.

In the olden days, you'd build tall walls

to keep people out but in the gun powder age,

you've got to build low walls that are hard to see

and that are thick and backed up with earth.

This is a fortress designed to be effective against modern assault.

This is the very model of modern military architecture.

In the end, the invasion force didn't come

and the guns were never fired at French ships.

But the threat remained

and in time a new enemy and a new threat emerged.

From the 1870s when the British start building this fort

and start adding artillery,

they are continually upgrading the artillery

as there's changes in casting techniques,

metallurgy, shell construction.

Here it was the final upgrade to the forts artillery.

The six inch breach loading gun which was installed here in 1938

in preparation for what would become world war ii.

The British had spent decades

preparing for an attack on Malta and now it seemed imminent.

The main target was this harbour.

The British military had to be prepared

in case of enemy action,

in fact this gun would go on to be fired in anger

during the same conflict.

In June 1940,

Italy joined the war on the side of the axis powers

but she had ambitions that spread well beyond Europe.

Malta emerges early on in world war ii

as a place of, you know, great strategic importance, why?

Because Italy and then Germany are trying to conquer north Africa.

Under the leadership of irwin rammel

known famously as the desert fox,

the axis powers invaded north Africa

as part of a plan to seize the valuable oil fields there.

The fighting was fierce and bloody

and the allied bases on Malta were to be a vital importance.

If rammel, the great German tank general

had been able to blast through from north Africa

to take the caucuses to meet up with German forces

in the caucuses

then the Nazi's would have had the oil,

the resources they needed to keep on fighting

and maybe to keep the war going a long time,

maybe even to win world war ii.

But for the Italians and the Germans to communicate with north Africa,

to resupply their armies,

they have to be able to freely cross the mediterranean

and they're attacked in this by the raf and by the royal Navy

which are based in Malta.

One of the most damaging raids by the British

on axis communications happens in September 1941

when the British using their code breaking at bletchley park,

they learn of this convoy,

they put submarines right out in it's path,

they sink two of these big luxury liners.

And German troops are drowned at sea.

The threat posed by Malta

was simply to great for the axis to ignore.

An invasion plan was quickly drawn up

and fort delimara was suddenly in the firing line.

Hitler sees that Malta is really a burr under the saddle,

that needs to be removed

and so he actually puts together this thing for 1942

called operation Hercules.

Marsaxlokk harbour

would have offered a good place to land

because it is a very wide harbour,

therefore accommodating several hundred of vessels at the same time,

so it would allow an easy landing of the enemy force.

The axis planned a combined aerial and amphibious attack.

30,000 paratroopers would drop inland.

While 70,000 more troops would arrive to the south on Navy ships.

Once the defences here had been overpowered,

the plan was to march north towards valetta.

The fort here sits at the tip,

at the entrance of marsaxlokk harbour

therefore any attempt at enemy invasion

would have to bypass this location in order to gain access

therefore the fort was Paramount

to the defences of this side of Malta.

The invasion was scheduled to begin in the summer of 1942,

all the troops stationed here could do was wait.

The British forces on Malta

were always expecting that German invasion to arrive.

And at one point, they saw a vessel on the horizon.

Everybody was bracing themselves

for the bombardment that would surely proceed this German fleet.

In August 1942,

search lights of the fort captured the target

just outside the harbour

and immediately guns in place here fired against it.

But the target they had sighted was not the feared invasion fleet.

It turned out it was an e-boat, the equivalent of a pt-boat

that was outlaying mines in the sea off of Malta.

And that gives you an idea of how worried everyone was

that any minute on Malta would be the minute before Malta fell.

But of course, Malta never fell.

Although Malta had been in the sights of the axis for a long while,

a turn of events on a different front

meant that they would never capture it.

Because Hitler gets bogged down in December 1941

at the gates of Moscow,

decides he's going to make a turn into the caucuses in 1942

to try to take the oil fields.

Hitler simply doesn't have enough force to deal with Malta,

so he just has to let it go.

With the invasion cancelled,

fort delimara continued to guard the southern shores of Malta

until the very end of the war.

Twice in it's lifetime it,

had faced the threat of invasion and had lived to tell the tale.

In 1964, the British handed over Malta

to the local government and fort delimara went with it.

In the Polish countryside are the remains of a place

that history has largely forgotten.

We're in a place called Gavin,

pretty much in the geographical centre of Poland.

Hidden amongst the trees

is a central building and a lattice tower.

You get the feeling when all this was built this was open land.

Now the trees have grown up,

a young forest has covered a lot of this hidden (indistinct).

In the tall grass are the footprints of an engineering giant.

You can see other buildings,

you can see concrete pads some distance away.

Clearly this was a big operation at one time.

It's hard to believe now but back in the 1970s,

this was a high security location.

This was pretty heavily trafficked,

pretty big site

and beside it all this wreckage of this steel trusses

and girders lying in a heap.

These scattered elements add up to a greater haul,

but one major piece of the puzzle is missing.

Tomasz mis is part of a group that protects and preserves the site.

We are in central Poland in a restricted area

of high national and military importance.

We were allowed to get in,

never the less very few people are able to do so.

Today the building is empty,

all that remains is mould, rust and solemn reminders of the cold war.

Oh, yes.

Political documents.

But there are signs

that it once required an enormous amount of power.

So this site we are currently in was extremely powerful,

even for today's standards.

One thing that's fascinating at this site and unusual

is that a lot of the electronics are still here.

All this stuff looks kind of old and decrepit today

but it was state of the art back in the '80s.

It consumed so much electrical power

that a small city could be powered using the thing which came in here.

Outside the main building

is a clue to what that much needed power was for.

A concrete anchor designed for industrial cables

is a common site at the bottom of these very tall structures.

So this is the foundation of one of the first level guy ropes

which held the mast stem in vertical position.

15 of these anchor points were scattered

across the countryside.

They were used to hold up the Warsaw radio mast.

What we're looking at here is the site

of what was once the most ambitious radio transmitting tower

in the world.

It's hard to wrap your mind around how tall this thing was,

2,100 feet,

this was once the tallest man made structure in the world.

This tower was designed at a time when Poles

were leaving Poland in their thousands.

One thing that's fascinating about Poland

is how many Polish people don't live there.

They live in all of these other places in the world.

By one estimate, there are 20 million

people of Polish descent around the world.

So after world war ii, when the borders of Poland changed

and many Poles actually emigrated also to the United States,

a way of communicating with them was desperately needed.

With such a wide spread community before the advent of the Internet,

reaching Poles around the world was a massive challenge.

So in fact the Poles were looking to set up a radio station

in the geographical centre of Poland

that could reach Poles all around Poland equally

but that was also big enough to transmit

to these Polish communities around the globe.

In 1970,

construction of a new transmission tower began.

Switchboards, transformers

and guardhouses were all vital components.

And in 1974, Polish radio was heard around the globe

through one of the words most powerful transmitters.

The engineer who designed it was called yan polock,

he must have been brilliant.

It was designed in 86 sections all joined together

and then anchored to the earth with 15 steel,

they call them ropes,

cables that would anchor it in any kind of wind conditions.

So when the wind blew they would correct for each other,

they would stabilise it.

The tower stood precisely 2,120 feet tall,

it's great height was the key

to reaching the most far away listeners.

They were long wave radio signals

and when I say long each, each wave,

I mean a literal wave in the atmosphere

of electromagnetic radiation was over 1,000m.

So why would someone want to use those very long wavelengths

because they tend to follow the curvature of the earth

and they can travel very, very long distance

and still be received.

So in the right conditions signals from this tower

could reach Africa and North America really just about anywhere.

The broadcasts were produced in a studio 60 miles away in Warsaw

before being sent via an intermediary tower

to this radio transmitter station.

They would transmit locally to a radio receiving tower here

near the base of the transmitter

and that's the big metal structure we see that's still standing,

I mean, it looks big but it's puny compared to the transmitter.

This tower is approximately nine times smaller

than the mast that was located on the other field.

On the top, there is still a dish

which received and transmitted signals

between the intermediary tower and Warsaw.

The main purpose of this tower was to collect the signal

from the Polish radio studios so anything music

and speech and all of it

so that it could be later encoded and broadcasted.

Then they would take that signal and then amplify it dramatically,

change the wavelength to this long-wave system

and then that's the signal that would go around the world.

This engineering giant was Poland's crown Jewel.

But on 8 August 1991

the tallest structure in the world came crashing down.

The mast broke down, twisted

and collapsed onto the antenna field,

including the exact place where we are standing.

This tower would have been the tallest structure in the world

until the construction of the burj khalifa in 2009.

It was 17 years old so it wasn't that old actually

but in fact, it needed a desperate renovation

after these 15, 16, 17 years of constant operation.

Building the tallest structure in the communist bloc

in Eastern Europe was a pretty dodgy proposition

considering how just poorly things were maintained.

They were just known for their shoddy architecture,

shoddy maintenance.

So in 1991, an attempt was made to renovate the mast

as it was getting older, however,

the entire process was done with a couple of major mistakes.

A technician was hired to carry out repairs

but he was unqualified for the job,

he detached a major guy rope without adequate support.

The lowest part of the mast fell towards the helix house

destroying it as we can see it here.

Gas lights designed to warn off air traffic

smashed onto the ground starting a fierce fire.

Some of the bottles with gases exploded

as the mast fell on them

and a couple of fire brigades needed to extinguish all of this.

All that was left of the tower was a mass of twisted steel

and broken glass.

It was nearly impossible to walk through this area

because it was all covered with the material

coming from the masts.

Nobody's hurt and yet it is a national scandal,

a couple of engineers are jailed for it.

This place where we are here now was left largely intact

after the catastrophe took place so, yes,

all around we can still find many elements of the mast.

For Poles across the world, Polish radio had fallen silent.

An engineering masterpiece gone before its time.

Today it is closed to visitors.

It's probably the biggest and tallest structure on the planet

that most people have never heard of.

A landmark in the truest sense of the word

now hidden from view in anonymous Polish countryside.

In Scotland near the ancient city of Edinburgh

is a rock that helped to defend a nation.

We're in northern climes here

and it's a island surrounded by dark cold water

at the entrance of a great estuary.

It's wet, it's cold,

it's not a place you want to be spending your summer vacation.

Empty concrete buildings provide reminders

of the former residents.

Clearly, a lot of people used to live here,

perhaps some kind of commune but now it's all overgrown,

the only sign of civilisation are some chickens.

Today this island is deserted

but less than 100 years ago it was vital for Scotland's defences.

It's heading into Edinburgh

and any place like that has a defensive role to play.

Two miles out of Edinburgh

a ferry will take you to a place where few people dare to tread.

The journey crosses the firth of forth,

an estuary that leads into the heart of Scotland.

Gordon barclay is an expert on the island history

which involves a wartime tragedy.

This is the northernmost 9.2-inch gun emplacement.

There are three of them down the spine of the island

and this is the one that covers the north channel.

This is inchkeith the gatekeeper to Scotland's waters,

during world war I

the island was issued with nine new Cannon.

Most of these fortifications are built in the early 1900s,

1903, 1904, '05, '06, '07

as they're responding to these fears of German invasion.

To defend the firth of forth

it was made into an impregnable fortress.

But that firepower wasn't enough to prevent a disaster.

On 4 September out near the main island,

'hms pathfinder' was sunk, went down in a few minutes

and only a handful of men survived out of over 200 crew.

When these guns were put in place

they were designed to fire on surface vessels,

dreadnought and destroyers.

They weren't built to defend against anything beneath the waves.

The firth of forth had been breached.

Two days before the attack

there had been an opportunity to prevent it,

but inchkeith was found wanting.

On 2 September 1914,

a u-boat submerged,

managed to get all the way up to the forth rail bridge

by about 10:30 in the evening.

For ages, it was undetected

and then suddenly someone spotted a periscope

sticking up out of the waves and the u-boat left the area.

Two days later, that same submarine surfaced

just outside of the firth of forth

and took a shot and sunk 'hms pathfinder'.

It was the first sinking by a submarine in world war I

of a ship.

The Germans then rely all in world war I on u-boats,

submarines that can get past the British blockade

and they can attack British warships,

British shipping covertly.

This island fortress had failed.

In 1914 there was only one way to detect enemy submarines.

The only way to detect a submarine was the human eye,

binoculars looking out at the sea,

this grey featureless surface, hour after hour

and if one spotted the wake of a periscope

going through the water you were lucky.

Other than that there was no technology

to detect a submarine

or indeed to prevent a submarine penetrating a base.

At that time there was a lot of hysteria

about new German weapons,

the public were reporting sightings of u-boats left, right and centre,

99% of them ended up being false reports.

Everybody saw a periscope, everybody saw a submarine

so they were just overwhelmed with warnings of German submarines

and so the British came to disregard them.

So when a boy actually saw clearly a submarine and reported it

they ignored him.

Three months after the first u-boat attack

the firth of forth began a major upgrade.

A network of new defences between the islands were built.

Inchkeith is so important

in this anti-submarine war for the British

they begin first of all by defending the firth of forth

with anti-submarine nets

that will trap a German submarine trying to come in.

Or will attach a buoy to the German submarine

so it will drag this buoy along the surface

and we'll be able to know where it is.

But Cannon and nets weren't the key to defending Scotland.

The most powerful defences were a collection of small huts

built to the rear of inchkeith.

Places like this were vital

to the protection of the firth of forth.

The men in the gun crews at least were out in the fresh air

but here you were stuck hour in, hour out,

day in, day out, watching the instruments.

These huts were built on the island

as part of a powerful new anti-submarine weapon,

the detector loop.

A submarine produces a magnetic field from its large steel hull.

By laying three cables in a loop on the river bed

its magnetic signature could be detected

and a warning signal sent to the guard huts.

The men listening out for an enemy submarine

had to be somewhere quiet where they could concentrate,

where there would be no noise to drown out or to distract them.

Here at my feet, you see the outlet

of one bundle of cables from detector loops

under the river still there.

For six long years during world war ii

these huts were never empty,

an officer was always on station

waiting for a signal that might never come.

There were multiple layers of defence,

a submarine would first be detected passing the isle of may

and again by the detector loops just east of inchkeith.

Parallel with inchkeith were the minefields

which if a submarine was detected entering them could be exploded,

it was pretty impregnable.

As far as we're aware,

no submarine ever penetrated the defences...

..Until the final hours of world war ii.

On 2 may 1945,

the first German regiments in Europe laid down their weapons,

they agreed to a total surrender to take place six days later.

But on the morning of 8 may, a u-boat crept into the forth.

Two hours before the end of the war,

one u-boat captain attacked a convoy leaving the river

out towards the isle of may,

and sank two ships, killing a number of men.

It was another tragedy for inchkeith.

German u-boat gets in

mainly because the British are napping,

they think the war's over,

it's the last day of the war, literally.

He claimed that he had not received the order

to stand down.

He had, however, been one of the officers responsible

for developing the new type of submarine

that he was commanding.

And to my mind, he ignored his orders

and decided to try out his new toy,

his murderous new toy.

Fort inchkeith saw the first submarine sinking

in world war I

and ended its watch with the final sinking world war ii.

Now few people cross the forth to visit the island,

what was once on the front line in the defence of Scotland

is now a safe haven for the wildlife

that has reclaimed it.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV