Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): An idyllic pacific island

that claimed thousands of lives.

They were angry

and they were fighting harder than they'd ever fought before.

A Russian bastion

that turned in to a vital centre of healing.

This place was armed for war against enemy ships

but it's gone down in history

for a battle against a very different kind of enemy.

An imperialist prison in Romania

which became a hot bed of revolution.

Getting sent here was a perfect opportunity

for a young communist activist.

And the remote complex in Chile built on treachery.

They were minding their own business

and they trusted this person

and in the end, he betrayed them.

(Theme music)

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

(Grim music)

Peleliu, a tiny island in the western pacific,

its tranquillity at odds with a hostile history.

It's this beautiful coral island, covered in jungle palms.

But the creeping vegetation

conceals remains of an ominous infrastructure.

There's, even now, the debris of warfare.

Tanks, amphibious tractors, guns and gun emplacements.

You notice that what looks to be an airstrip

has been carved out of the jungle.

And below ground there's more.

A closer look reveals quite a lot of ravines and hollows

almost dotted with caves.

And in them you can see evidence of past occupation,

the archaeology of war.

This place was known for a time as 'hell on earth'.

Des matsutaro is a local historian

whose ancestors witnessed the destruction unleashed here.

The site was devastated

beyond any one of my people's imaginations

'cause we've never seen destruction like this in our, our lives.

The airstrip cutting through the heart

of this island is the first clue to what went on here.

Here we've got an island that's relatively low in form

and it has some areas which are flat enough

to construct an airfield

and so it became a very strategic point

in this part of the pacific.

Next to the airfield stands a distinctive ruin

which looks like some kind of control centre

but it wasn't the local people running the operation.

There's a headquarters building,

very much in the Japanese imperial style,

very grand in size, clearly this was a place

that was gonna harbour a lot of Japanese naval

and military personnel.

Not only was it a place for them to,

to do their work, there was areas that

were living quarters that they had here.

This building also has a nerve centre,

where the high-ranking officials had a top secret...

Sensitive materials inside.

As these scarred remains show war was coming to peleliu.

By 1944 the us marines

were fighting their way through the Japanese controlled islands

in the western pacific.

The whole American strategy was island hopping

so we hop from necessary island to necessary island.

The kind of air support that would be required

for the operations to retake the Philippines

and to take Japan needed airfields,

needed islands.

That meant that the leathernecks,

the us marine corps had to retake those islands.

Peleliu was their next target.

But there were some who thought that an invasion here was unnecessary.

There was talk in the American command of bypassing

it but the marines were already on their transports.

The naval taskforce

was already setting sail for peleliu.

And it's decided,

"well, it's probably gonna be easy so let's just do it."

They assumed that the Japanese

would do the same thing they always did

and try to stop invaders on the beach.

The last thing they expected was that the Japanese army

would have learned from its mistakes.

But they did.

The stage was set for a bloody showdown

between two great military powers.

So, we've got two American rounds that were lodged

in to this column here.

And you can see by the trajectory where it went in,

came from my left side

and that's where the landing beaches are at.

8:30am, September 15...

The marines began the agonisingly slow journey

towards the beaches in amphibious vehicles.

We're at orange beach where the Americans began

their invasion onto this island.

It was highly defended due to the fact that this beach

is actually the shortest distance between the water

and the actual runway which is the main objective.

After a week of fierce fighting and unbearable temperatures,

the airfield was secure.

The first marine division managed to take

the airfields on peleliu island comparatively quickly.

It appeared that victory was in sight.

But aerial intelligence collected before the invasion

had failed to spot a key detail.

The marines were walking into a trap.

Part of the problem

with identifying a lot of the features of the island

from above is when you have thick vegetation,

you can hide sheer cliffs,

you can hide quite a lot of the topography under a blanket of green.

So, it looked like, "oh, if I take the island,

"I've, I've got the whole island."

The Japanese defenders had made the most

of peleliu's hidden geography.

It's made out of predominantly

ancient coral reef limestone

that dissolves into caves and natural ravines.

And actually it's quite a soft rock.

You can actually build your own defences

into the mountain.

It had been impossible for us intelligence

to identify the extent

of the massive Japanese defence network

hidden below ground.

This caves that we have here in peleliu,

there's about 300 to 400 of them.

They took about ten months

to develop and construct these caves.

Many of the caves were also dug out by local labour as well.

Prior to the invasion the Japanese had evacuated

all the local men off this island

due to the fact that

they didn't want any of the local men

to go over to the us side...

Side and reveal the locations of these caves.

The Japanese commander colonel kunio nakagawa

could control the entire defence

from the heart of this cliff-side fortress.

The Japanese were hunkered in within this Ridge.

Many Japanese men had lived and stayed in these caves'

very harsh conditions.

Some of these caves were small enough for one person,

his gear and some supplies.

Many Americans called that a sniper cave or a foxhole.

Other caves are actually much bigger

and they would connect with other caves

and interlock and form a network of caves

up to a dozen or so entrances.

The fight for peleliu was about to become

one of the most brutal of the pacific campaign.

(Dramatic music)

It's a real departure, peleliu,

from the normal Japanese doctrine

which is to fight at the water's edge,

deny the marines a foothold.

The marines get ashore, take the airstrip

but then they're pounded from this central height,

this big massive that overlooks the island.

The Japanese defence was designed to pound fire down

into pre-registered positions

where they knew the Americans would have to come.

To fully control the island,

the marines needed to take the high ground.

The Americans called that bloody nose Ridge

'cause first marine division,

they went up there and they got a bloody nose.

The battle for bloody nose Ridge was just absolutely ferocious.

For the marines, it was having to fight

this deadly adversary that had essentially entombed himself

inside this cliff face.

And he had to be dug out and he was not gonna surrender.

What it came down to was grunts with rifles, mortars and guns.

Peleliu's network of caves and tunnels

meant that the marines could never be sure

where their enemy was.

American soldiers would be running up an American flag

and then they would smell Japanese rice cookers

underneath them as the Japanese were still installed

in these fortified caverns under their feet.

After nearly two months

of grinding their way up bloody nose Ridge,

the us forces were finally closing in on victory.

The Japanese commander on the island

transmits a last message to Tokyo saying,

"all is lost, the island has fallen."

And then he and his staff commit suicide.

This is where they found the body of colonel kunio nakagawa.

When the Americans came to this part of the island

and found his body,

that's when they declared the battle of peleliu over.

But for some, the conflict was not done.

Two years after world war ii was over,

a Japanese official had to come to peleliu

to prove to the remaining Japanese soldiers

that the war was really over,

that they could put their guns down and go home.

More than 12,000 us and Japanese soldiers

lost their lives in the ferocious battle for peleliu

and many more were injured.

After the war, the Americans calculated that

so good were the Japanese defences

that it took 1,500 rounds of bullets,

grenades or artillery to kill a single Japanese defender.

And when the locals returned to the island,

it was unrecognisable.

My people were asked by the Americans

to bring in fruits and vegetables to replant here.

Bring back coconuts, bring back papayas,

bring back bananas to replant

because the island was, phew, flattened.

In the icy waters that surround st Petersburg, Russia,

is an oddly shaped structure.

It's got two long sides

that are both rounded off at the end.

It looks a bit like a kidney bean in shape.

It's made of solid brick and concrete

and the outside is an ominous black.

A closer look reveals something unexpected.

There's a large courtyard surrounded by rounded architecture

and it almost looks like a mediterranean Plaza.

Inside, it's a work of art.

There's this steel staircase that's rusting away

but exquisitely formed.

This place was not built in a hurry

and it wasn't built on a budget either.

But further in, things take a chilling turn.

The inside of this building is empty,

almost as if it's been stripped or sterilised.

This imposing fortification was built to intimidate.

But what it was designed for and what it became

are two very different things.

This place was armed and prepared for a sea battle

but it ended up fighting a very different war.

So, how did this sterile shell come to save lives

instead of taking them?

Russian archaeologist, sergey solovyev,

has explored this marooned stronghold many times.

(Speaks Russian)

The deep waters of the Gulf of Finland

have long left Russia open to attack.

At one end is Russia's old capital city of st Petersburg

and at the opposite end

are Europe's other great powers, France, Germany, britain.

And by the 1830s the Russians needed to build a new fort

in the Gulf itself to keep their capital safe.

(Speaks Russian)

Building an island, then the fort on top,

took seven years.

The result was the distinctively designed

fort Alexander.

(Speaks Russian)

But the guns of the tsars' imperious fortress

would never fire a single shot in battle.

Because by 1845 soon after its completion,

fort Alexander had become redundant.

Military weaponry was becoming so powerful

that the fort's walls

could no longer withstand an enemy shelling.

But decades later, the fort did see action

when Russia was attacked by an enemy

more deadly than any Navy.

(Dramatic music)

In the late 19th century

a pandemic was spreading across the world.

The bubonic plague.

The plague had already ravaged parts of the globe twice before,

in the 6th century and in the 14th century.

This disease spread from country to country

through different ports.

At every port, rats would escape from the ships

but it was really their fleas that spread the disease.

And with the growth of international trade,

by the 1890s the so-called third plague pandemic

was reaching its peak.

It had already reached parts of Europe

and was now knocking on Russia's door.

(Speaks Russian)

The Russian government decide

they're going to study the disease in a lab.

Have lots of scientists working with samples,

trying to find a vaccine

and of course they had the perfect place to do it.

The isolated artificial island of fort Alexander

with its high level security was about to come in to its own.

(Speaks Russian)

The mighty fort had to be repurposed

to contain the unseen enemy now inside its walls.

(Speaks Russian)

Within the infectious side of the fort

the laboratory set up was scrupulous.

(Speaks Russian)

The labs and their operation

were pretty sophisticated for the time

and they had, you know, vials, test tubes, lab coats.

The first floor of the fort

had a series of laboratory facilities,

libraries, conference rooms and something surprising.

(Speaks Russian)

Rodents, monkeys and reindeer

were also used for trials here.

They brought in animals to this fort

so that they could infect them with the plague.

There are photographs

of how they'd perform autopsies on the animals.

Pinning their legs back with wires.

It's gruesome stuff.

The laboratories extended to the fort's second floor.

They experimented with different types of the disease.

They even made a dust that could be inhaled

and in other instances they simply injected

the specimen into animals' windpipes.

But it was only a matter of time before something went wrong.

With all the lab's sophistication

they still couldn't completely remove the possibility

of the disease escaping.

The scientists used the fort's isolated

upper levels to deal with the unthinkable.

(Speaks Russian)

Despite stringent safety measures

they had to use this isolation unit at the start of 1904

when the laboratory's head doctor contracted the plague and died.

Three years later the disease escaped again.

This time the esteemed epidemiologist

lev podlevsky,

and his friend and colleague, dr schreiber were on the frontline.

When schreiber developed symptoms of the plague,

dr podlevsky rushed him up to the dreaded third floor.

(Speaks Russian)

He died within three days and with the body still contagious,

dr podlevsky had to perform the autopsy.

Shortly after the post-mortem of his colleague,

dr podlevsky started to feel a burning sensation in his fingers.

But the researcher's sacrifices were about to pay off.

Things looked grim for dr podlevsky

but his colleagues started administering

some of the antidotes they'd been working on.

And in a few days it looked like they were starting to work.

Podlevsky, and the other scientists,

had developed a cure.

(Speaks Russian)

(Dramatic music)

As well as finding an antidote to the plague,

the fort scientists also worked successfully

on diseases such as tetanus, typhoid and cholera.

But in 1917

the Russian revolution brought the work

of the imperialist plague laboratory to an end.

However with the antidote inaccessible to most,

the third plague pandemic lived on for the next four decades

claiming 15 million lives before petering out in 1959.

Fort Alexander earned a reputation

not through taking lives in battle

but through saving them.

And sergey wants to preserve it to remember those

who gave everything to do so.

(Speaks Russian)

In the remote telega region of Romania,

lies an imposing set of ruins.

You come across the big steel gate leading to a building

that looks like something out of a dickens novel.

There are also outside spaces around the outer parts

which are almost like courtyards or gardens.

The structure of this place is distinctive.

It's a strange sort of horseshoe shape.

It has rings radiating out

and this is clearly the most important

and key part of the building.

It looks like a mansion or a wealthy home.

But once you get inside, the story is completely different.

(Tense music)

There are gaping holes in the roofs,

whole walls turned to rubble.

It looks like it's been ravaged by more than just time.

A bizarre broken replica of the building itself

hints at its greater significance.

This ruined building set in motion a chain of events

that would change this country forever.

This is doftana prison.

Scott allsop studies this tattered site

which once filled Romanians with dread.

Doftana, I've been surprised to find,

is not really remembered that much by many Romanians

and yet the prison guards

regarded this as like the bastille of Romania.

The complex dates back to 1895

but it wasn't until two decades later

that it came into its own.

What was happening in the early years

of the Soviet union

turned a lot of heads in Romania where a battle was brewing

between the monarchy and the communists.

In 1924 under king ferdinand,

the government outlawed communism in Romania.

That anti-monarchism so characteristic of communism

was one of the main reasons

why the Romanian royal family wanted to imprison communists.

King ferdinand was very worried about threats to his rule

so he designated

this location to become a prison for political prisoners.

By the mid 1920s

around 300 political prisoners were locked up in doftana.

The fact that there is a single place

where the burgeoning Romanian communist party

was all placed together is absolutely fascinating.

If you lock up together

a group of active passionate political ideologues,

you're asking for trouble.

This was more like a university of communism

than it was a punishment for being a communist.

They can develop their ideology.

They can indoctrinate other prisoners

into their ideology.

So, by the time they get out

they are a much more disciplined force.

The prisoners were even compiling a communist newspaper

from within doftana's walls.

The fact that they were able to do this

all under the noses of the guards was amazing.

But separated by the prison's cells,

the inmates had to find inventive ways

to talk to each other.

So, in some of the cells in doftana,

there were heating pipes

similar to this one back here, and as a way to communicate

many of the communists developed a tapping system

in order to send messages

between cells by using the heating system.

They used wooden bed slats to pass pencils and documents

through cell bars.

They even stitched makeshift bags from bedding materials

to help pass around their clandestine materials.

But they still faced the problem

of how to get the newspaper out of the prison.

A nearby river provided them with everything they needed.

Doftana is positioned on the hills just behind me

and the storm drains that were within the prison grounds

ran down to this river

and so the newspaper was sent down the storm drains

and ended up in this river

where they were collected by local party members.

The communists inside the walls were absolutely determined

to get their story out.

These were men who believed in a political cause

and they were willing to go to great risks

to try to bring that cause into reality.

The wide-reaching influence of doftana prison didn't end there.

An extremely famous leader who changed the course

of modern Romanian history forever was once held right here in doftana.

In 1936 a new inmate

was sentenced to two years' imprisonment

for communist activities.

The name of this new arrival was nicolae ceausescu.

By the time ceausescu

was sent here to doftana at 18 years old,

he was already described as a dangerous communist agitator.

Ceausescu was young, head strong

and utterly captivated by communist ideology.

On his arrival there he would have been surrounded

by likeminded communist activists.

The monarchy was still in control but that would soon end.

World war ii completely changed the landscape of Romania.

They were one of the most active allies of Nazi Germany.

The Germans were finally pushed out by Soviet troops.

In the aftermath of the war

the Soviets installed a communist government in Romania.

The man at the helm was gheorghe gheorghiu-dej

a former doftana inmate imprisoned with ceausescu.

Following a series of earthquakes

the newly installed communist government

closed the prison down

and repurposed it for its own glorification.

It was opened as a museum to effectively honour

all of those founders of Romanian communism

who had been held here.

The propaganda museum even featured a scale model

of the place itself.

Doftana was absolutely vital to the communist leadership.

It was important that they were able to show

how communism was effectively able to conquer

the bourgeois elements of society that had preceded it.

We have evidence of leading communists from China

being bought on tours to doftana

to prove how communism

was able to overcome those obstacles.

When gheorghiu-dej died in 1965

ceausescu came to power.

Ceausescu went from being

a revered leader to incredibly feared dictator.

As his time in office went on

he became increasingly totalitarian and violent against his own people.

Ceausescu's control was really summarised

by the secret police

that he introduced into the country.

Ceausescu's Romania is one of the worst examples

in existence of a, of a truly totalitarian

repressive communist dictatorship.

Eventually, the collapse of communism

triggered violent uprisings in Romania.

In 1989, ceausescu ordered

his forces to open fire on anti-government demonstrators

and this was just a step too far for the Romanian people.

The armed forces revolted and captured ceausescu

before putting him in trial and convicting him of mass murder.

Ceausescu's end came when he was shot

by a firing squad on Christmas day.

(Gunshot)

Doftana prison also fell from grace.

No-one was really interested in going back to the prison

as a kind of monument and it continued to decay

and fall into disrepair.

Today, the authorities continue to leave the prison to rot.

The terrifying leaders that emerged from it

will long remain a part of the Romanian consciousness.

In the deep south of Chile,

at the edge of a crystal blue lake, sits a town frozen in time.

It doesn't really look like your average lakeside resort.

In one of the most sparsely populated places on earth

are the remains of a once prosperous settlement.

There are shops

and a school and a football field

and there is everything you'd want in a nice town.

It's just empty.

There's lots of abandoned kind of rusting machinery.

There's clearly something that would be being processed.

A curious structure built into a mountain

could offer up some clues.

It's almost as if the building has been draped into the hillside.

I guess it's trying to use, in some way,

the geography that's already there but-but why?

At its height

this was one of the most important buildings

to the Chilean economy.

Luis Casanova's father

bought this now deserted site back in 1995.

The first time that I came here I was about ten years old.

The feeling was like this place was alive.

This is puerto cristal.

In patagonia in the aysen region this deserted town

seems to sit at the end of the world.

90 years ago there was almost nothing here

until the first family moved in.

Luis has studied the story of puerto cristal

and knows of the tragedy that befell its first settlers.

The first family that lived here was called the inayao family.

They settled here because they wanted to have a life,

uh, farming.

Saturnino inayao arrived with his family in the 1930s.

They were homesteaders.

They wanted to farm this countryside.

They wanted to break this ground.

They came to stake a claim

and make a life for themselves

in what they must have thought was the wildest spot on earth.

The inayao family built a house and started farming,

unaware of the vast riches below their feet.

One day, one of the children in the inayao family

discovered this odd-looking rock.

And the father recognised there was something unique about it.

It was grey. It was shiny. It was heavy.

And saturnino took the rock to his neighbour

and asked him if he knew what it was.

The farmer then gave it to a supposed friend

and they want off and actually found out

that potentially there could have been

fortune to be made.

They discovered that this particular rock

had over 60% of lead.

The mountainous terrain was rich in zinc as well as lead.

Although you're not finding gold,

if you find lead and zinc in such amounts

that it becomes commercially viable to distribute it

around the world, you can make a lot of money.

The inayao family now had the potential

to become millionaires

because of what they found on their property.

However, the inayao family would never see a cent of that.

Saturnino inayao had the mistake

of asking the businessman silva ormeno for help.

As soon as ormeno realised that this was lead,

he went and registered the land under his own name

and he promptly evicted the inayao family.

With inayao gone and the land rights

eventually ending up with the aysen mining company,

in 1945 construction began.

And within three years,

an efficient lead and zinc processing operation

was in place here.

At its height this was a modern,

effective, productive industrial installation.

We are inside of the processing plant

for the ore.

The first time I came here it was still working

so you could hear the machines.

It was really loud and you... Could see a lot of dust.

The metallic ores were easy to mine

but hard to process.

These rusting relics show how it was done.

The first step is this where you have a primary crusher,

then on the bottom of this machine

you have a conveyor belt that moves

all the material to the next step.

Next came the grinder.

Here everything that was heavy

moved up and the rest was lighter stayed here.

The operation was crammed inside the hill hugging building.

The strange shape of this building

it's because they wanted to make the process more efficient.

So, if you follow the slope of the hill,

it's easier to move it.

The last part of the process

is to allow the material to settle down

because of the gravity

and then you can pack it and export it.

By the 1950s,

puerto cristal's lead and zinc was being exported

all over the world.

The population had risen to 850

and the mining company did all it could

to keep them here.

They give them everything they knew.

They didn't have to pay

for the house or the tap water, electricity,

anything of that and they had access

to all the basic services like health, education.

This is a place where Chileans could come,

could put their roots down

and could really feel they were part of a place.

In the '60s you had the sense of community

with a lot of people playing around

in the soccer field, the children in the school

so it was a close community, was hard work

and a hard labour but they had things

and a quality of life that you couldn't get back then.

The industry at puerto cristal

was still going strong in the 1990s.

When Luis's father bought into the processing plant.

He was really surprised

when he arrived because he didn't expect to see

all the buildings

and all the infrastructure that you had here.

But the thriving plant soon fell on hard times.

The price of zinc on Asian markets dropped

and the price of lead on Asian markets dropped

and that meant that this facility was no longer viable.

In late '90s,

it was so expensive to be here extracting the ore

so that's the reason why he decided to close the mine.

With no work to keep them there, the population left.

Now, Luis wants to preserve this place

for the sake of his father.

After my dad closed the mine,

he remained here until maybe 2010,

when he got sick and had to leave the place.

And he was the last habitant of puerto cristal.

(Theme music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV