Original subtitles

The musical heartbeat of a city brought down by racial division...

There were raids, there were arrests. People were taken away.

..A training facility in Belarus

used for a terrifying show of strength...

Everyone in the west is acutely aware

that this could be world war III.

..And a mighty fortress in Indonesia

built in a time when nations behave like pirates.

This relic was once the site of a furious battle,

raged over the most unlikely of treasures,

worth more in weight than gold.

Decaying relics, ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In the state of Louisiana, where the great Mississippi meets

the Gulf of Mexico, lies the vibrant city of New Orleans.

We're on la salle street in the central city neighbourhood.

This is not a neighbourhood

that tourists usually spend a lot of time in.

Among well-kept homes are a scattering of rundown buildings,

one of which could easily be overlooked.

It's dilapidated, some of the windows are boarded up,

and you can see where the old signs and hoardings used to be.

As you enter through the old doors,

you see what looks to be a reception area or ticket booth.

In one part of the complex, there is a perfectly preserved barber chair.

In one part of the complex, there is a perfectly preserved barber chair.

Out front, one distinctive sign has survived

and reveals what this place once was.

And this sign should call up memories

for any fan of American roots music.

This locale has a legendary name in music history.

The dew drop inn was a light,

and this light attracted people from all over New Orleans

and all over america.

As well as great names, it attracted huge controversy.

This place was victim to constant raids.

The drop was pushing boundaries

and it would bring the wrath of the local law.

Curtis doucette is a property developer

trying to restore this club to its former glory.

So we're in the space that was the nightclub

and there was a stage here.

And there was a stage here.

It wasn't just music.

There was full entertainment, I mean, a full show.

There was shake dancers here, there was...

One gentleman I believe it was iron jaw or metal jaw

or something like that.

I've heard stories, it's unbelievable,

but of him chewing glass, for instance.

By the 1950s, the drop, as it was known,

had become a mecca for america's R&B greats.

You had folks like Duke Ellington,

Ella Fitzgerald, ike and Tina Turner.

People like ray Charles, Otis Redding, James brown.

Little Richard even wrote a song about it.

There are stories about, like,

maybe the first rock’n’roll song, you know, was sang here.

This was a gathering place, not just to see great music being performed,

but a place where musicians could hang out when they're in town.

But a place where musicians could hang out when they're in town.

One newspaper called it "the south's swankiest nightspot".

Its fame and popularity were born

out of the restrictions of living in the Jim crow south.

So Jim crow is the colloquial name given

to the laws that separated American citizens from each other.

White institutions were financed and maintained,

whereas the separate institutions

for African Americans were left to dilapidate, or didn't exist at all.

In some cases hotels were white only,

and there were no hotels for African Americans.

One of the great ironies and injustices of this era

was that black musicians were often invited to play white clubs,

but they couldn't even necessarily sit at the bar

and have a drink in that club,

or stay in the neighbourhood where the club was located.

Or stay in the neighbourhood where the club was located.

They had to find a place to stay and hang out after the show.

That left a gap in the market,

a fact not lost on one young man working nearby on lasalle street.

The man behind this whole complex

was named frank g painia, and he was a real visionary

and a real representative of a kind of entrepreneurship

that helped build the black community

in the days of Jim crow and segregation.

His grandson Kenneth Jackson recalls

how he seized the opportunities these laws could offer.

He was a barber by trade and he decided to bring his family

to New Orleans, and he started his barber business,

and when the property came up for sale,

and when the property came up for sale,

he and his brother decided to purchase

one side of the building, and they had the idea to start a club.

You know, to start, like, a bar

and then they added on live entertainment.

Kenneth has fond memories of living here as a child

and enjoying this unusual playground.

We'd come in when they were cleaning up the bar and they had

a set of instruments that were on the stage and you could get up there

and beat on the drum, or play with the piano,

or stuff like that, you know?

Always some entertainers or musicians that were there,

that were, like, part of the house band,

and they were basically almost like relatives to us, you know.

My nickname was rooster,

so all of them would call me rooster,

but it was a festive environment.

Everybody wanted to have a good laugh

and it just felt like a family.

Frank had also purchased the other side of the building,

allowing him to further expand the enterprise.

So, the dew drop was a multi-purpose business, right?

There was a barbershop here, there was a restaurant here.

There was a bar, there was a nightclub.

All of those things existed within this space

which is about 13,000 square feet.

Hotel is pretty much now what it was. There's 29 rooms here.

Most of them are very small rooms.

So this is one of the smaller rooms

and one of the few rooms that actually have a bathroom in it.

Soon, the drop was added to the famous green book.

So this was basically a guide

for how African American motorists were to navigate the Jim crow south,

and let them know where they could be arbitrarily denied service,

food, lodging, not to mention be arrested for no good reason.

Food, lodging, not to mention be arrested for no good reason.

This was an essential tool

for anyone black in that age trying to travel.

The dew drop fit in the green book network

because it was a place where you could rent rooms,

you could eat, you could get your hair cut.

You know, it was just a welcoming type of atmosphere

for people that were coming to town.

The dew drop inn therefore formed

part of a network of green book-led institutions

that kept up and maintained a space for African American entertainers.

In many ways, these places provided a heartbeat

and a lifeline for this culture.

It's heart-breaking to think this was necessary,

and the injustice of it still rankles,

but this was the reality, so the dew drop inn was kind of a beacon

on this landscape of hospitality

on this landscape of hospitality

for anyone who came through the area.

Ray Charles and little Richard made the most of frank's hospitality.

Both lived and recorded here in the mid-1950s.

We're talking a who's who of entertainment back in the days.

It was just a place where musicians, if they weren't playing there,

they would come there to find out where work was.

So the dew drop inn was an anchor for the whole network of musicians

during a period when these musicians

were not only transforming American music,

they were making music that would transform popular music

around the world.

But it was frank's open-door policy that was so unusual for the time.

You had guys that dressed up like women,

and, you know, it was just part of the atmosphere.

And, you know, it was just part of the atmosphere.

At frank's request, the famous female impersonator

patsy vidalia became resident bartender, performer and mc.

Vidalia, known as the toast of New Orleans,

hosted an annual gay ball held here each Halloween.

(Cheerful music)

Frank painia, the organiser,

made a space that was inclusive, not exclusive.

African Americans mixed with their white counterparts.

They even embraced notions of gender fluidity

and had themed nights in which people were able to explore

various forms of sexuality in a way in which would have been

unheard of in the established nightclubs of New Orleans.

For the time, you know, it wasn't acceptable everywhere, you know?

Everybody didn't agree with that,

you know, that that should be allowed.

But it was ok at the dew drop, you know?

But it was ok at the dew drop, you know?

That was a part of society that people were overlooking,

but my grandfather didn't care.

You know, it was like he felt that,

you know, they deserve to be seen in their own way.

But in such a racist, divided society,

this level of tolerance and success drew some serious heat.

It really took an immense amount of courage

for him to offer this open-door policy, but he did suffer for it.

The authorities decided to shut down the dew drop inn.

This meant that on a weekly basis,

there were raids, there were arrests.

People were taken away.

The attempt was to make sure that the inn closed for good.

There were times when my grandfather actually had police pull up outside,

there were times when my grandfather actually had police pull up outside,

with what they called paddy wagons back then,

and if they knew that they had white people in here,

they would arrest everybody in the place and take 'em all down

and charge them with racial mixing.

There's also times

when there weren't just raids but there was just harassment,

police driving by and telling people, "you better not go inside.

If I catch you inside there, then I'm taking you to jail."

These arrests were commonplace,

but one particular raid made national headlines.

In 1952, the actor Zachary Scott got arrested

at the dew drop inn for disturbing the peace,

and frank painia got arrested

for the crime of serving blacks and whites together,

which was actually against the New Orleans city code.

After years of constant harassment,

frank sued the city,

arguing that the Jim crow laws were unconstitutional.

Arguing that the Jim crow laws were unconstitutional.

Painia took the suit all the way up to a federal court,

but before a verdict could be reached,

the civil rights laws were passed in 1964, legally ending segregation.

This is absolutely what frank wanted, but incidentally,

it actually contributed to the demise of the dew drop inn.

You would hear people around that time, in reference to integration.

They would say, "well, you know, white man's ice is colder,"

and so people didn't come to the dew drop

as much as they did because they had options,

and particularly options that had been taken away from them

for a very long time.

Sadly, frank died of cancer

just a few years after the dance hall closed in the late 1960s.

As a person, my grandfather was a real all-around nice guy,

and he loved for people to enjoy themselves.

He tried to help people whenever he could.

In 2005, a deadly blow was delivered,

in 2005, a deadly blow was delivered,

not just to the drop, but to the whole of New Orleans.

Those of us who were here during hurricane Katrina,

we remember the infamous watermarks.

This is one of the ways that we know

how high the water settled in a place like this,

so this, you know, looks like maybe 2.5 feet or so

that the water settled.

The impact of the hurricane was so great,

the rest of the business closed and has sat abandoned ever since.

Though devastated, this place is far from forgotten,

and Curtis hopes to bring it back to life.

I would say my day job is an affordable housing developer.

When I found out about this place, really, the history of it

is what made me fall in love, and so this is a passion project for me.

Is what made me fall in love, and so this is a passion project for me.

My goal for the dew drop inn

is to make it as close as possible to what it used to be.

You walk in to the building now,

it’s kind of a bittersweet situation.

I basically have to realise my mortality, you know?

I'm getting older.

It's kind of like I need to pass the torch to a younger generation.

It's in need of a lot of repair, of course,

but I feel lucky, or blessed, to have it still in existence

and with the potential

of being refurbished and reborn.

In a remote region of Indonesia

is a defensive structure built in an age of discovery,

conquest and greed.

Conquest and greed.

It's an island paradise. It's hot and humid.

There are fishing boats dotting the landscape,

and at the water's edge, there's a cluster of one-storey buildings.

Further up the hill is what looks like a castle.

The imposing structure suggests a military history,

but just whose battleground was this tropical island?

The brutal construction,

at odds with the serene beauty of the surrounding land,

suggests it was built by people a long way from home.

This design is typical of the Pentagon-shaped fortresses

found across Europe,

but here, it's on the remote island of banda neira in Indonesia.

There's a courtyard at the centre,

with what looks like a well, and these strange square blocks,

where it's really not clear what their purpose was.

Where it's really not clear what their purpose was.

From the outer wall, still armed with cannons,

you can see miles into the distance.

So clearly this was set up to stave off any threat from the oceans.

What was it here that required such immense protection?

And what foreign force risked slaughter

by launching a daring raid to seize control of the prized asset?

This relic was once the site

of a furious battle raged over the most unlikely of treasures.

The Indonesian island of banda has long been coveted

for its natural resources.

Lukman ang is a local guide,

born and raised in this tropical paradise.

(Speaks foreign language)

For hundreds of years, the location of the banda islands

and their sought-after riches remained a closely guarded secret.

Their eventual discovery would change everything.

(Speaks foreign language)

We've all heard the phrase, "money doesn't grow on trees."

Well, here in banda, it did.

Spice was really the most valuable commodity of the age,

and the banda islands were the Jewel in the crown of this trade network.

And the banda islands were the Jewel in the crown of this trade network.

It was the only known place in the world

where you could grow nutmeg and mace.

Nutmeg was especially important, as it was thought to prevent plague.

What value would you put on something

that could cure you of the plague?

Unsurprisingly, Europeans would pay an extortionate amount

for this medicine.

In the early 1500s,

only Asian and arab traders knew where to find the prized spices.

Among Europe's fledging colonial forces,

the race was on to find the islands

and seize control of the lucrative trade for themselves.

(Speaks foreign language)

The Dutch were next to discover the islands

and they swiftly forced out their European rivals.

And they swiftly forced out their European rivals.

At first, they tried to strike a peaceful deal with bandanese nobles

that would Grant them exclusive rights to the islands' riches.

But this contract alone wasn't enough to guarantee a monopoly,

and they soon turned to another means of control.

In 1609, the Dutch admiral verhoeven

arrives in the banda islands with a request to build a fort,

but the banda people aren't gonna hand over their land so lightly.

Verhoeven and his men were ambushed and killed.

The Dutch responded by destroying local ships,

plundering villages and executing local leaders.

This extraordinary violence led to the signing of a peace treaty,

which recognised Dutch authority over banda,

and even more importantly, over the spice trade.

And so what began as, you know, trade,

and so what began as, you know, trade,

really involved colonisation and occupation.

Fort Nassau, built in 1609,

would prove to be only the first of a number of strongholds

constructed to safeguard Dutch interests in the area.

What unfolded was a tragic story, stained in the blood of locals

spilled at the hands of foreign invaders.

By 1621, the Dutch still felt

that they didn't have a secure monopoly on the nutmeg trade.

Some locals continued to trade with other nations,

in defiance of their treaty with the Dutch.

The Dutch had all the excuse they needed to initiate a massacre.

Nobels were beheaded,

villages razed and islanders tortured.

It was a bloodbath.

It was a bloodbath.

The native population fell from 15,000 to 1,000,

and maybe even less than that.

By virtually annihilating the bandenese people,

the Dutch secured their monopoly, but at a horrible cost.

In fact, the Dutch had killed so many bandanese people

that they needed to turn to and bring in enslaved labour

from India and China to work on the plantations.

(Speaks foreign language)

But the Dutch weren't alone in their endeavours.

The British also had their eye on the region.

The spice wars were about to enter a dangerous new era,

the spice wars were about to enter a dangerous new era,

and for that, the Dutch needed a new stronghold.

As tensions increased,

the Dutch built the larger and more strategic fort belgica.

(Speaks foreign language)

The belgica fort, which is still standing today,

was begun in 1667 and took six years to complete,

and once completed, it could Garrison 400 troops.

Every inch of the fort's construction was intended to inspire

fear among locals and deter any would-be European attackers.

(Speaks foreign language)

The outer ring consists of a low wall,

designed with five bastions to cover all angles.

The inner ring was built much higher,

with five circular towers that offer panoramic views.

(Speaks foreign language)

From here, it was easy to spot

anyone trying to smuggle spices illegally.

Those whom they caught they threw into these cramped prison cells.

They were built for political prisoners,

but also for any of the locals but also for any of the locals

who dared to sell nutmeg to anyone but the Dutch.

Capture didn't just mean imprisonment.

It often meant a death sentence.

(Speaks foreign language)

But Dutch domination of the islands’ people

and the money-spinning trade in nutmeg and mace was nearing its end.

The British were coming.

The British had never relinquished

their desire to get their hands on the spice trade.

Their desire to get their hands on the spice trade.

And when the Netherlands fell to France in the napoleonic wars,

the British sensed an opportunity and invaded the islands.

In August, 1810, a naval squadron commanded by captain Cole arrived

in the waters of the banda sea.

(Speaks foreign language)

From the towers of this bastion,

it seems impossible the British could have avoided detection.

The guards in their sentry boxes

would have sighted them as soon as they came over the horizon.

But captain Cole was clever.

He arrived at night under the cover of darkness.

At sunrise, Cole and his men

launched their surprise attack and stormed fort belgica.

Launched their surprise attack and stormed fort belgica.

They threw ladders against the side of the ramparts

and climbed up under heavy musket fire.

Rather than stand and fight, the Dutch soldiers fled for their lives.

Within hours, the battle was over,

and the British claimed control over the rest of the island.

The Dutch were in no mood to give up their prized asset so easily.

They rallied their troops and hit back.

It wouldn't be long before the Dutch reclaimed their stake,

but Cole and his men uprooted hundreds of nutmeg seedlings

to replant in other colonies.

With that, the Dutch stranglehold

on the spice trade was fatally weakened.

And as the colonial era faded into history,

so too did the fort's significance.

So too did the fort's significance.

By the mid-1900s, it was completely abandoned.

In 1991, fort belgica was restored

and now serves as a tourist destination.

Today, it's a powerful reminder

of a brutal era when savagery and greed ruled supreme.

(Speaks foreign language)

The ruins at fort Nassau and belgica stand as a sign

of the violence and destruction

wrought on this region by the colonisers.

The bandara really suffered under European colonialism.

These were state-funded trading organisations

with the aim of increasing influence on the world stage.

But in essence, they were just pirates.

But in essence, they were just pirates.

And we can still see this dynamic

playing out in the modern world today.

We can still see war being fought as a business.

We can still see economic interest driving conflicts of various sorts,

and you still see corporations, backed by governments,

trying to seize control of resources,

seize control of certain regions for their resources.

In the former Soviet republic of Belarus,

near the Russian border,

is a disturbing reminder of more troubled times.

It's actually very hard to make sense of this complex

when you first see it, and that's kind of the point.

Crumbling interiors reveal

a construction designed to command and conquer.

A construction designed to command and conquer.

There are bunker-like structures

built with thick, reinforced concrete,

meant for keeping whoever was on the inside safe from something,

and yet they afford a very good view of the surrounding landscape.

That was no accident.

This complex was built way out in the middle of nowhere,

and that's crucial.

Given what they were doing here,

they could not be near any large residential areas.

This was a theatre of power and the drama that played out here

was intended to strike fear into the hearts of enemies near and far.

In some ways, what happened here

draws parallels with modern-day Russia.

An event of this size looked like it could only mean one thing...

A full-scale invasion.

A full-scale invasion.

How important was this structure

to an event that caused the cold war to turn red-hot?

(Serious music)

Yuriy shapovalov was an officer in the Soviet army.

He first came to this location in 1981.

(Speaks foreign language)

At the time of yuriy's visit, the world was a very different place.

(Speaks foreign language)

You would have had men in uniform swarming all over this place,

whistles, shouts, crashes booming all around.

It would have felt like utter chaos. But this was organised chaos.

Whoever was in charge here needed to build something that was

almost a fully functioning city, and they had to do it in record time.

And the superpower behind it

had all the motivation it needed to achieve the staggering feat.

Up until 1980, when the Soviet union invades Afghanistan,

there had been a decade of detente, of increasing normalisation

of relations between the west and the east.

But by 1981, that was done with,

and the cold war was heating up all over again.

To make matters worse, communist rulers in Moscow

were also facing growing unrest within their own borders.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s,

there's a wave of anti-Soviet sentiment in Poland,

and this is not good news for the Soviet union.

The election of a Polish pope only served to add fuel to the fire.

When pope John Paul ii is elected,

he is the senior holy man in a technically atheist country,

and that was a poke in the eye

to officially atheist communism.

Even under communist rule, Poland had remained one of the most

catholic countries in Europe, so to now have a catholic Polish pope

catholic countries in Europe, so to now have a catholic Polish pope

calling so visibly for resistance

was a real threat to communist rule in the region,

so they needed to take care of things very quickly.

Moscow goes to the Polish defence minister and says,

"you will crack down, or we will invade."

Soon, troops begin to amass in the Soviet-controlled state of Belarus,

which shares a border with Poland.

(Speaks foreign language)

So western analysts see

so western analysts see

the Soviet army massing in Eastern Europe,

and they have got to take seriously the idea

that this is a Soviet land attack against NATO.

Something of this scale

definitely looked like the precursor to an invasion.

But not all was as it seemed.

These are the dretun training grounds,

the site of one of the largest military drills ever performed.

It was called west-81 or zapad-81,

'zapad' being the Russian word for ‘west’.

And on the surface, it was just a massive military exercise,

but it was something more than that.

The zapad exercise program is a proof of concept,

the zapad exercise program is a proof of concept,

and the concept they’re proving is

that the Soviet army can survive

an American nuclear attack and then command and coordinate a response.

(Speaks foreign language)

Zapad-81 may have been presented

zapad-81 may have been presented

as a carefully orchestrated training exercise,

but the west continued to observe with deep suspicion.

This was an era when one false move

could have unleashed nuclear armageddon.

There was great uncertainty about what was going to happen next.

Everyone in the west is acutely aware

that this could be cover for world war III.

(Speaks foreign language)

All the west could do was watch and wait as the drama unfolded.

The Soviets filmed the entire production,

running it like the set of a Hollywood movie.

Only here, the missiles were all real.

(Speaks foreign language)

News of the exercises quickly spread around the world.

(Speaks foreign language)

It was theatre. It was national security theatre.

The Soviet army had a lot of amphibious armoured vehicles,

and the problem is that the armoured vehicles

could not cross rivers very well, so what they did was they built

concrete lanes across the bottoms of the rivers just for this exercise.

It was a demonstration to the rest of the world

that the Soviets had the numbers and the will

to overrun Europe if they so wished.

But western leaders were not the only ones spooked

by this massive display of Soviet strength.

The intimidation tactics were also intended

to send a very powerful message to Poland's dissenting population.

To send a very powerful message to Poland's dissenting population.

One of the reasons to look really good

is that this is meant to make clear to the Polish government

that the Soviet army is ready to invade Poland

and there will be nothing that the Polish government can do about it.

That is very clearly intended here.

The exercises at dretun played out for eight consecutive days

and are said to have involved up to 150,000 troops.

In Poland, the Soviets didn't have to mount

a military incursion to put down anti-Soviet demonstrations

in the way they had done in czechoslovakia in ’68,

so you could say that the show of force was a big success

from the Soviet perspective.

And much to the relief of nervous NATO forces,

on the 12th of September, 1981,

on the 12th of September, 1981,

the Soviet military simply packed up and headed home.

The dretun training fields

would never again host military manoeuvres of such magnitude.

(Speaks foreign language)

There have been many exercises in the following decades,

but none that could quite match this one

in terms of the scale and global attention.

Today, the war games at dretun are over, but danger still remains.

(Speaks foreign language)

For soldiers like yuriy, the cold war cast a long shadow,

and although full-scale war never erupted,

the events of west-81 had a lasting impact.

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