Original subtitles

A top-secret facility in Scotland besieged by militant protesters.

Once the site was exposed through the Spies for Peace leak,

the government was terrified.

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 Northwest America,

a military installation linked to a mysterious wartime mission.

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

In the USA, 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 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.

FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: Yesterday, December 7th, 1941,

the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked

by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

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 US 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 aeroplanes.

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.

You were in the gondola, the cab,

and each crew member had a pair of binoculars,

and they were looking for a Japanese periscope.

So, it was a great observational platform.

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 aluminium

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.

It was extremely muddy,

so bulldozers were getting stuck in the mud,

the equipment that was being used to build the hangars

almost came to a standstill.

It was so foggy, they actually had to string telephone lines

so workers at the top of the hangar

could communicate with workers at the bottom of the hangar.

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 three million board feet of lumber,

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

The hangar is actually so long,

you could literally lay the Chrysler Building down

inside of the hangar.

In February 1943, the first of eight airships,

built at Goodyear manufacturing plants

in Ohio and California, arrived.

This would have been a very active place

during the Second World War.

There would have been a lot of commotion going on.

You had offices in here,

you had maintenance personnel in here,

you had crews getting the blimps ready

for anti-submarine patrol, so there was a ton of activity

that was happening in the hangar at any given time.

On the 16th of March,

the first patrol mission was launched.

Fortunately, the crew was equipped with more than just binoculars.

So, the airships also used 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

of scanning the waters and not seeing anything.

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

That would soon change.

On the 19th of May 1943,

Tillamook's communication building received an urgent dispatch.

About ten 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 airships, in addition to submarine-detection equipment,

were also armed with depth charges and a machine gun.

Their role was to defend the US 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 4.46pm, 13 hours after the pursuit began,

the PC-815 was finally restocked with depth charges

by a supporting vessel.

The ship's commander continued

to hunt 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.

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 reported

that he believed he had destroyed one or both of the submarines

because neither had counterattacked.

But Navy officials

immediately launched an investigation

to establish the facts.

The commander had used five ships,

two blimps, deployed over 100 depth charges,

and was still unable 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.

During the course of the war,

Navy blimps provided cover to some 89,000 convoys.

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, the 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?

When you enter the building, it's extraordinarily unsettling.

You see parts of a tent, parts of, um, old clothing,

and the place is filthy.

It looks as if people were living here.

The question is, why?

Upstairs, there's a lot of beds.

There's colourful 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 didn't last long.

As time passed, it became a den of depravity

and the subject of a controversial expose.

It created an international scandal

that humiliated the Greek government.

Because of this complex,

Leros became known as "the island of the damned".

Petros Akoglanis was 22 years old

when he started working here as a nurse.

The story of this now-derelict shell began long before Petros arrived,

during an era of European occupation.

The structure dates back to a time

when Leros wasn't under Greek control.

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 urbanising,

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.

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.

While there was some opposition to the new purpose of this building,

there was also a lot of support.

Many locals thought that it would provide jobs

and opportunities for them.

But soon, increasing numbers of people were being sent here,

and within just a few years,

there were 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 1,000 patients.

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.

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.

When the story was published,

they called this "Europe's guilty secret",

and there was condemnation all around,

forcing the Greek government to react.

The reforms 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 spelt the end for this site.

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 was 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

called the Arab Spring.

The repercussions were 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 coastguard.

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.

Refugees began living wherever they could,

including inside these buildings,

but without any running water, heat, electricity.

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 centre

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.

In Southwest Oklahoma, USA,

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 once 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 programme

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.

So, this place is very significant to the Native American community.

I 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 place

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 try 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 several Native American nations

met with officials from the US 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 different languages spoken by the Native American nations

required numerous interpreters,

which created confusion and the opportunity for exploitation.

In addition, they were pressured to accept the terms of the deal

by the threat of military force and deliberate 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 it moved here in 1892.

Its distressing aim would never be forgotten.

One of the purposes of this residential boarding school

is to separate these children from their families,

their 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 got to take a second. Sorry.

SHE SIGHS

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 of 1929

that some progress was made

on the rights of Indigenous communities.

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,

and this would become a catalyst for change at the school.

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.

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 stayed over there, at the corner of that building over there,

looking down that road every Saturday or Sunday,

looking for my mother.

I stayed here till 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 till 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 Sill 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...

..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 will 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, there'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.

Rumour 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 it 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 served at this top-secret facility,

which had been built in 1953.

We 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 sworn to silence.

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,

codenamed 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 co-ordinate the ROTOR radar network in Scotland,

where no-one would ever see it.

What they built was a subterranean fortress.

Three storeys deep,

the complex covered an area of over 37,000 square feet.

It was called Air Defence Notification Centre North,

and it formed part of the United Kingdom's

first line of defence had World War III ever erupted.

It was the largest nuclear bunker in Scotland,

but barely anyone knew it existed.

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 the radar and the other means that we had.

On numerous occasions,

the Soviets tested the UK's new defence system.

And, of course, sometimes there were Russian aeroplanes

which shouldn't be there,

and we were able to scramble aircraft

to go and intercept them and accompany them out of the area.

But by 1956,

just three years after it became operational,

the complex 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 defence 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 on the city centre of Edinburgh.

So, the bunker's designation

was switched from defence 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 have been 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.

There was no scope, unfortunately,

for the staff to bring their families here.

They would have faced a very difficult choice

as to whether or not to come.

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, there was increasing public concern

about the escalating 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 going to 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.

There was about 200 or so protesters

that came to picket outside the fence.

With the secret out, Barnton Bunker became the target

for regular anti-nuclear demonstrations

for the next decade.

They demanded the site to be shut down.

There were several break-ins and there were sabotage attempts.

But as the tensions of the Cold War faded,

the protests began to ease,

and 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 this fascinating 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.

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