In Oklahoma, a place of learning created
with a disturbing objective.
They wanted to change the children,
to take them from their culture and their language.
A small Greek island
caught in a chilling web of controversy.
Suddenly, this facility was on the front pages of newspapers
all across Europe, and it was an international scandal.
And in Oregon, a military facility linked
to a mysterious wartime mission.
It was a 68-hour battle against an imaginary enemy.
Six miles from Oregon's Pacific Coast
is a staggering remnant
built during a time of national emergency.
The first thing you see and you can't miss it,
is this vast structure.
The thing that's just mind blowing
is just how big it is, how tall it is.
Makes you wonder, what could you possibly store here
that would demand this much space?
Then you see something that gives you a clue.
At the front is a large plane.
So, was this an aircraft hangar?
Yet, the aircraft that reside here today are not the ones
it was built to protect.
The structure itself is the key to unlocking this mystery.
On closer inspection,
you can see something remarkable.
The whole thing is built out of wood.
They started construction in the fall of 1942.
And the reason that they used wood versus steel
is that all the metal was being used for the war effort.
The Japanese had already launched an attack
on America's mainland,
and they could do it again.
The airships that flew out of this building were crucial
in defending the country.
One of these warships of the sky became embroiled
in one of the most bizarre military incidents
of the Second World War.
Personnel from here were sent to fight an unseen enemy,
but of course, everything is not as it would appear.
Everyone knows about Japan's devastating attack
on Pearl Harbor.
But not many people remember that, just a week after,
a number of Japanese submarines made it all the way
to the West Coast of the United States.
In June 1942, a long range Japanese submarine successfully
managed to shell Fort Stevens, in Oregon.
Japan also sank two ships.
They fired on a couple of locations in California.
It pretty quickly became clear that the U.S.
didn't have sufficient infrastructure
to defend their coastline.
Christian Gurling is passionate
about the history of American aviation
and is an expert on this vast facility.
So, a total of 17 of these wooden hangars were built
to act as a protective ring around the United States.
But they weren't going to rely on conventional airplanes.
They would turn to a very different technology
to safeguard American lives.
They were a secret weapon.
They were...
airships.
Airships were perfect.
You could fly low enough and slow enough to be able
to spot an enemy submarine.
But given their enormous size,
you need somewhere equally big to house them.
This is Naval Air Station Tillamook.
Construction began on the first of two hangars in October 1942.
But building these behemoths was no easy task.
Supplies of steel and aluminum were critically low
because of the war effort.
But there's one building material that the northwest
has in abundance, and that was wood.
The race was on to get the hangars finished before
Japan could once again threaten America's national security.
A bitter winter hampered early efforts,
and the hangar that survives today
took nine months to build.
The primary challenge that they faced
in building the hangar was weather.
And, of course, on the Oregon coast,
it rains considerably.
But when completed, it was a record breaker.
Hangar B at Tillamook is the largest freestanding
clear-span wooden structure in the world.
The hangar itself is about 1,000 feet long,
300 feet wide, and 200 feet tall.
They used in excess of 3 million board feet of lumber,
which is enough lumber to build 279 three-bedroom homes.
The hangar's actually so long, you could literally lay
the Chrysler Building down inside of the hangar.
In February 1943,
the first of eight airships arrived after being constructed
at Goodyear manufacturing plants,
in Ohio and California.
On March 16th, the first patrol mission was launched.
Fortunately, the crew was equipped with more
than just binoculars.
So the airships also use a very primitive form of radar called
a "magnetic anomaly detector," where they would look
for magnetic anomalies in the earth's surface
to find these submarines.
Anti-submarine warfare is mostly hour after hour
scanning the waters and not seeing anything.
It was the same story, day after day of nothing.
That would soon change.
On May 19th, 1943,
Tillamook's communication building
received an urgent dispatch.
About 10 miles off the coast of Cape Lookout in Oregon,
the USS PC-815, an anti-submarine vessel,
started picking up irregular signals on its sonar device.
The ship's commander quickly ordered his crew to fire
on what he believed was a Japanese submarine.
After six attempted attacks, the USS PC-815
runs out of ammunition.
They were potentially a sitting duck.
So the call went out to the two airships that were then
operating out of the base, K-33 and K-39,
to assist this Navy surface vessel.
The blimps, in addition to submarine detection equipment,
were also armed with depth charges, and a machine gun.
Their role was to defend the U.S. ships
and help scout the water for any signs
of enemy submarines.
Eventually, four other surface ships were called in,
to assist as well.
Soon, the ship's crew picks up another signal.
Now they're convinced that there's a second Japanese sub
in the vicinity.
By 4:46 P.M.,
13 hours after the pursuit began,
the PC-815 was finally restocked with depth charges
by a supporting vessel.
The ship's commander desperately continued
hunting down the Japanese submarines,
launching attack after attack.
The fear now is that it's staking out its target.
The race was on,
and American lives were at stake.
2 On May 19th, 1943,
two airships from the Tillamook Naval Air Station
were dispatched to assist the PC-815
in its pursuit of two Japanese submarines.
The fight continued on through the night
and into the next day.
But the enemy is nowhere to be seen.
After 68 hours, the commander of the ship
was ordered to call off the search.
On return to base, the commander of PC-815
reported that he believed
he destroyed one or both of the submarines,
as neither launched a counterattack.
Yet, Navy officials immediately commenced an investigation
to establish what took place.
The commander had used five ships, two blimps,
deployed over 100 depth charges,
and failed to supply any of the evidence
required to confirm a kill.
The final report contained some astonishing findings.
No subs were ever found.
No wreckage was ever found.
The airmen on the blimps, for example, didn't think
there was any sign of submarines in the area.
But the commander of this vessel was still convinced
that he had destroyed two enemy vessels.
So who was this mystery commander?
His name was L. Ron Hubbard.
After the war, he would become
a very successful science fiction writer
and then go on to found
the Church of Scientology.
Now, L. Ron Hubbard was known to,
let's say, stretch the truth at times.
Even in his After-Action Report,
you can see that Hubbard has a certain literary flair.
But there was one piece of evidence
from the Navy investigation
that no amount of creative language
could disguise.
It turns out that the area where Hubbard and his crew
first picked up these strange signals is well known
for having natural magnetic deposits.
So it seems, Hubbard may well have been fighting
an imaginary enemy.
For the next two years, airships from Tillamook
continued to patrol the Oregon coast.
Only one vessel under the protection of an airship
was ever sunk,
an oil tanker named the Persephone.
That's a pretty impressive service record.
The war in the Pacific dragged on until September 2nd, 1945.
And at that point, of course, the Tillamook base
was no longer needed.
In 1948, Tillamook Naval Air Station
was decommissioned.
Today, hangar B is home to the Tillamook Air Museum.
We call it "history housing history."
You have this amazing structure from World War II,
an engineering marvel.
These hangars show what we can accomplish
when we're under threat.
On the Greek island of Leros,
stands a commanding structure
with a shameful secret.
Following along the coast, we find this amazing,
vast, and powerful building.
It looks like security was really tight here,
but who was being kept inside?
It looks as if people were living here.
The question is, why?
Upstairs, there's a lot of beds.
There's colorful decorations on the wall,
but also medical equipment.
Could this have been a hospital?
This was once a showpiece,
designed to demonstrate the might
of a conquering nation.
Its days as a glorious symbol of power did not last long.
As time passed, it became a den of depravity,
and the subject of a controversial exposé.
It created an international scandal that humiliated
the Greek government.
Because of this complex, Leros became known
as the "Island of the Damned."
I first came in 1966.
It was October 5th.
It was so beautiful that it left me
with the best impression.
Petros Akoglanis was 22 years old when he started working
as a nurse in this building.
For me, this place is very sacred because this is where
I lived my best years.
There are some other feelings now.
I'm saddened by this space.
The story of this now derelict shell
began long before Petros arrived,
during an era of European occupation.
Since 1923, this was under the influence
of Mussolini's fascist Italy.
It was built as accommodation for troops
using the nearby seaplane port.
Italy and then their Nazi allies controlled the island
until the end of the Second World War.
But eventually, these structures and the island
were handed back to a united Greece.
Life on Leros eventually returned to normal.
But by the 1950s, a crisis was brewing on mainland Greece.
This structure would be part of the solution.
After the war, Greece was in the midst of profound change.
The population was increasing and urbanizing.
And all of this impacted the way that people
with mental illness and physical disabilities were cared for.
The hospitals in Athens and in other major cities
were filling up and were reaching breaking point.
They had to de-congest the other mental hospitals
because they were overcrowded.
And they found a suitable place
and brought them here.
In 1958, this facility admitted its first patients,
more than 300.
It was officially called the "Colony for Psychopaths,"
and later became known as the "Leros Asylum".
And it was very important for the island.
There were no other ways of working in those years.
From the first moment, I loved this place.
The patients, we would pick them up from the boat,
bring them here, have their food ready.
But within just a few years,
there was around 2,500 patients at this facility.
It was designed to care for about 600.
Some of this meant that there was poor sanitation.
A few toilets, hundreds would have to use.
It was even said that there was only one qualified psychiatrist
for a thousand patients.
Of course, there were problems.
There were cases of patients attacking staff,
attacking their fellow patients.
We, the staff, dealt with these incidents
as much as possible.
The outside world had no idea just how bad the situation
inside the Leros Asylum had become.
In 1989, the devastating truth of what was really going on
in this facility was revealed.
2 In the late 1950s, a new psychiatric hospital
opened on the Greek island of Leros to help care
for people with mental health conditions.
By 1989, it had become so dangerously overcrowded,
a team of journalists exposed its appalling story.
Reporters from the British newspaper, The Observer,
recorded the squalid and terrible conditions
that patients were suffering in.
You had patients living naked and even tied down
to their beds, bearing the marks
of this really inhumane treatment.
The shocking photos that accompanied the article
revealed the brutal reality of life within these walls.
Look, we didn't react negatively.
We accepted the publication.
Up to a certain point.
When the story was published,
they called this "Europe's Guilty Secret,"
and there was condemnation all around,
forcing the Greek government to react.
We did not rise up and say that, because these things
are happening, it should be closed.
We never accepted that.
Slowly, things started to improve,
and a different climate started to prevail.
We tried to bring better working conditions
for the staff, but especially for the patients.
The reforms that were enacted
went far beyond the Leros Asylum.
All over Greece, mental health institutions
were thrust into the spotlight
and found wanting.
Across the board, wholesale changes were required
to overhaul the broken system.
Those improvements would usher in the end of this site.
The admissions of patients began to decrease
because the general hospitals began to establish
psychiatric hospitals.
And in order for a patient to get to a psychiatric facility,
they had to first go through the general hospital.
As a result, the number of patients
being sent to Leros rapidly declined.
Over the following years, patients were gradually moved
into community care, and the institution's buildings
were eventually shut down.
By the late 1990s,
the Leros Asylum was completely abandoned,
and this distressing period consigned to the past.
But it's far from the end of its tragic story.
In March 2011, Syria erupted into civil war,
following a wave of pro-democracy protests
that spread across North Africa and the Middle East,
known as the Arab Spring.
The repercussions would be felt on the small island of Leros.
By 2015, more than a million refugees had arrived
on European shores.
Human traffickers would take these refugees,
smuggle them to islands near Leros,
and leave them to be rescued by the Greek Coast Guard.
In March of 2016, the area in front of the hospital
was opened up as a camp that was designated to be
the initial meeting point
of refugees entering the European Union.
According to some estimates,
there were up to 1,500 people arriving
on Leros every day.
For the next five years, the old Leros Asylum
and the grounds that surround it,
served as a neglected home
for desperate immigrants seeking a better life.
A more humanitarian answer needed to be found.
In 2021, the Greek government created a new reception center
on the island for these people, and this camp in front
of the hospital was finally abandoned.
Today, there are no plans to restore or demolish
the old asylum.
But in the building's shadow,
a growing tourism industry now thrives.
I am proud of my island.
Leros is here, it's beautiful, and everyone should visit.
In southwest Oklahoma, are the remains of a complex
built during an era of disturbing change.
The buildings are all solid and functional.
They're constructed with the same type of bricks,
and flat roofs, and minimal decoration.
When you enter the site, it's clear that the buildings
are all in really bad disrepair,
and inside are identical rooms.
It looks like a dormitory, but who's staying here?
Discarded toys and small chairs,
suggest this was a space used by children.
Over the years, hundreds of students
would walk through these doors.
For the most part, they came here forcibly
and against their will.
This site wasn't a one-off.
It was part of a much larger program across the nation.
This is the start of a dark chapter of American history.
What happened inside these walls would shape the lives
of children across Oklahoma for generations.
The kids came from many different tribes.
They all spoke in different languages,
and they would get punished physically.
I'm sure that it was a scary place.
2 In Lawton, Oklahoma, is the ruin of a building
with a troubling legacy that still runs deep.
So this place is very significant
to the Native American community.
Don't think there's very many people
that don't have a connection.
It's incredible.
Yolonda Ramos works closely with the Kiowa, Comanche,
and Apache nations to maintain this site
and to document its unsettling past.
There were many students who came when they were
about six years old.
And, in the early days,
there were a lot of bad stories.
and, in the later years, there were better times.
The origins of this place
are tied to a number of government acts
that tried to limit Native Americans' rights.
This included the notorious
Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Thousands are forced to give up their land and relocate
west of the Mississippi River.
This created a territorial divide
between the United States and Native Americans.
A series of violent conflicts between those two communities
would result in an extraordinary meeting.
In 1867,
the representatives of multiple Native American nations
met with representatives of the U.S. Government.
They came together to negotiate what became known
as the Medicine Lodge Treaty.
From the very start, the indigenous communities
were at a disadvantage.
The multiple languages spoken by the Native American nations
required numerous interpreters, which created confusion
and the opportunity for exploitation.
In addition, pressure was applied to accept the terms
of the deal by using the threat
of military force and starvation.
In signing the treaty, tribal leaders agreed
to relinquish valuable lands and important hunting grounds.
Part of that agreement was to educate the native children,
hence the boarding schools here being built.
This one was called Fort Sill.
It originally opened in 1871
and moved to this site in 1892.
Its distressing goal would never be forgotten.
One of the purposes of this residential boarding school
is to separate these children from their families
and communities, thus making them vulnerable
to indoctrination with a new culture.
These schools were built to assimilate the children.
I think their idea of assimilation was to make
the kids good little Christian boys and girls,
to assimilate them to the white man's way
and to pull them from their old ways.
The main focus of the studies for the boys and girls was
agriculture and home economics and English, of course.
The curriculum the school enforced was influenced
by Captain Richard Henry Pratt,
a veteran military man turned educator.
In 1892, at a national conference,
Pratt makes his famous statement that essentially says,
"Kill the Indian in him and save the man."
This motto became the core philosophy of over 500
Indian boarding schools across the country.
The schools achieved assimilation by operating
with a strict military-like regime.
Culturally, we wear our hair long.
When the kids came here, they cut the kids' hair
completely off, and then they ultimately
moved on to making them dress in military-style uniforms.
Just like the military, when children stepped
out of line, they were given harsh punishments.
It was a part of them teaching the kids discipline
and another part of teaching them to become more like them.
At the Native American school in nearby Anadarko,
which operated on similar principles as Fort Sill,
a tragic story demonstrates the climate of fear
the children lived under.
After a young boy was severely whipped,
he and two friends attempted to run away.
They were later found frozen to death
outside the school grounds.
They were just too terrified to come back.
There are a lot of negative stories.
There is so much history here.
I gotta take a second, sorry.
It makes me a little emotional.
Essentially, it's ethnocide, and this practice of attempting
to strip away people's culture
continues well into the 20th century.
It wasn't until the Great Depression struck in 1929
that indigenous communities' rights
slowly started to progress.
Native American families are hit really hard
because of lack of financial opportunities,
structural racism, and generations of land loss.
In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt introduced
the Indian Reorganization Act.
The law ushered in long overdue and often gradual improvements.
And this would become a catalyst for change
at the school.
2 In the 1930s, the harsh conditions
at the Fort Sill Indian School slowly began to improve
after the introduction of the Indian Reorganization Act.
This new law protected and restored land
to indigenous Americans and encouraged self-government.
It also supported the preservation and revival
of Native American practices and traditions.
They started to...
work on building new buildings for the campus.
In 1936, the gymnasium.
And in 1939, they built the school building.
So, Fort Sill Indian School ultimately became
somewhat of a lifeline for the Native families.
I am half Comanche.
A lot of people thought we were here for punishment,
but it wasn't.
I stayed here because my mother, she couldn't take care of me.
Jimmy Ray Caddo enrolled at Fort Sill in 1938
when he was six years old.
At first, I was scared.
I stand over there in the corner of that building
over there looking down that road
every Saturday or Sunday, looking for my mother.
I stayed here until I was 21 years old,
and I never went home.
The ethos of strict discipline still existed,
but the policy of forced assimilation had ended.
The education Jimmy received was now more focused
on just teaching vocational skills.
The goal of this school was to teach you to be farmers.
We had about 35 cows we had to milk in the morning.
School here, it taught me a lot.
You know, I joined the Navy, from here.
I stayed until I was a chief petty officer.
I learned from here
how to get along with other people.
That's why, when I joined the Navy,
it was right down my alley.
So I did very good.
I've seen the world.
In the years after Jimmy graduated in 1953,
Fort Sills started to offer a more well-rounded
education to its students.
The quality of education did get better as time went on
because they started to expand into more subjects.
One student that I talked to said that she actually loved it
because she was able to be around other students
that looked like her.
They were all Native American students
and they all had a very strong sense of culture.
Fort Sill continued to function
through the 1960s and '70s,
but its end was drawing near.
In 1980, the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the school
due to a lack of federal funds to keep it going.
Most of the kids at that point had been integrated
into the public schools, and so they didn't feel like
there was a need to provide further funding to the school.
To date, 526 Native American boarding schools
have been identified in the United States.
Their impact should always be remembered.
Research is ongoing to uncover the long legacy of trauma
for those who were confined there.
There are plans to build a new school on the site,
which will be used by indigenous and Native American children.
It is going to be a huge project.
I absolutely do feel a responsibility.
I feel like that I have to do my part in protecting our land
and protecting our culture
and in ensuring that the language continues on.
And that's very important to me.
In Scotland, on the outskirts of the capital, Edinburgh,
is a clandestine site built
at a time of widespread paranoia.
Following a rough dirt track, you come to a clearing
with small brick buildings.
It doesn't look like much, frankly.
A fence still runs around the outside of the property.
Whatever it is, it's still an air of secrecy
that surrounds it.
As you get closer to the unremarkable structure,
it's impossible to ignore the solid steel doors.
Their presence suggests this is a place with something to hide.
What were they guarding?
The answer lies deep within.
The first thing you see is a long sliding tunnel
leading underground.
At a time of war, this was a subterranean headquarters,
key to Britain's survival.
Few people knew about it, and even fewer
ever saw behind its walls.
This was part of a much larger network
that protected the whole country.
Rumor was that the queen herself would be hurried here
if there was a doomsday scenario.
I was conscripted into the RAF in September 1954,
and after basic training,
we were brought here and introduced to the place,
and was very impressive, actually.
A super state-of-the-art building in those days.
Alan Treloar was 18 years old when he was called up
for national service.
For 18 months, he was posted at this top secret facility,
which was built in 1953.
You weren't allowed, really, to tell anybody anything
of what you were doing.
When I went home on leave or for a weekend,
parents wanted to know what I was doing, and I told them
the bare minimum of what I knew I was allowed to do.
There was a very good reason
the military personnel based here
were forbidden from revealing their activities.
Their mission was to safeguard the United Kingdom
from total annihilation.
In the early years of the Cold War, the main threat was
long-range Soviet bombers carrying deadly nuclear weapons.
To counter this danger, Britain's Air Ministry
developed a new radar network, code named ROTOR.
If an attack from the Soviet Union
were to come over the North Sea,
Scottish radar would be the first to detect it.
The Royal Air Force needed somewhere secure to coordinate
the ROTOR radar network in Scotland,
where no one would ever see it.
What they built was a subterranean fortress,
three stories deep, the complex covered
an area of over 37,000 square feet.
It was called Air Defence Notification Centre ,
and formed part of the United Kingdom's first line of defense
if World War III ever erupted.
It was the largest nuclear bunker in Scotland,
but barely anyone knew it existed.
In time, that would change with dramatic effect.
Exposed by a civilian espionage group,
it became a target for protests and sabotage.
2 In Scotland are the remains of a subterranean bunker
built in complete secrecy during the Cold War.
Its mission was to help keep the United Kingdom safe
against the threat of communism.
It was a maze of corridors and rooms
around a huge central atrium
where a map plotting table allowed RAF officers
to compile a full picture of any potential incoming attack
from Soviet bombers.
Most days, day-to-day work
was reporting flights which were planned
by RAF Bomber Command.
And it was up to us to plot them and identify them
using radar and the other means that we had.
On numerous occasions, the Soviets tested
the UK's new defense system.
And, of course, sometimes they were
Russian airplanes which shouldn't be there,
and we were able to scramble aircraft,
and to go and intercept them
and accompany them out, out of the area.
But in 1958,
just three years after this facility became operational,
it was already obsolete.
Missiles could be fired from thousands of miles away.
The weaponry was now more advanced
than Britain's radar network.
That didn't mean the bunker's use to the country was over.
Although the bunker no longer functioned
in its operational defense capacity,
the engineering behind it
was still immensely valuable.
The British government believed that the bunker would have been
able to withstand a three megaton bomb
dropped in the city center of Edinburgh.
So the bunker's designation was switched
from defense to survival.
It was known as a Regional Seat of Government,
or "RSG" for short.
Dr. Sean Kinnear
is a historian and expert on Scotland's Cold War history.
Here at Barnton, there would be about 400 people
specifically chosen, so after a nuclear attack,
they would be the central nucleus
to try and restore some form
of government and society in the aftermath.
And, although it's never been confirmed,
it has been suggested
that this would be the place of refuge for the queen
if there was a nuclear strike
while she was in Scotland.
Yet, as the government made preparations
to survive a doomsday attack,
some members of the public
became increasingly worried
about the spiraling nuclear arms race.
While many protested peacefully,
others resorted to more militant methods.
The location and function of the bunker remained a secret
until 1963,
when an anti-nuclear group called the "Spies for Peace"
managed to break into another government bunker
in the south of England.
There they found a load of classified documents.
These outlined the locations
of other RSGs around the country.
And these directed them to a previously undiscovered
base right outside of Edinburgh.
They wanted to expose this network of bunkers
that they were saying was for the privileged few,
and the rest of the population were just gonna have to take
what was coming, in terms of a nuclear attack.
So, when they exposed sites like this, it was to say,
"We have found your network.
It's not as robust as you thought,
and now everyone knows about it."
The government was terrified.
Barton bunker became the target for regular
anti-nuclear demonstrations for the next decade.
They demanded the site to be shut down.
But as the looming threat of the Cold War faded,
the protests began to ease.
In 1983, the bunker was officially closed.
So, at that point, the site became an attraction
for local vandals, who would break in and slowly,
bit by bit, tear the place apart.
Arsonists eventually found their way into the property.
All the equipment and furnishings
that hadn't already been stripped out were destroyed,
and the bunker was left a blackened shell.
In 1996, the derelict site was purchased
by private owners.
They are now in the process
of restoring the Cold War relic.
The intention is to bring it back to resemble
what the structure would have looked like
whilst it was in operation during the 1950s
and give back to the community, allow them in
to see what they weren't allowed to see
for so many years.