Secret Tunnels
Underground because it had to be hidden. Escape tunnels under the Berlin Wall, the Cu Chi network, smuggling and cartel tunnels, wartime bunkers and command centres, the Underground Railroad, and the places people went to survive a government.
Part of Underground
30 moments in this segment.
- - South Korean counter-tunnel. A West German engineer inspects a tunnel boring machine inside a South Korean counter-tunnel constructed to eliminate the value of North Korean tunnel No. 4 by intersecting it. Both tunnels are locate.
- - The Cu Chi tunnel system. A look at the layered tunnel network used against American forces during the Vietnam War.
- - Samizdat, civil disobedience and the Helsinki process. Gabor Demszky at the Library of Congress on the underground press and the subculture around it.
- - The Cold War bunker beneath America's grandest hotel. A 1996 report filmed shortly after the Greenbrier facility was exposed and decommissioned.
- - Inside the Cu Chi tunnels. The 155-mile network outside Ho Chi Minh City, its wartime role and its life today as a visitor site.
- - Coober Pedy: the town that lives underground. Half the population of this South Australian opal town lives in dugouts cut into the rock.
- - Descend into Australia's underground opal town. Atlas Obscura on the dugout homes, churches and hotels carved beneath Coober Pedy.
- - The man who tunnelled under the Berlin Wall. An escape helper recalls digging beneath the death strip to bring East Germans out.
- - Life underground in Coober Pedy. BBC Reel on the opal town where 60% of residents live below ground to escape the heat.
- - Samizdat: the secret printing press. How Soviet citizens built homemade presses to print and circulate banned texts undetected.
- - Digging up the Underground Railroad. Archaeological remains of a clandestine network that by design left almost no written record.
- - The Stasi and the Berlin Wall. DW on the Wall built on 13 August 1961, the escape attempts it provoked and the surveillance apparatus around it.
- - The Underground Railroad. How the escape network actually worked, and why the railway metaphor obscures as much as it explains.
- - Inside Derinkuyu, the city that held 20,000 people. A descent through the eighteen levels of the Cappadocian underground city and its rolling stone doors.
- - The great escape beneath the Berlin Wall. Tunnel 57, dug in 1964 from a West Berlin bakery, through which 57 people escaped East Germany.
- - Raven Rock: the government's underground command centre. The continuity-of-government complex dug into a Pennsylvania mountain.
- - Turkey's newly found underground city at Midyat. BBC News on the vast cave and tunnel network excavated beneath Midyat, near the Syrian border.
- - Artefacts found at Harriet Tubman's birthplace. Maryland officials present the archaeology from the Thompson Farm site in Dorchester County.
- - Life inside the Viet Cong tunnels. A cross-section of the Cu Chi tunnel system: kitchens, hospitals, air shafts and trapdoors.
- - Inside the Greenbrier bunker. The congressional fallout shelter built under a West Virginia resort and kept secret for three decades.
- - The underground cities of the Byzantine Empire. How the volcanic tuff of Cappadocia was hollowed into multi-level cities during the Byzantine period.
- - Why does Derinkuyu exist?. An on-site exploration of the Cappadocian refuge city, its ventilation shafts and its wells.
- - Escape over the Berlin Wall, 1965. ITN archive on Stanislaus Gefroerer's climb out of East Berlin on 20 September 1965.
- - Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom. PBS on the woman who returned repeatedly into slave territory along the Underground Railroad.
- - The many lives of the Soviet dissident movement. Benjamin Nathans on how a clandestine movement operated within, and against, the Soviet legal system.
- - An Underground Railroad hiding place found in a New York museum. Historians identify a concealed space in a Merchant's House Museum closet wall.
- - How Soviet citizens escaped censorship. The samizdat circuit: carbon copies, typewriters and hand-to-hand distribution under the censor.
- - Writers underground: Soviet samizdat 1967-1982. How hand-typed publications passed hand to hand became a real threat to the Soviet state.
- - A wartime aircraft revetment shelter, Izumi, Japan. The remains of a semi-underground revetment shelter built to protect aircraft at the former Izumi naval air group base in Kagoshima, Japan.
- - 海軍出水航空隊の掩体壕跡. Photograph showing 海軍出水航空隊の掩体壕跡.