Weather

Transcript

Anchor: When living outdoors for any serious length of time the elements can quickly become problematic. With its unpredictable weather and extremes in temperature, the Korean climate is often tormenting.

Charlie Rees: When we landed there, we landed there right at the starting of the monsoons.
(Sunrise)

Edward Patrick Taylor: Summer time there when you hit those monsoon rains, you really used to get the wet then.
(Soldiers walking through the rain)

Roland Boutot: It would rain cats and dogs, and then after 15 minutes it would stop and it would be sunny and hot... 110, 100 degrees. Damn I hated that.
(Soldiers walking through the rain)
(Sunshine after the rain)

Charlie Rees: There wasn't always a downpour but it was always rain.

Jean-Paul Savary: The water rose about a foot an hour, and then nothing. All the bridges would disappear.
(Soldiers in the river)

George W. Elliot: And your bunkers would slide in and stuff like that. So that made it really, really rough.

Gérard Dauray: We spent nights in dugouts full of water with a big blanket, trying to get warm.

Roland Boutot: Our feet got really big, caked in mud. Clay sticks you know. Our feet got huge, and heavy.

Edward Patrick Taylor: The trucks and guns, we used to pull them out of position, they'd just bog down, ah Jesus.
(Trucks bogged down in the mud)

Marcel Joanisse: Winter is cold in Korea. Almost as cold as here. Less snow, but almost as cold.
(Soldier working in the snow)

Gerald Edward Gowing: Here in Canada you can put on more, because you always have more at home, but we had nothing else.
(Soldiers hauling equipment in snow)

Albert Hugh MacBride: I was never that cold in all my life. It's a damp cold, and we had these nylon type pants, that every time you walk it goes 'swish, swish.'
(Winter scene in Korea)

Jean-Paul Savary: We weren't dressed for patrols because the fabric made noise when it rubbed together.

Sheridan "Pat" Patterson: We were ill-equipped, personally, for what we had gone into. We were wearing our summer gear, which was a sort of a khaki drill outfit.
(Doing maintenance in snow)

Carl "Herman" Thorsen: And they gave us a pair of flannelette pyjamas for underwear. And all we had, we only had our leather boots. They were no good for there, they'd be too cold so they got some from the Americans.
(Tank traveling during winter)

Ronald Guertin: When it got cold, nothing could warm us up.

Yvan Paquin: We took a metal box, the kind that held four mortar bombs, and we made a little furnace with them.

Graham Dixon: And you took shell casings and made a chimney.
(Soldiers making a chimney)

Jim McKinney: And if you could scrounge some gas to cut your diesel with then your stoves would burn fairly clean, but if you were burning straight diesel then they would carbon up and once in a while explode and blow your stove pipes all over and everything would be covered with a greasy soot.