Terrain

Transcript

Anchor: Although ingenuity and improvisation can make terrible weather bearable, nothing but strong will can overcome the most harrowing of Korean conditions: terrain.

Jean-Paul Savary: Korea is a series of mountain ranges. If you climb to the top of one, you see five or six more ranges on one side, and five or six more on the other side. It's all mountains.
(Korean mountain ranges)

Gerald Edward Gowing: It was hills and hollows, hills and and valleys and mostly hills.
(Korean landscape)

Philip Daniel: Up one hill, down the other, up one hill, down the other.

Arthur Lortie: There was so much bombing over there that the trees were almost all gone. The mountains had been stripped bare.
(Bombing at night)

Jean-Émile Paillé: Very mountainous and very steep. There were ravines and crests...
(Tank going up the steep mountain)

Arthur Lortie: These were rough mountains and we had to bring all our equipment up there.
(Soldiers bringing equipment up the mountain)

But in a way, they protected us from being seen or being shot.
(Viewing landscape from a tank)

Raymond Tremblay: And at the bottom, there were rice paddies, with water that had been there for maybe a hundred years. What do you think that smells like? If you were on patrol and you fell into it, it was pretty gross. You couldn't wait to get back to wash up.
(Soldiers at the river bank)