My memory is (and it doesn’t seem outrageous) that the front line moved, sometimes unexpectedly, and the distance would change. I recall at least one episode about a bugout when the front was getting too close. By the end of it, things had changed and they went right back where they started.
I also recall that they regularly showed the unit under artillery fire, generally for dramatic effect while operating.
Watching Colonel Potter’s first episode. He arrives via a jeep and starts honking his horn. Radar is shirtless and sunbathing with a metal reflector.
Radar eyes are closed and tells Potter to “Stick the horn in your ear”
IMO, that is very out of character for Radar, and reverts back to the passive, nervous and naive Radar as soon as he finds out that it is Potter.
I’m guessing they were taking fairly serious dramatic liberties; the front didn’t move significantly from mid-1951 to the end of the war in 1953, and prior to that, it was freewheeling maneuver warfare, with the N. Koreans pushing the UN back to Pusan, then the UN broke out and performed the Inchon landings, and pushed north all the way to the Yalu River/Chosin Reservoir on the Chinese border, only to be pushed back to just south of the 38th parallel when the Chinese entered in 1950, and subsequently pushing the Chinese back to just north of the 38th parallel by mid-1951.
Methinks you are taking this way too seriously. It’s just a sitcom. Or a dramedy. Depending on which episode.
That’s nothing. Radar and everyone else seems to have forgotten that Potter is actually a crazy old racist that they have already met under a different name.
Also, Harry Morgan played Sherman Potter? I know what J.K. Rowling used to watch! (I hear in an early draft he was Sherman Morgan.)
Different theater, and much later, but when I was in Bosnia we likely had mines inside of our base. There we two areas that we were pretty sure had live mines laid during the fighting. In addition there had been an ammo dump that exploded during the fighting in the area. That had scattered unexploded ordance (UXO) throughout the area as well. Every area inside our base that wasn’t either paved or actively cleared was off limits. Keep off the grass…sometimes it’s more than just a nice idea.
Battalion aid stations would have been closer to the line in the battalion rear areas. They came up in both the background information in the show and in at least one episode I remember where one of the cast had to go forward to help. That episode the battalion aid station was in artillery range IIRC.
There was more than one episode that involved going up to an aid station. One was when Hawkeye went up there and wrote his will. Another was when Father Mulcahey went up there to show he wasn’t a coward (or something like that) and had to do a tracheotomy.
It’s also out of character for Radar to not know it’s someone important before they arrived.
Is that the first ep with Potter, or the first ep with Morgan when he played a crazy General that wanted to move the unit to the front?
First episode with Potter.
In the episode with General Steele (Three “e’s”, not in a row), they knew well in advance he was coming and Henry and Radar were really nervous about it.
Yes, Harry Morgan played a crazy General in one early episode of MAS*H. Although Rare, that was done before and after.
Law and Order had several regular cast members that made one-off appearances as other characters in earlier episodes
Det. Briscoe was a Defense attorney in a early episode
Lieutenant Van Buren was a Mother of a killed kid in Harlem
ADA Borgia was stripper