More From Narvik

One of the more interesting actions near Narvik was the amphibious invasion of Bjerkvik, a small town north of Narvik.  With complete naval supremacy, the Allies could attack virtually anywhere at any time.  The fjords offered a much easier way to get around.  At times, this created real problems as the bridgeheads were not mutually supporting and required naval support to remain viable.  On May 12th, 1940, the Allies struck at Bjerkvik, with an eye to link up with Poles already landed at Navik to the south.

Ne Next morning at Bjerkvik, the attack was constituted by a ferocious naval bombardment, which was very destructive to the town and caused many civilian casualties.  This was followed by an attack of a company from one of my all time favorite units, the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion along with some H39 tanks.

These seems like a great deal of overkill for the few German sailors that remained behind in the city, but the Germans were reputedly backed up by Alpine troops.  At any rate, the Germans gave quite a show as the allies landed and landings had to be called off a number of times to allow destroyers to resume pounding German positions.

The Germans, however, had withdrawn the Gebirgsjaegers and were holding on by their fingernails with machine gun teams composed of sailors and specialists that had been secretly transferred in across Swedish territory (Gierr Haarr, 2010.)  This had led locals to consider that the danger had passed and that it was safe to stay in their homes, leading to a rather large loss of civilian life from naval fire.

Unfortunately, in ASL terms it is difficult to depict the battle, as the terrain is rather cramped and specific, so the best that can be done is a  rather abstracted overview of the battlefield constituting the village and leaving out the quays that were so important in landing phase of the battle.

The small harbor just north of town was where tanks and troops were landed.  At one point, infantry tried to get ashore on the stony beach, but one of the boats hit a mine and this was stopped.

H39s being brought ashore came in rather piecemeal, as the ships and landing craft weren't really designed for such purposes.  Further, the amphibious attack aspect of the battle generally puts a lot of ASL players off as unnecessarily complicating scenarios and in this case I am inclined to agree.  Putting troops ashore while getting hammered by machine gun fire doesn't seem like interesting scenario material to me.

And, so we come up with the following as a map of Bjerkvik.  Not perfect, but at least somewhat representative.

The Allied forces are fairly straightforward.  Two H39's and a depleted company of Legion Etranger.  The Germans are a bit more complicated.  These were sailors, but showed a tendency to rally.  So I am going to make them up of 127 vehicle crews.  That way their morale is not high, but they don't need leaders and they can come back on their own.  Despite being sailors, they were probably familiar with the use of machine guns from the anti-aircraft weapons on their destroyers.

I'll throw in some interesting SSR's and maximize fog of war.  So without further ado, here is Burning Bjerkvik.  Enjoy the scenario setup file as well.

As a final aside, one of the interesting aspects of all the Narvik battles was the actions of Marina Lee, a ballerina and spy for the Germans.  Lee left the Soviet Union for Scandinavia after her parents were (supposedly) purged by Stalin.  After volunteering for the Red Cross, she somehow wormed her way into Auchenlick's HQ in Tromso, from where the Allies were conducting the war.  As a result, Dietl, despondent and prepared to surrender his troops into Swedish custody, learned that the Allies were prepared to leave Norway.

German? Spy Marina Lee

Lee later turned up as a Soviet spy in Spain during the 70's.  British Intelligence (a very poor source for this time) figure she had a taste for the spy game and switched allegiances, but she had a personal relationship with Stalin and it is quite possible she was working for the NKVD all along.