Fall and Rise: A WW2 ISOT

No. As said before, there are 2 parts left and then a brief epilogue. As a story, it is a fairly closed and self contained one, without great scope for stretch or complications.

One thing is for sure: It isn’t going to take going all the way to Berlin. The end, when it comes, will be relatively quick.

Their opinion is informed by the poor performance of the USSR in their defeat in the Winter War, the first 18 months of Barbarossa and the grinding fight of 1943. They aren’t worried, as the Red Army isn’t in an attacking position in 1940 - remember, it is the British here who have some interesting infiltration of the Soviets.

Stalin has been just a little deterred by what Bomber Command has shown it is capable of.

The Free Polish Forces in Britain are largely conventional infantry and armour. As outlined a few pages back in the notes for Part 5, there will be a link up with the Home Army by British and Free Polish special forces, as well as an Anglo-Polish-Israeli operation against a notorious place. Further details would be giving the game away a tad.

1,174,208 IDs + 4000 frontline infantry tanks 
187,200 ADs + frontline 5200 tanks
Field Army: 1,361,408 men + 500,000 RA, 150,000 RE + 500,000 Ors for 2.5 million

Narvik
June 26th 1940

As Leutnant Unglückselig stood waiting on the dockside for his turn to embark upon the ship that would carry him across to England, captivity, and safety, he finally remembered the French phrase he had been trying to remember through the day

Coup de main.

The 2nd and 3rd Mountain Divisions had retaken Narvik less than three weeks ago, and in that time had quite naturally little opportunity for the erection of any permanent or major fortified defences and fieldworks. There had been some concern of repetition of the earlier naval raids and the rampage of Warspite, but the Allied evacuation of Norway had seemed to have put paid to that prospect. In any event, General Dietl’s force had maintained outer pickets out in the Ofotfjord and the surrounding heights overlooking and controlling the approaches to Narvik harbour, and these were naturally expected to provide warning of any approaching enemy.

It was thus a circumstance of no small perturbation and confustication to the German garrison when, at 0942, an enormous British fleet had appeared in the middle of the fjord and began shelling the battered remnants of the coastal batteries and other strong points. There had been no warning, nor even any telltale sound, just a normal June morning and then a veritable maelstrom of destruction. Five huge battleships, ten cruisers and dozens of destroyers, all flying battle flags and bristling with guns, had delivered the first punch, but that had not been the most disturbing feature of the day.

Nor, for that matter, had been the sudden appearance of hundreds of English fighters and dive bombers out of an empty sky, swooping down to strike everything in feldgrau that could be seen in the open with withering cannon fire, barrages of rockets and some sort of horrific jellied gasoline bomb. It was a shock, to be sure, and he still couldn’t understand how they seemed to appear out of nowhere without the usual noise of engines, but aircraft and ships were known threats and ones that could be understood.

What had came as a true shock beyond the ken of ordinary experience was the troops who had seemingly rose up from the mountainside and fell down upon the Gebirgsjager emplaced around Narvik, for one simple reason.

They were not men.

Thousands and thousands of heavily armoured dwarves had charged down forth at the Germans, firing stubby automatic rifles and machine guns and supported by mortars and mountain howitzers. Many of the mountain troops had tried to fight back gallantly as befits good German soldiers, but they were outnumbered, outgunned and beset from all sides; those positions that did offer resistance were swiftly subdued by some form of shoulder mounted rocket launchers wielded by the dwarves or equally devastating grenade guns.

The German troops on the other side of the Rombaksfjord had the distinctly strange experience of being better off facing a surprise attack by several thousand Gurkhas, even as the tender attentions of the furious fighters from the far-off Himalayas would very, very rarely be seen as the lesser of two evils; a ferocious smile and razor sharp kukri was only ever so slightly less disconcerting than a bearded midget trying to introduce a landser’s nether regions to a doubled-bitted battleaxe.

Within an hour of the appearance of the fleet, the swarms of aircraft and the troops, all semblance of organised resistance had ceased. The landing ships carrying the Light Division then appeared from behind their screens of illusion and began to land the division directly onto the dockside, whereupon they proceeded to fan out into the town as per the carefully laid plan. Once empty, they were used to ferry the German prisoners out to the transports further out in the fjord.

The morning would see other landings at Trondheim and at Bergen, similarly using the decidedly unfair combination of concealing magics and overwhelming force to come down upon the Germans as the Assyrians of old, like a wolf upon the fold. Royal Air Force bombers and Mosquitoes flying from Scotland and Gloster Reapers out of the Shetlands continued to hammer every airfield in Southern Norway through the morning, following on from the constant bombing of the last week, all working towards a greater purpose.

From airfields across the North of England, hundreds of Vickers Victoria transports took to the skies carrying the first wave of I Airborne Corps. The British and Canadian paratroopers were bound for Sola and destiny.

The liberation of Norway had begun.

It more than seems to be bigger - it is very much bigger, with three and a half divisions; 5 BB, 10 CA and 42 DD; and FAA aircraft from four carriers plus 250 RAF planes.

It doesn’t just seem to be the finisher, but is that. The Germans don’t have a fleet to get troops to Norway again.