"First Battle of Narvik" Topic

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Well after all the preliminary stuff, my group got down to playing the First Battle of Narvik last night. This was the 'raid' by the British 2nd Destroyer flotilla in the early morning hours of 10th April 1940. It was intended to catch the German invasion group napping. Big Trev commanded the British ships.

In our battle the British passed up Ofotfjord without being detected by the two destroyers on watch. Visibility was 500 nautical yards during the passage. At 0440 the visibility had increased to 6,000 yds and this was when the British ships entered Narvik one by one. Hardy was first in which the others covered the outside, then one by one the other four ships entered and fired torpedoes.

The German destroyer Wilhelm Heidkamp was sunk by torpedoes and others seriously damaged by gunfire. Several merchant ships were sunk, but the worst casualty for the Germans was the huge whale factory ship Jan Wellem, which was acting as their supply vessel.

Our Baldric commanded the Germans and after the initial surprise wore off, he set about giving the attackers a mauling for their trouble. Unlike real life, HMS Hardy escaped without damage, but the total British casualties matched real life, with two of the destroyers being lost. One ran aground in sinking condition to save the crew. The others retired back down the Ofotfjord toward the sea, with three large and angry German destroyers in hot pursuit. Of the five actually in Narvik harbour, none were in much of a condition to join the chase, so it looked like the British would get away relatively easily. But then they found the patrol they had missed during the night coming head on at them down the Fjord. Visibility had now widened to 12,000 yds and it looked as if the five large German units would be able to overwhelm the three British ships trying to escape, however a failed recognition resulted in the German destroyers engaging each other for one move. This caused some engineering damage and the ships coming up the Fjord were treated to the indignity of seeing the British ships slip past them. Quite a few more rounds were exchanged before the British made good their escape, but the damage was relatively minor for them, while much harsher on the German pursuers who, with engineering damage, flooding and etc eventually gave up the chase.

Just as they were about to exit the Fjord the British encountered the steamship Raunfels entering. The German ship immediately stopped and the crew abandoned it after setting her on fire. The British were a little puzzled at first but all was revealed with it blew up in spectacular fashion. The unarmed German ship was the ammunition supply vessel for the Narvik expedition.

PHOTOGRAPHS.
All the photographs on the Photobucket site were taken on naval mats from TERRAIN MAT in the UK
terrainmat.com

I built the rest of the scenery over the past week or two and will be producing an article on how it was done.

Rules used were GENERAL QUARTERS III but using a test torpedo table. The Germans didn't fire any torpedoes in the game as Baldric was so busy shooting people up he forgot. However the British torpedo results pretty well matched real life for the number of hits and success.

Next week we will be fighting THE SECOND BATTLE OF NARVIK.

Mal.Wright.

As usual, Mal, great report! Nice terrain. I always enjoy reading your stuff.

Question for you – do you still have a site up where your WW1 Italian and AustroHungarian battles are located?

Excellent! What scale are those ships?

Dave

beutiful work Mal

Sorry mghFond. My Italian and Austro Hungarian battles are not on line and most of the photographs have been accidentally lost.

dasfrpsl. The ships are Navwar 1:3000 scale, with an occasional Skytrex.

Thanks Bluewillow.

Breathtaking photos! Sounds like a great game Mal. Congratulations.

Mal, I feel that I just was watching the History channel! Very nice presentation. BTW, I'd love to see that done up in a PowerPoint presentation (idea bulb). Again, very enjoyable.

Dunno about PowerPoint. Hardly my favourite program!

Mal.

Looks like a fun time--thanks for the write up.

Mal, I may not be a master of Powerpoint, but I did have some fun with your story and pics. If anyone has a clean method of converting the ppt into an avi or mpg, I could u/l it to my photobucket. Then, I can link it here. As it is, it's a little shy of 6mb, but is fun to view. If you are "game", all you need is powerpoint viewer (free). Is anyone ready to microwave some popcorn?

If anyone has a clean method of converting the ppt into an avi or mpg, I could u/l it to my photobucket.

Is this available in English?

Mal, did I mention that the photos with gunfire have sounds now? Also, in the overview photo of the fjord/harbor area the wind is whistling, as are the new several photos of the British DesRon moving into the narrows. I might try to e-mail this to you, but since I was just switched to Comcast I might have an u/l limit of 5mb. While I'm not sure about that, it's easy enough to test.

Errrrr….ummmmm….would I need to put on a Jacket? Or are there no cold effects too?

OK you shellbacks, don your peacoats (and pollywogs too!). Pop some microwave snacks and have a seat, for all of four minutes . Mal, you should be able to either link to it, or perhaps "steal" a copy and offer it direct yourself. If you promise to not sue me, I'll do the same, lol. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show, but remember to be gentle with critiques, as it is my very first attempt at giving James Cameron some competition (yeah, I don't think he has anything to lose sleep over, lol).

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Oh, I recommend clicking the "full size" option.
Flank speed!

Oi! Wots the bit with someone banging on a drum! They are steam powered y'know, not rowed!!!

I told you to be gentle. Haven't you heard what the wind sounds like when it whistles through a Fjord? The only inserted sound was the opening audio clip. The balance are all from using the slide transitions. I looped some of them to experiment on how they came off. I'll agree that the strobing on two of the slides can be a bit straining, but the gunfire seemed to work out rather nicely. Both of these were looped sounds. One worked, and one did not so well. That was the experiment. I'd edit it again, but I've already burned most of the demo uses up for the conversion software. I did find it interesting that I was able to squeeze what I could out of the default sounds within PowerPoint. If you wish, I can take those two frames of sound and remove them, or an alternative might be to have your hand very near the volume control. I can also e-mail the saved PPT file to you so that you can have it to edit as well. Consider the work as a proof-of-concept to show the possibilities. I'm satisfied that it can work, now. With the time invested, someone (not me I'm afraid) can do a superb job using this to add voice-over narration as well as many additional sound clips (and minimising on the built-in sound feature).

Can we have people shouting abuse in Norwegian, German and English?
That'd be good!

You could even have them doing it in harmony.

Errr…OK. I'll leave you to work out the script.

Hey!
Sci-Fi gamer. How did you get that PowerPoint presentation to load on Photobucket?

I've done one myself but cannot seem to get it to upload.

Please see response offered on the "Sci-Fi gamer" Topic.

These are some of the best wargame pictures I've seen. They look like colour war time shots. Well done and thanks.

Maxshadow, did you see the "movie" that I made using Gallopingjack's photos? It is easy to miss the link, but it's in my reply above dated 24 Mar 2007 2:08 a.m. PST. My intention was to show Gallopingjack how to use his photos in a different way. To take more time to read the text of the battle, you can of course pause the movie. I too thought those photos were some of the best that I'd seen.