Golden Journal No. 36:
Atlantic Marines
Scenario Preview, Part Three
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2021

The Golden Journal has been a lifesaver for Avalanche Press, mostly because it gives me an outlet for bizarre game design ideas that otherwise I might try to publish in our main line of games, and that would be a really bad idea. One of those topics is the proposed German invasion of Iceland, known as Fall Ikarus, which would have been opposed by a brigade of U.S. Marines. While I find the notion of German mountain troops brawling with Marines across the treeless tundra to be really fascinating, I kind of doubt there are many more who do. Most of those are members of our Gold Club.

Atlantic Marines wraps up with a chapter devoted to the Marine-Mountain slugfest. High morale, no trees, not a lot of support weapons. And it all happens in Iceland! So let’s look at the scenarios.

Chapter Three
Fall Ikarus 1941

As the Germans saw increasing American aid flow across the North Atlantic to Britain and the Soviet Union, they redoubled their efforts to cut off the convoys. In September 1941, American escorts began accompanying the convoys as far as Iceland, well outside the Western Hemisphere and well inside what the Germans considered the war zone. To counter the American move, Germany’s Supreme Leader authorized Fall Ikarus, the planned invasion of Iceland. A pair of fast liners moved a brigade of mountain troops to the island along with engineers tasked with quickly building an airstrip.

Facing them would be U.S. Marines, who had arrived in July to garrison the island against just such an attack. Despite official U.S. neutrality, they were prepared to fight the Germans the moment they landed.

Note: Both sides planned for this battle, but it never actually took place.

Scenario Eight
Ringstrasse
September 1941
Iceland had few roads in 1941, the most important of them Route One which circled the island. The Austrian gebirgsjäger immediately named it the Ringstrasse after Vienna’s famed thoroughfare, and set off along Route One from their landing at the tiny shrimping port of Hvammstangi for the capital at Reykjavik. The Marines came up the Ring to greet them.

Conclusion
Neither side expected to meet opposition so early in their march, and a confused meeting engagement developed. German experience in the open, rocky ground so similar to that of the Arctic tundra in front of Murmansk helped them maneuver, but the Marines adapted quickly and fought with their usual determination. The Germans managed to hold part of the pass, but could not eject the Marines from the western end.

Notes
We lead off with a meeting engagement, with the Germans and the Marines trying to secure one of Iceland’s only roads. They’re pretty evenly matched, with insane morale and near-total reliance on the rifle and the bayonet to assert their will.

Scenario Nine
Passing Through
September 1941
Balked by the Marines, the German mountain troops could either press forward or surrender; packing up and heading home wasn’t much of an option. Given those choices, the regiment pressed forward. The Marines found it impossible to dig in, given the hard and rocky ground, but prepared themselves as best they could.

Conclusion
The Germans used their cross-country abilities to outflank the Marine positions and force them back from the pass before they lost their pack artillery. But while the Marines had been pushed back, most of their brigade had not yet been engaged and the road to Reykjavik was not yet open.

Notes
The Germans have brought up reinforcements and now their going to try to bull-rush the Marines. That’s not usually a good idea, but they do have a lot of bodies and firepower and might make this work.

Scenario Ten
Marine Armor
September 1941
The march on Reykjavik continued, with the fate of Iceland dependent on whether the Marines could hold the capital against the advancing Germans. If the Germans could not secure the small city and the nearby anchorage at Hvalfjördur, they could not capture Iceland, and if they could not capture Iceland, they had no real means of retreat. The garrison’s mobile strike force, the 6th Marines, attacked the German spearhead with support from the brigade’s tank company.

Conclusion
The Germans had only limited anti-tank capability, and so even the handful of Marine light tanks made an impression. But the real fighting still had to be done by the Marine Rifle platoons, in close combat with the German mountain troops. The clash of two highly-skilled, well-trained brigades resulted in intense fighting, but this time the Germans were the ones pushed back.

Notes
We had no tank battles in Atlantic Marines, so I set out to fix that: Panzer II’s vs. Marine Stuarts.

Scenario Eleven
Marine Raiders
September 1941
With the German advance on Reykjavik faltering, the German high command committed a battalion of crack paratroopers as reinforcements. The battalion dropped near the German beachhead and gathered itself to march on the Icelandic capital alongside the mountain troops. But the Americans had received reinforcements of their own, who moved swiftly by night to deliver an unexpected spoiling attack.

Conclusion
The Marine Provisional Rubber Boat Companies – they would not receive the title “Raider” until early 1942 – had trained for stealth attacks, and caught the Germans by surprise. The paratroopers recovered quickly enough to repel the attack, but not until the Marines had disabled their desperately-needed artillery pieces. The German invasion of Iceland was not going well.

Notes
We had all these Raider Marine pieces on the sheet for Atlantic Marines, and hordes of paratroopers on the Crete sheet, so it was inevitable that they had to fight. The Raiders are raiding, sneaking up on the paratroopers and attacking them in the darkness because that’s what Raiders do.

Aftermath
The German attempt to seize Reykjavik and Hvalfjordur failed in the face of staunch Marine opposition. The German brigade – now reinforced by a parachute battalion – retreated eastwards along Route One, where the Marines did not pursue them. The brigade seized and held the British-built airstrip at Akureyri long enough for long-range Fw.200 transports to land and take off most of the troops without their equipment.

Fall Ikarus had always been doomed to failure, thanks to the German Navy’s inability to bring regular shipments of fuel and supplies through British-controlled waters. A supply base for submarines and aircraft couldn’t function without supplies, and Iceland could not even feed its occupiers much less produce fuel and armaments. The presence of a small but feisty garrison changed the odds of success from difficult to impossible.

Notes
This was a fun little set; long ago I actually designed a set of ten of them because . . . well, I don’t know why, but I at least had the sense to put them away and not publish them. For Atlantic Marines I picked the four best and polished them up, and I think they’re a lot of fun. In Iceland.

The Golden Journal is only available to the Gold Club (that’s why we call it the Golden Journal). It’s free when we first offer it, but then it’s $9.99 afterwards ($19.99 for the oversized Atlantic Marines). We print enough of them to handle initial demand and a few extras, but once they’re gone we won’t reprint them – there’s just no profit in a company as small as Avalanche Press keeping a $19.99 item perpetually in stock. If you want your Atlantic Marines, the time to grab it is now.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published zillions of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his dog Leopold, who is a good dog.

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