Scenario: Vital Airfield

[Suhiir]

How are Homeguard formations numbered/lettered?
What Homeguard formations would be in the Bunge area?

Given the distance to Gotland ... hovercraft ... one reason the Soviet assault isn't made of as many heavy formations as one would expect normally ... you may have noticed there are no Soviet tank companies.

[wulfir]

Originally Posted by Suhiir

How are Homeguard formations numbered/lettered?
What Homeguard formations would be in the Bunge area?

Hmm..., IIRC they changed the names some time around when this scenario takes place.

Home Guard units had names that differed from the rest of the organisation - a Hemvärnskrets included a number of Hemvärnsområden....

Norra Gotlands Hemvärnskrets (Hvk)
- Gothem hvo
- Slite hvo
- Hangvar hvo
- Lärbro hvo
- Bunge hvo
- Fårö hvo

But the exchanged the names Hvk to Batallion and Hvo to Company (or if it was small to platoon). I assume it would have been Bunge Hvkomp. IIRC the name change took place during the 80s...

The Swedish Home Guard had it's roots in WWII. It was made up of volunteers too old for the Brigades or the local defence, i.e. around 50 years old. They had their equipment, uniform and weapon in their homes and usually lived close to their wartime assignment. The first priority of the Home Guard was to protect the mobilisation of the defence - Sweden practiced a dispersed mobilisation with vehicles and equipment etc spread out over the countryside in storages, farmers' barns etc. The Home Guard was also to man certain fortifications near air ports, harbours etc, and be able to protect important targets (bridges, goverment agencys etc) against sabotage. Or to destroy those targets if they were in danger of falling into enemy hands. That means the Home Guard was especially important in a coup type of invasion ("strategic attack").

The majority would have been in the field within an hour or two. On Gotland there was one Hv artillery battery which was unusual (I'm unsure of its location, doubt it was Bunge). The Home Guard was mostly a leg infantry organisation that when it came to combat focused on fighting in platoon, sometimes company.

The Home Guard was jokingly nicknamed "the Prostate Geurillas" though it had women in fighting positions early on.

[wulfir]

Originally Posted by Suhiir

Given the distance to Gotland ... hovercraft ... one reason the Soviet assault isn't made of as many heavy formations as one would expect normally ... you may have noticed there are no Soviet tank companies.

After the cold war some Soviet military maps over Sweden surfaced and it showed that they knew plenty about important details the Swedish defence thought they would be more or less in the dark about, things like depths in important areas, airfield lengths, conditions in forrests, capacity of bridges, direction of streams, fording possiblities. Harbours were given special attention on these maps. It was estimated that one division would need 10 000 metric tones every day, half of it being fuel.

Gotland might have been less supply demanding given its limited size.

I'm not sure if it is possible to launch from civilian type Ro/Ro craft at sea. Or even if the WP had them in enough numbers, but in theory some elements of a Mot Rifle Rgt should be able to swim ashore on it's own - provided they can get off the ship without it sinking or beaching.

Russian map of northern Gotland. They knew about the fortifications there.