You make a couple of good points, RCAF. If the attack was just part of a series of raids, the Tarawa almost certainly wouldn't be risked. On that note, my TF Inchon (Law has advised that I should probably change the unit name since Marines name TF's after the TF's main unit)- one of the smaller units participating independently and the one landed furthest east- was landed by two smaller East German landing craft and a couple of converted minelayers/sweepers. You pointed out that they had been scrapped in the early '90s, but I use the v1.0 timeline in which the Cold War continued unabated until WWIII. In that world, a lot of military hardware that was retired, sold off, or scrapped in our real-world timeline would have been kept around. The Cold War was largely a numbers game. If East Germany still existed in '96, and still kept marine infantry type units, they would have kept their handful of amphibs.
Inchon, however, is part of a larger operation, already described. The Tarawa is landing the main force of Marines closer to Gdansk. Several NATO destroyers and frigates are providing security. Two of the escorts, however, were protecting the Inchon landing craft and so weren't able to intervene during the attack on the Tarawa.
For a more "classic T2K" small unit type campaign, a group of NATO SF recon/raiders could be certainly be the focal point, operating anywhere around Gdansk, including Elblag.
I posted a pan-NATO SOF group a while back that GMs could use as a premise for multi-national commando units conducting reconaissance and raiding missions in NW Poland. For coastal recon, you could have Marine recon, RM/SBS, Dutch Marines, German KSK, Danish frogmen or Jaegercommandos, Norwegian SF, etc.
http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.p...llied+commando