Could use some advice in the Panzers marsch! campaign

[Aldaris]

Hello Gentlemen,

I am quite new to this series and loving it so far, playing only WEGO. I've recently decided to give one of the campaigns a shot, and I started with, as the thread title suggests, Panzers marsch! The first two scenarios went pretty smoothly, I won the second one losing 4 killed and 9 wounded and killing and wounding over 100 GIs in a pretty brutal double envelopment. Total victory. Yay!

And now this scout and secure the road to Le Dezert scenario. I can't seem to figure out a way to cleanly crack those defenses around the bridge. The forests on both sides are positively thick with American troops, and so is the Bocage near it. Problem: very little infantry, NO ARTILLERY and precious little time. Oh yeah, and night. However I go about entering a wood where I know enemy troops are, it fails. I fire into it for a good long time, advance a squad from a good angle - boom. Crawl in, hunt in, boom. I'm at a loss how to solve this without taking unacceptable losses - is there something I'm missing?

[Dietrich]

*** FILMED IN SPOILER-VISION! ***

One word: Bypass.

In my experience, moving to engage infantry in close terrain at night is awfully dangerous. However, the infantry in the vicinity of the bridge are few and not heavily armed. You can spray the copses and hedgerows with MG fire to suppress and even drive off the infantry lurking therein.

The first several times I played this scenario, I too was baffled at the idea that I was supposed to capture a bridge and hold it against a large tank-supported infantry force when I had no tanks to begin with (I admit, I never played the scenario long enough for any of my own tanks to arrive on-map) and had precious few AT assets and relatively little infantry.

The way I found to win the scenario is to (1) pour fire onto any areas from which one receives fire in the vicinity of the bridge and (2) advance quickly (if you're too slow, lurking enemy infantry will immobilize or even knock out your armored cars and halftracks with grenades and bazookas) along the road to the "to Le Dezert" objective. However, if you start advancing too soon or advance too quickly along the road, you'll just run into some of the enemy tanks; but if you time it right, you can send a vanguard along the road and end up bypassing the bulk of the enemy force. Such, AIUI, is the essence of blitzkrieg: advance where the enemy isn't.

[Tigrii]

I played this one a while ago, but as I recall I got a minor victory by simply giving up on clearing all the Americans out and rushing a mechanized group along the road to the objective at the end. Attacking equal/superior forces at night in the woods is pretty hopeless, I'd say just try to blitz through with a limited number of troops and keep everyone else in a defensive deployment to sit it out and bombard the woods.

[Tigrii]

Edit: Beaten to it, but glad to see great minds think alike

[Aldaris]

Thanks! I'll try that then. Just chug out the ammo with everyone decently armed and try to break through with a couple of Halftracks.