Theater of War Mission Pack: Operation Barbarossa
Mission: Cold Weather
This is a small-unit mission to kill German vehicles behind the lines on a very cold and snowy night. Basic tactics apply, e.g., if you’re 2:1 against a German squad, separate your rifle squads to set up some crossfire. Use your flares to see farther around you, when you have the ammo. Look for ammo caches to grab as well as AT weapons. There is a 45mm gun in the yard ahead and to the left from the starting point. There is a Pak-40 at the crossroads. Those two guns and one PTRS squad are all the AT power you’ll need here.
After the first extended firefight and just before you get to the crossroad, look to the right on the road leading away from the crossroad and you will find three disabled (except for top-mounted MGs) tanks; use the 45mm gun you have scrounged, with support from your PTRS squad and a flare from the other squad. In this way you can vet up for the crossroads firefight.
Use your squads’ grenades and the 45mm to take the crossroads. After taking it and getting reinforced, do not head north across the river. A German base with at least 1 gren squad and 2 highly vetted StuGs is there. Instead, using your fire-lighting pios to lead the way, go east into the center of the map, on the road where you killed the three tanks, and then north again onto the river road and kill another three tanks plus a 251 halftrack that are stuck on the frozen river. Those tanks can fire back and wipe your squads so try to hit them from max range with the Pak-40 you captured at the crossroads.
If the engineer squad dies so you can no longer light fires, use your conscripts to reinforce your AT crews, which are somehow much less vulnerable to the cold.
Once you’ve taken out 9/9 vehicles, you fulfil the victory condition, but the mission continues and you’re asked to get the remaining 3. It can be a slog to do this without losing your force, unless you’ve managed to capture a tank along the way. But one approach is to go to the bottom of the map, poke and blast the German troops in the village, grab a mortar and maybe get a partisan or two, and kill the 251 there. Then head to the NE end of the river road, cross the river, and approach the big German base (two vetted STuGs plus infantry) from the east on its side of the river. Be patient, poke and defend, mortar the gren squad in the house first, and use the button tank capability of your elite infantry squads and the target weak point ability of your stolen Pak. The STuGs can’t take much AT fire.
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