Steel Beasts: I Would Love to Stay and Fight You, But I'm in a Rush!

This scenario by Gary Owen is an exercise to practice platoon movement techniques. I'm in command of a platoon of M1 tanks and I have to take an objective some 10+ km northwest of my position.

Time allowed is 90 minutes and the terrain ahead is ...
a heavily wooded area.

This is the route I've chosen for my platoon (shown as 2 sections in the map). Right after crossing phase line Ernie (PL Ernie) is where I started sweating. Roughly at the tip of the arrow we find some BMPs, and we dispatched them with relative ease (see one of them below).

However, I spotted some infantry around the destroyed enemy vehicles and sooner than later they opened up on us. Their machine gun fire was no match for us, but for a moment I kept my platoon at a safe distance. There is nothing more frustrating than loosing a radio antenna to infantry fire!

Yet, I had to move my platoon passing really close to the enemy infantry and the thought of them having some sort of anti-tank capacity worried me. In addition, I thought some of the infantry fire was coming from a small group of farm houses.

The clock was running and I was there wasting time. So I called an artillery fire mission. A mixture of HE and smoke worked like a charm.

See ya, suckas! This is my tank bypassing the enemy infantry, somewhere within the smoke and shrapnel in the background. On to Objective Kermit!

Cheers,