Normandy Breakout Tutorial: BGC - Part I

The BGC (Battle Group Commander) learning tutorials continue. This time I get the pick of the crop from the 7th Armoured:

• An Armoured Regiment
• A Motorised (aka Foot as lorries die on the battlefield) Battalion
• An Armoured Infantry (Half-Track) Battalion

Unfortunately despite poring in my resources to the Recon phase, a bad set of dice-rolls (here we go a general making excuses already) made my set-up rather limited. (Not as bad as my fellow "learner" who dismissed recon and used his boys as fighters in the front line. The result was a shambles as he had to come in from the baseline probing blind and did not even reach as far forward as my jump-off position. I will always recon!). The infantry dismounted and the tanks hid behind a convenient wood (a German artillery "stonk" on me in the prep-phase would be rather uncomfortable). Armoured infantry to the left, foot-sloggers to the right and tanks to the rear. I have deliberately compressed my frontage to about twenty inches. The foot-sloggers are to cover the flank of the more mobile troops as they race unashamedly down the table edge.

Recon and Allied deployment over the German placed his troops. Two and a bit infantry companies plus a PAK 40 Coy [75mm A/T](see below). I intend to bypass the town, go to the edge of the wood with my foot-sloggers and drive over the hill with my (initially dismounted) armoured infantry and tanks. 

With no targets worthwhile to hit (I had only seen the German platoon in the town and he was in too good a covered position) I chose to lay down a (pre-plotted, as in before I knew where the rest of German units were) smoke screen for the armoured units and advance behind it (see below).

The smoke stayed where it should, covering the German positions nicely and congratulating myself on a good start (always a bad thing to do) the advance began.