User Guide

Thermopylae
If the General Staff doesn’t think all that highly of your accomplishments, then
all roads lead to Athens. Leonidas and his Spartans held the pass at Thermopylae,
against the massive Persian armies of Xerxes, long enough for the Greeks to rally
and eventually defeat the Persians. In 1941, the Australian and New Zealand
defenders of the pass were just trying to hold back the panzers long enough for
the Royal Navy to evacuate the ill-fated British expedition to Greece.
While the Greek army fought off the Italian invasion in late 1940 fairly suc-
cessfully, the Greeks were in no position to mount a serious defense against the
German invasion which followed in the spring of 1941. With their best divisions
facing the Italians, and few anti-tank guns, the Greek defense quickly crumbled.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered a number of divisions out of
Libya to help prop up the Greek army. These units fared little better than had
the Greeks, and soon the same divisions, minus their equipment, were lining
up to board British warships for the return trip to North Africa. The German
player’s task is to push through Thermopylae to stop this evacuation.
Malta
Sitting astride the sea lanes between Italy and Libya, the British-held island
of Malta proved a major nuisance to Italian efforts to push supply convoys
across the Mediterranean Sea. Therefore, the Italian general staff, the Stato
Maggiore, drew up a plan for the island’s conquest, known as C3.
Italy’s German allies soon demanded a leading role for the invasion they now
called Operation Herkules. Where the Italians had planned to overwhelm the Allied
defenses by landing infantry divisions all around the island, the German plan put
its faith in airborne landings. German and Italian paratroopers would secure the
most important points, and reinforcements would then come over the beaches to
finish off the island’s garrison. The Axis never found themselves in a position to
assault Malta, but the German player can find himself ordered to tackle the island.
This is one of the game’s smallest maps, and provides a change of pace with a
rare (as regards PANZER GENERAL II) naval conflict as part of the action.
Kishinev
Romania joined the Axis alliance to seek vengeance on its neighbors, Hungary
and the Soviet Union. Each of these, with German connivance, snatched entire
provinces in 1940. When German diplomats carefully broached a possible inva-
sion of the Soviet Union, Romanian leaders jumped at the chance to regain the
lost province of Basarabia. Romania was the only Axis ally privy to German
plans for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
CAMPAIGN DESIGN NOTES: Blitzkrieg 64
In the actual campaign, the Allies had little trouble inserting the forces they
desired into the Tobruk fortress before continuing their retreat into Egypt.
This scenario requires the Axis player to drive quickly enough to keep this
from happening.
Tobruk
The Australian defenders of Tobruk faced up to the Axis siege with great success.
Despite repeated attacks and a lengthy siege, the garrison could not be cracked
and Tobruk remained in Allied hands, though the South African and Indian
defenders of the fortress a year later had much worse luck.
While they were well-suited to warfare in the desert, the German panzer divi-
sions and the Italian armored formations were not designed for frontal assaults
against fortifications. Though the Italian infantry proved to be tough fighters,
especially at night, supplying an infantry force large enough to invest and cap-
ture Tobruk by siege proved very difficult.
The Axis forces eventually tried to bypass Tobruk instead, building a new road
south of the fortress. This eased the supply situation somewhat, but not
enough to mount a full-scale invasion of Egypt. Once again, the German com-
mander is trying to change the historic result of this battle.
63 CAMPAIGN DESIGN NOTES: Blitzkrieg