Mission 2--Operation Pegasus - Day

After a few hours of rest, you'll be awakened by Captain Price and the screaming death sound of incoming mortars. Most of your squad will be cut down instantly, as will you if you don't duck and cover as quickly as possible. As soon as the mission starts, ignore Price and make your way into the bunker nearby; you'll be safe here while the mortars are dropping.

A German assault from the west follows hard upon the bombardment, but, luckily for you, your teammates will hold the western side of the bridge on their own fairly well. They'll still need your help, however, so you'll have to grab the MG42 in the booth on the left side of the bridge and use it to mow down incoming Germans.

It goes without saying that headshots are difficult to come by while using the machine gun at long range, so be thorough in your shooting; tack onto a target and keep firing at him for a second or two, then move on to the next German you see. You're so far away from the far side of the bank that individual Germans are difficult to distinguish from the background, so watch for muzzle flashes and use those to aim. Concentrate your fire on the right side of the village, along where the trench is dug. Soldiers will occasionally lie prone beyond the horizontal range of your gun; if this occurs, disengage from the MG42, duck down so they can't see you, then pop back up after a few seconds and they will usually have moved into your killzone.

The game seems to give you an edge here by making the Germans fire less accurately, meaning that you'll rarely get hit, but if you do take a bullet or two on Veteran mode, you may as well reload your game, since you're going to need your entire health bar later on. It's best to stay at the machine gun for 15 seconds or so, disengage and duck, then save while you're not being fired upon.

There are two scripted events during this little orgy of gunfire. The first occurs around a minute after the assault begins; your game will auto-save, after which a group of eight or nine Germans will pop over the wall behind your position and start firing on your teammates from the eastern side of the bridge. If you keep your ears open, you should hear their gunfire coming from behind you while you're on the MG42. Once you do, let go of the machine gun and use whatever automatic weapon you have to kill these infiltrators.

Don't let these Germans evade your attention for too long; if they all jump over the wall, they will be quite difficult to kill as a whole.

The second event takes place shortly after the game auto-saves your position once again. Your squad will become overwhelmed by the vast number of German troops that are flooding the town, and will begin to fall back to the other side of the bridge. Your job while this occurs is to support their retreat by mowing down as many of the oncoming troops as possible. A simple task, but there are going to be a greater number of soldiers than before, and you'll have to keep an eye on both the rightmost side of the village and the central road.

Eventually, all of your troops will cross back to your side of the bridge, and your objectives will update. Your only goal now is to wait for five minutes until your reinforcements arrive. The twist is that tanks are approaching your position from the north, south, and across the river to the southwest. They're awfully courteous, though, and will approach one at a time, giving you plenty of opportunity to take them out with the flak cannon or the load of Panzerfausts that popped up behind the bunker at the beginning of the mission.

On lower difficulty settings, the cannon might be the best way to proceed here, but when your life is on the line, you'll want to stay huddled in the protection of the bunker and use the Panzerfausts at long range. Each incoming tank will pop up as an individual objective on your compass, so you'll always have an idea of where the next threat will be coming from. The tanks that approach from the north should be destroyed as they pass by the trench in the rear of the bunker; those coming from the south and southwest can be fired upon from the bunker itself. The Panzerfaust's poor accuracy will usually require you to fire multiple times at the more distant targets, but this is preferable to running through the death field outside to use the cannon. As long as you keep a submachine gun, like the Sten or MP40, and use it take down Germans approaching the bunker from the east, you shouldn't have any problems grabbing as many Panzerfausts as you need from the cache in the trench.

After the five minutes are up, it's a simple matter of clearing out any remaining Germans to finish off the mission.