Me and my friend have been playing the first campaign, with me as allies and him as axis, and I've made it into the base.

Now my objective is to "Activate"the three objectives before the end of turn 8, and his is to defend and "annihilate" me.

Well, my issue is; the board is 9 grids big and the objective is on the other end, so in terms of me moving and shooting with a unit it would take 1 unit the whole game to reach it. this seems impossible seeing as he can jsut set up shop at the end and "shoot, shoot" me to bits! If I double move I'll get wasted even harder.

Are we reading the mission wrong? it seems that the Axis can just dig in, snug as a bug, and outshoot me.

You're not reading it wrong, but you might not be playing it right. In my experience, this scenario is quite easy for the attacker. You don't have to move just a single square each turn. Some units could move twice while other stand and fire. Also, where are your Fast units? This scenario is cluttered enough that BBQ can weave through those walls, causing lots of mayhem.

I had some bad luck with my BBQ boys and they ended up as on the wrong side of 6 barrels...

I'll try to put my cover in better places and utilise the movement better, but it still seems a hard chore to reach all 3 different objectives in the allowed number of turns since the axis can just hole up and rapid fire my runners.

I'll give it another go soon. Thanks for the answer!