Well, by airing your concept on here and getting feedback is a form of thinking it through. As for close quarter combat, the terrain is the limiter. Although AT and tanks would love to engage at their longest effective range (the longer range weapon then stands the chance of being the victor), this all goes to pot when something gets in the way. The Bocage in France was tactically a nightmare for tanks and tactical heaven for anti tank. No matter what weapons were used, the thinking had to be 'on the hoof'. The same goes these days for troops in Iraq where urban warfare made the huge range of modern weapons all but useless. The same happened in Stalingrad, tanks were often firing at targets tens of yards away rather that the thousand that they were capable of.
So, to get to your 5' square board which equates to 360 feet, allow artistic license and call that 600' and you are in business if there are enough obstacles in the way. Given WWII technology, you could still have a good looking scene based around a hunter/hunted or ambush setup about to be triggered. If you concentrate on limiting line of site you will be on a winner. However, in reality, when tanks found themselves in such conditions, the ideal would be to have infantry move in first and ensure it is safe for the armour to move up. Totally the opposite of how the infantry would have preferred it I am sure.
So, given license to expand the true 360 feet of your 5 foot board to represent 600 feet, you could easily have the outskirts of your defended (or is it?) hamlet with the first elements of a weakly supported armoured unit approaching an unknown quantity. At the opposite edge of the board could be the first layers of defence, a heavily camouflaged AT unit, maybe a small AT gun actually inside a house.
I think there is lots of possibilities so long as you remember it is a model and not reality so compressing distance is no crime, it is art. Go for it, there will be many opportunities to build some really good scenery.
