It was quite surprising to find France and Benelux harder than Soviet Union tho
Well... we know what and how it happened, that makes it a lot easier and gives a wrong impression at the same time.
Germany conquered the whole of Benelux and France in 6 weeks... so it must have been easy... no, certainly not. And contrary to all those jokes about the French army, the fighting was extremely hard. Just look at the
numbers... in terms and scales we are used to for WW2 almost 160 thousand casualties on the German side, the winning side, might not look impressive but then again, put it into relation: all those casualties were in just 6 weeks. And almost a third of the whole Luftwaffe destroyed, also almost a third of all tanks destroyed... in 6 weeks. So, yes, fighting was fierce. No cakewalk.
Both sides, the Allies as much as the Axis, both for their own reasons, spun the myths of the vastly superiour Wehrmacht... but it wasn't. As a matter of fact, especially if taken the British Expedition Corps and the French altogether (and even when leaving out the Netherlands and Belgium), in sheer numbers they were on par with the Wehrmacht but had for the most part better and especially more equipment in terms of artillery, tanks or motorized units in general. What made this war look, afterwards, like the cakewalk (which, as I said, it wasn't) were much better tactics and usage of their equipment on the German side... and, most importantly, abandoning their initial plan how to attack France. That initial plan, very similar to WW1, would had, most likely, utterly failed.
And as good as DH is as a WW2-simulator, there are limits. It is really difficult to simulate how absurdly out of time the lines of communication and command were on the Allies's side in comparison with this new way of waging war on the German side: Mobility, Auftragstaktik, 2-way-radio-sets in every kind of can-like thing the Germans called Panzer Typ 1 and 2 at that time, leaders with the ability to command right at the frontier together with a new kind of combined arms-warfare including Panzer divisions - Luftwaffe/Tac and CAS - motorized artillery... and, of course, a whole officers' corp who had since 20 years poundered the question why they lost WW1 and how they could do better... in comparison to the Allies who won WW1 and thought why improve what worked well enough back then.
So how difficult the so called Westfeldzug or Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) is for you in DH often very much depends on how you wage the war. And, one must honestly say, DH tunes it in favour of the Germans to simulate the failures of the Allies' command at that time. So it is usually possible in DH to win the war going the historic path thru the Ardennes (Luxembourg, Arlon, Sedan) but also when going thru the low lands. The latter would had been a desaster historically. It is also possible to conquere Benelux and France right after Poland still within 1939 and the UK before spring 1940... in DH.
The same problem is true for Barbarossa but on the other side: How do you simulate that the Wehrmacht killed and captured something around 3.5 million soldiers of the Red Army within the first 6 month, about the same number of the whole attacking Wehrmacht.... to see the Red Army completly on its knees and,,, standing up again? Here the mods come into play which I mentioned above which try to somehow simulate the incoming Red Army forces from the far east and the mobilization of the vast number of reservists the SU had by adding quite many Red Army units seemingly out of nowhere... what the vanilla DH, as far as I know, doesn't do or at least not to such an extent as World in Flames, the mod that raises the difficulty level considerably.
(I must admit, until today I shy away from Barbarossa, so I can't say much about it in terms of DH. Sounds weird, I know. DH is just a game but... heck, being a German myself with both my Granddads having been in the war... it is diffcult to explain but I just can't bring it on to win this war in a game. It feels like a sacrilege. So unthinkable brutally hard earned by the soldiers of the Red Army that I can't take it away from them even in a game.)
