Originally posted by unscratchedfoot
The Germans did attack the maginot and line and went through it like a hot knife through butter. It was a 2 prong invasion so one attack drew the defenders away from the other and caused confusion.
False. There were, as you say, different areas of attack, but all of them were within Belgium. The main attack came through the Ardennes, the diversionary attack was aimed north towards Rotterdam - allowing the Ardennes group to bypass the flow of force the British and French sent north to assist against the German advance in the Low Countries. This force would eventually become encircled with the British evacuating out of Dunkirk.
At no point did the Germans engage along the Maginot line, although some forces were moved to the German equivalent of the Maginot (the Siegfried Line) to prevent a counterattack coming through in the region around Saarbrucken (which would have isolated German forces in a way similar to how they isolated the British and French)
As for fortifications being useless in modern warfare, this is equally false. One word: Kursk.
"The battle of Kursk was monumental for numerous reasons but will almost always be remembered for being the largest clash of armour, certainly during W.W.II and would not be rivalled until the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1960's and 1970's. The vast area around the city of Kursk presented itself as a target with a salient being formed in the Russian line of defence. Hitler needed a victory that would regain the initiative in the east and declared that Operation Zitadelle as it was known" would shine like a beacon to the world" and would avenge the crushing defeat at Stalingrad earlier in the year, but even he had misgivings about the whole affair .... These defences were of a scale never seen before for a battle and the Russians immediately put the military and 300,000 of the local civilian population to work laying a massive array of tank traps, minefields, anti-tank guns and dug in tanks and other defensive positions in anticipation of the German attack. The minefields were specially designed to channel the armoured formations into dug in antitank defences and it was hoped that the Germans would burn themselves out trying to break through the defences ... Zitadelle had proved a costly gamble which, if one analyses the battle, had a very slim chance of success and one from which the Germans would never fully recover their losses."
http://www.forces70.freeserve.co.uk/Waffen SS Text+Images/The Battle of Kursk.html