Today In History: "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought."

On this date in May 1940, the Germans launched one of the most audacious airborne assaults in history...

No, no, not the gliders and Fallschirmjäger at the fortress of Eben Emael. That was positively sane compared to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Operation Niwi.

You haven't heard about Operation Niwi?

This was one of those battle plans that was obviously concocted at about 0200 on a Sunday in the middle of a pile of empty adult beverage containers...

"Hans, I've got an idea. We can speed up the advance of the 1st Panzer if we drop airborne troops on the crossroads in their rear and cut off all their communications. They'll panic and run if they can't talk to their rear areas."

"But Franz, all our airborne troops are already allotted to other attacks."

"So we'll use regular infantry and land them in transport planes. Get a couple of companies from, say, the Grossdeutschland division. They're not fully tasked yet."

"There's not enough room on these little country roads for transport planes to land and take off."

"Well, then use those little artillery spotter planes."

"But they can only carry two or three troops apiece!"

"So use a lot of them."

And so they did.

They rounded up almost every Fieseler Storch in the Luftwaffe and put them in a scratch squadron to train for the mission: 100 tiny planes delivering roughly 300 troops laden with antitank rifles to delay armored reinforcements, in two lifts, landing and taking off again from fields and country lanes. It would require precise timing and coordination. And they pulled it off, too.

On the morning of May 10, everything went down like... well, a whole lot better than you would expect a plan like this to work, actually. They actually seized the vital communications chokepoints in the Belgian rear areas, thus preventing clear instructions from reaching the troops at the front.

Unfortunately, the instructions which they prevented from reaching the frontline troops consisted of things like "Fall back and regroup," and "We need to borrow your anti-tank troops back here because we've got Jerries in the rear areas," and so the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennes held on in the face of 1st Pz. as best they could and even counterattacked a little bit instead of falling back and the German advance was held up a good day longer than if everybody had just stayed in bed that morning.

But that wouldn't have made as cool a story.