Force
Fallschirmjäger
Germany's WWII paratroopers — the first large-scale airborne force, and the reason the FG 42 exists.
The Fallschirmjäger were Germany's parachute infantry — a Luftwaffe force, not an Army one, built from 1936 under Kurt Student into the first airborne arm to prove the concept in war. The 1940 descents took Norway's airfields and, in a stroke that stunned military opinion, the Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael: seventy-eight glider troops landing on its roof and blinding the strongest fort in Europe in minutes.
Crete in May 1941 was the concept's Pyrrhic masterpiece: the island taken by parachute and glider assault alone, at casualties so severe — over a quarter of the force — that Hitler forbade further large drops. The jumpers became elite ground infantry instead, and their defensive record made the second legend: at Monte Cassino in 1944 the 1st Parachute Division held the abbey ruins through three Allied offensives, earning from their enemies the name 'Green Devils.'
Their equipment was airborne-driven: the bone-breaking face-forward jump technique, weapons canisters dropped separately, the distinctive rimless helmet and jump smock, and late in the war the FG 42 — an automatic rifle firing full-power ammunition, built solely for them. Student's force wrote much of the airborne doctrine every later force studied, and its opponents — the 101st Airborne included — were its most attentive readers.