During World War II the Luftwaffe raised a variety of Fallschirmjger units. These infantrymen were part of the air force rather than the regular army. Starting from a small collection of Fallschirmjger battalions at the beginning of the war, the Luftwaffe built up a division-sized unit of three Fallschirmjger regiments plus supporting arms and air assets, known as the 7th Air Division. Later in the war the 7th Air Division's Fallschirmjger assets were reorganized and used as the core of a new series of elite Luftwaffe infantry divisions. These formations were organized and equipped as motorized infantry divisions, and often played a fire brigade role on the western front. Their constituents were a division or organized from miscellaneous available assets. After mid-1944 Fallschirmjger troops were no longer trained as parachutists due to the realities of the strategic situation, but they still retained the Fallschirmjger honorific. Near the end of the war the series of new Fallschirmjger divisions extended to over a dozen, with a concomitant reduction in quality in the higher-numbered units of the series. Fallschirmjger participated in many famous battles, including the airborne seizure of Fort Eben-Emael, airdrops in Norway in 1940, and the defense of Carentan the Battle of Normandy in 1944. Their most famous airdrop was in the Battle of Crete in 1941, where the entire 7th Air Division was deployed along with other assets such as the German 22nd Air Landing During the Battle of Monte Cassino, the 1st Fallschirmjger Division, operating as ordinary infantry, held out for months against repeated assaults and heavy bombardment and earned the nickname "Green Devils" by the Allied forces for their tenacious defense, though they were finally forced out of the position by Polish and French Moroccan forces.
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