Europa Games and Military History

The Nafziger Collection

Before the advent of the Web, the name of George F. Nafziger was already a staple in wargaming circles. His work on the wars of the French Revolution and his collection of well-researched Orders so Battle, especially for the Napoleonic area, made him the first adress for anyone wargaming that time. Nafziger started to make single OOBs available via the Internet in the Mid-Nineties, and his now rather dated looking website enabled visitors to order print-outs of selected battles and campaigns.

In 2010 Nafziger retired from publishing those OOBs and donated his whole collection to the public domain. It is currently hosted at the US Army’s CARL website. Additionally Alternatewars.com culled the complete archive and made it available as a collection of zipped archives for quicker access.

The Nafziger Collection itself contains orders of battle from 1600 to 1945 with over 7000 individual pdf files. What makes those files special is that the majority of them is based on archival sources, which are not easily accessible for mortal souls like us. Its depth and scope are unparalleled anywhere, and it still remains one of the most reliable, best sourced and detailed adress for order of battle research.

Date: April, 23th 2012

URL: https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/

Updated: March 18th, 2020: CARL has a new URL.

4 Comments

  1. Dr Michael Somervill

    Hi
    I am trying to access Nafziger lists related to the German invasion of France in 1940 for my research. I have the Nafziger finding guide, and have identified likely candidates for use; but whenever I try and access them I get a 404 Error Page Not Found. It seems that the only Nafziger documents still available online are those related to the American Civil War. Has there been a change in the access policy for these documents, as all the information on the internet seems to say that these are still available for free use on the web.

    • chef

      Dear Mr Somervill,
      I took a quick look at the CARL website, and it seems that the library has reduced the Nafziger collection to have only the Civil War documents publicly available, just as you said. This is a shame indeed, and I wonder if that is in the spirit in which the collection was donated in the first place.
      I consider myself lucky, since I downloaded the complete collection as soon as it became available, so it must be somewhere in my archives.
      One solution for you could be to use the invaluable archive.org, where a lot of the files seem to have ended up: https://web.archive.org/web/20160715081858/http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/CGSC/CARL/nafziger/index.asp
      Regards!

      • George Nafziger

        Contact me directly at drnafziger @ yahoo.com and I may be able to get you what you need.

        Captain G.F.Nafziger, USNR-Ret, PhD.

    • Rich Hamilton

      Check out this site for the complete archives – https://alternatewars.com/CARL/Nafgizer_CARL.htm

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