We just finished uploading a new revision to the collection. In the absence of a proper versioning database, this means deleting the complete drive and re-upping everything, a process which is less work intensive than renaming individual files and searching four doubles, after having done the work already on the loca drive.
Space was running low on this google account, so we decided to limit this collection to FMs created 1930-2004. The latter year is a good cutoff, because the US Army started a major reorganisation that year in the way their field manuals are written (and named), with the goal of reducing the number of field manuals and create at the same time a more diverse range of documents reflecting he increasing complexity of doctrinal layers. We are still in the process of assessing and sorting through newer manuals, and might upload them to another collection. For now, this one covers everything pre 2004.
The collection now comprises 1951 US Army Field Manuals with more than 12 GB of data. At this point, we have most of the field manuals published up to the end of World War II, with most missing files being either versions of manuals already there, or covering topics that continue to be secretive, such as nuclear and chemical weapons, or intelligence.
For the time between 1946 and 2004 we have 77% of all manuals currently known to us, which also constitutes a solid body on which to start any reading into US military doctrine in that timeframe.
Here are the sites:
US Army Field Manuals from World War Two
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