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Europa Games and Military History

Tag: links (Page 1 of 3)

Screenshot of VDV Textbooks, 2025
Screenshot of VDV Textbooks, 2025

VDV Manuals – A collection

March 19, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Keeping it up with military manuals, in 2021 some friendly reseacher posted a huge cache of military manuals and publications from the academy of the Russian Airborne Forces, the Воздушно-десантные войска России (ВДВ), or VDV. Again a translation is necessary, which fortunately can be done for free with a range of tools online these days. But the files deserve their mention, especially since the site is virtually invisible on search engines these days, and not everone as the stomach to go Ex to view the sites Twitter account.

URL: http://russianairbornetroops.info

Screenshot of Ukrainian Field Manuals
Screenshot of Ukrainian Field Manuals - https://sprotyvg7.com.ua/vijskovi-publikacii

Ukrainian Field Manuals – A Collection

February 28, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Ukrainian people were forced into a brutal war by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and had to adapt quickly and creatively to stand against the numerical superiority of the Russian Army. Support from the West was often lackluster and unreliable, many NATO states themselves torn between rising nationalist sentiments,  pacifist traditions, and the desire to help a democratic European nation to defend itself.

The Training Department (G7) of the Headquarters of the Territorial Defense Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine follows the example of the US Army and has made most of its manuals available online to the public. With a bit of automated translations, a lot of knowledge about the Ukrainian Army is available in these documents.

As of this writing, the war is neither decided nor over, and we sincerely hope the West can find its way back and be a staunch defender of democracy and freedom.

URL: https://sprotyvg7.com.ua/vijskovi-publikacii

 

Thank you to the CDSG!

January 15, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I recently found some time to work on putting the U.S. Field Manual Collection on a more solid footing, going through the various FM 21-6 (Index of Training Publications) and other lists to see what manuals are still missing, and seeing if they are available online. All this for a bigger update at the end of this month, when I will add roughly 200 new FMs or variants thereof, and correct some spelling errors.

Sometimes, the search for missing FMs ends at the gates of a mailing list who’s owners remain unresponsive. Sometimes, the reply comes quick, and I get more than I asked for. The webmaster of the Coastal Defense Study Group was so kind as to indulge my request for a couple of FMs and instead handed me their whole repository of documents, for which I am deeply thankful. I do not take donations for this website, but if you want to support the amazing work the CDSG does for the military history of the United States, please head over there and have a look!

Screenshot of RKKA-WW2, March 2018
Screenshot of RKKA-WW2, March 2018

RKKA-WW2

April 6, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Since 2003 RKKA provides a host of information on the Soviet Forces in World War Two: Formations, Force Structure, uniforms, Losses, Weapons and Maps. The Design hasn’t changed much since then, and the site hasn’t really been updated since 2010, so the website structure belies the sheer amount of information available, which definitly could use a more accessible navigation, and a lot of the maps and individual documents would profit from context.  But the amount of material presented makes RKKA one of the reference points for the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Since Alex, the site’s webmaster, is russian, many items are based on original research and russian sources.

Date: April 6th, 2018

URL: http://www.armchairgeneral.com/rkkaww2/

 

Rounding up

October 23, 2017 / / 0 Comments

While the generals talk I’ve slowly reached the limit of this years ideas and plans, and/or the limits of what I can post online without running afoul of copyright laws.

This is probably a good moment to repeat my mantra: This website lives by its contributors. If there is anything online you think violates any copyright laws, I would be very grateful if you let me know, and I will immediately remove the offending content. I do not make a single cent from this website, so I would very much like to avoid legal issues.

So, probably the last news for a bit untill the jubilee comes around (Generalstab turns 20 next year!):

  • Line of Communications pages online – Luiz Duartes fanzine, despite folding after only six issues for the want of submissions, was the indian summer of Europa and the best attempt of putting the game system on a footing without a publishing game company. Seems so long ago.
  • Two more links, one a more self-referencial (and incomplete) bibliography of publications by the Great General Staff (obviously none of them related to World War Two, but some still excellent sources, most of them available online), the second one to a similar, but way more sophisticated project collecting links to books available online about german and prussian history. And Prussian history comes with a lot of military history, so even though the books are german, even some of the map sections alone are worth a look.
  • Referencing the games is mostly done, means most games have a section listing all articles devoted to the game.

Be safe!

Screenshot von widerlager.wordpress.com, Oct 2017
Screenshot von widerlager.wordpress.com, Oct 2017

Sources for German Military History Online

October 17, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Note: This months link leads to german books and sources exclusively, so you might want to skip this link tip if you cant read german.

Markus Maria Hof is a historian and publicist, and he found the time to scrounge archive.org for books related to german and especially Prussian history. And since Prussia shaped more than a century of European military history, his findings are a treasure of sources on that topic, all of them available online. Due to copyright only old books end up at archive.org, so you’ll miss out on the most recent scientific consensus, which in a lot of cases has significantly evolved since the days when writing military history was done to instruct and motivate soldiers for the next war. However, some of the works reach a level of detail unsurpassed since.

A last grain of salt: Hofs political writings place him firmly on the conservative side of conservatism (to put it mildly), elsewhere on his blog he extensively discusses Spengler and Carl Schmidt, and his language as well as choice of topics echoes the national conservatives of the Twenties and Thirties. Still – I appreciate the bibliographical work, and reading Spengler and Nietzsche in my twens didn’t stop me from developing emphathy.

Bibliographies of (german) books on Prussian and German history online

Screenshot of www.abbl1940.be
Screenshot of www.abbl1940.be

The Belgian Army in 1940

September 12, 2017 / / 0 Comments

For this Link credit goes to Peter Page from the fantastic Yahoo group “TO&E”, which is to my knowledge the best place in the internet to search and inquire sources and information about the organisation, structure and the equipment of any modern army (“modern” being used here in the classic sense of “after the medival ages”). The TO/E group not only shares news and updates about armies around the world, but also is able to point you towards archival records and rare books available only in selected libraries.

In this case, someone pointed out a small treasure trove of digitalized documents, regulations and TO/E information mostily about the Belgian Army between the wars and up to 1940. The website is heavy on equipment and weapons and their history, but together with a small but carefully selected collection of images the authors manage to create a solid picture of the state of the Belgian Army up to the Second World War. Google Translate is only marginally helpful, since the website seems rather old and still uses frames, but the content makes it well worth a visit!

URL:  www.abbl1940.be

 

One Two Three Four!

August 31, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Todays Generalstab Archive News:

  1. A new game report, published with the kind permission of its author, Brian O’Donnell. I long hoped he would be able to finish the write up – but even the existing reports of 1937 are much better than my own write-ups, so here you go: FWTBT game report No 5.
  2. A new game report from old times. Watch – or better read on – as your truly manages to see the mighty forces of the Spanish Army defeated by a ragtag rabble of anarchists and socialist militias, led by a complete Europa novice – game report FWTBT No 6. It took me so long to publish it because I truly got put to shame here.
  3. The Europa Magazine-pages are under construction as I have pulled out the old magazines to add the table of contents to each individual magazine page. So far, 10 have been done, so I should be finished somewhen around December.
  4. New Link entries, too – a tribute to Sturmpanzer.com and the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War. Their Write-up of the First one was so abysmal that I think they wanted to make extra sure no-one complained this time. So the resulting work with fifty volumes dwarfs that of some of the major combattants, not only by volume but of course also by the sheer level of detail.

I think I am gonna slow down in the next weeks again.

Screenshot of Sturmpanzer.com, Aug 23rd 2017
Screenshot of Sturmpanzer.com, Aug 23rd 2017

Sturmpanzer.com

August 23, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The recent news that Richard Hedrick, the owner of Sturmpanzer.com plans to discontinue the site as more than enough reason to point your attention to this trasure of research material. Nearly as old as the General Staff, Sturmpanzer owes its existance to a much nobler cause: scientific research. From its inception, the website has been tool as well as display of historical reasearch, only superficially centered around the German assault tanks based on the Tiger chassis, the “Sturmbär”.

Pretty quickly the content broadened into archival and printed sources. However, Sturmpanzers main treasure trove are the extensive PDF catalogues of all things World War two contained in the National Archives in Washington, and a vast amount of German TO/E-Data, usually in the original form of the KStN. KStN is german and short for Kriegsstärkenachweis, which I would translate to “war/mobilisation strength rooster”. Before and During Second World War they served as the basic inventory and structure information of any german unit, and their continuous updates reflect the German Armys response to the requirements of war.

Last but not least, in the past years the research blog has been another rich source of Data, Insights and thoughts about – mostly – the german Army in World War Two. I highly reccomend a visit before its taken offline.

Date: August 23rd, 2017

URL: http://sturmpanzer.com

The charge of the burning camels

July 20, 2017 / / 0 Comments

More work done: I’ve enlarged the Academy and created sub-pages for essays and documents. The library now contains links to nearly all available official histories of World War I, while the page about WW 2 is being built. The corpus of links has grown sufficiently I believe to justify converting it into permanent pages.
Also, the title of this post refers – of course, to the victory of the great Timur Tamerlan over the Indian Sultan in 1398.

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