Tag: US Army (Page 1 of 2)

Another research trip brought us to the Stanford Library, which hosts links to more than 1500 FMs in its catalogue. This enabled us to add 79 new MOS (Military Occupation Speciality) field manuals to the collection, as well as an yet uncounted number of other FMs which still need to be processed. Browsing through the complete Stanford holdings will probabaly keep us busy until May, when another big update will be ready. Also, we’re currently evaluating possibilities of hosting the collection on our own server, which would ease access and backups. 

On a side note, “discovering” these files while the are presented and catalogued very open, visibly and very publicly accessible makes us feel like green novices. It is as if this collection was something any decent librarian could click together in 5 minutes, and our academic experience and credentials do not help. So thank you to Stanford, and if you have any tips on how to improve this collection, let us know.

Here they currently are:

US Army Field Manuals from World War Two 

US Army Field manuals from the Cold War

US Field Manuals defining Military Occupational Specialities (MOS), 1976-1980

US Army Field Manuals since 2000

day we have another first: The first two FMs exclusively available on this site, contributed by a reader! We are very grateful for Scott to have scanned FM 5-31 Use and Installation of Boobytraps (1956) and FM 21-50 Ranger Training and Ranger Operations (1962) from our Missing list, and provided the scans to us. We reduced the resolution of the scans in order to scale them down to a web-friendly sice, but the quality is still way better than most of the MHI-scans of older manuals. So a very big thanks to Scott, and you*ll find both manuals in their respective sections, or with the links above.

Yet another batch of field manuals, closing more gaps in the Cold war department. About 20 new manuals, from FM 5-31 Land Mine Warfare (1949) to FM 44-1 Antiaircraft Artillery Employment (1952), bringing the total in Cold War to 1458, if I am counting correctly.  Yes, thats not significantly more than before, I had to remove some doublets, too, again. I am sure there are more professional ways to handle a PDF collection like this, but most probably also involve more time than I have on my hands. And it is late, again. Also, I updated the missing list again to reflect the new manuals.

The free days over the holidays, when not spent with family, provided us opportunity for yet another round of research, reordering, and publishing. By no means done, we at least can present the first results: 

• A new website with 500+ US Army Field manuals published since 2000 (and yes, this means the Cold War collection will shrink by four years. If anyone is knowledgeable enough to explain to us when exactly the US decided on the massive rewriting project that happened at the beginning of the 2000s, we would be gratefu indeed..

• roughly 100+ new manuals of all ages, with some really exiting ones amongst them, courtesy of a different FM collection, hosted at  https://electrtonicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/index.php?dir=Military%2FUSA%2FArmy%2FField+Manual%2F (thank you, unknown admins, for this!)

• Plans for yet another site for the ATPs, FMIs and TCs of modern times, one for the Navy, the Air Force, and the USMC, as soon as we can establish where the FMs actually differ and since when.

Anyway, enjoy the new material, and have a wonderful 2026!

Today thanks are in order: Kevin Rose has kindly agreed to share and scan the trove of Field Manuals in his archive with us, so there are quite a couple of new documents, for example FM 17-95 Cavalry Operations in every iteration from 1977 to 1996. These, by the way, make a nice background reading for BattleOrders new Youtube video on Cavalry, if this recommendation is allowed here.

In any way, the amount of new manuals made it impossible to cram them into the 15 GB limit google offers for free.  So after discarding the post 2004-manuals, we created a second website for the World War II manuals of the US Army, which can be found here. The current time ist to add a couple of more websites with military training documents, and to link them via this website. For now, follow the link if you are looking for older manuals – the cold war FMs are still here, accessible on the menu on the left.

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

US Army Field Manuals from the Cold War

US Army Field Manuals since 2000