About the Field Manual Collection

Why?

The collection is meant as a ressource for historians and hobbyists, wargamers and modelers (and serve as a warning for all things published without proper spell check). Military field manuals, while rarely followed to the point in the field, are important source documents to understand how armies understood war, understood and used their equipment, and fought. If there are successive documents - like the famous FM 100-5 Operations, changes in the prevalent or official theory of war, or the development of tactics and procedures can be traced. 

Other fields can also gain insights, from the question of women in the Armed forces (here of interest the 1943 FM 35-20 WAC Field Manual.Physical Training) legal scholars about the Armys official views on laws (FM 27-10 The Law of Land Warfare in several iterations), and of course social historians will find ample material to analyze social interaction between classes (officers vs. enlisted) or soldiers and civilians.

How many Field Manuals are there?

Honestly, I doubt that anyone knows. So far I have not found any authorative source covering all field manuals ever published. I can, however, tell you what we have: I started in Oktober 2023 with 941 files; after the first rounds of uploads we had 1793 FMs online, although we later found a couple of doublettes. in September 2024, we raised that to 1893. In December 2024, after a lot of cleanup and renaming, there should be 1960 files (some additional documents in the first folder skew the totals slightly), with the following distribution:

Era FMs In Collection Known FMs Percentage of known FMs*
1919-1939 29 69 42%
1940-1946 297 488 60%
1947-2010 1421 -     unknown
2010- 205 -     unknown

*This Percentage shows the completeness of the collection: 100% means we would have all the manuals we know of. For example we have knowledge of 69 FMs (including versions) that were published between 1919 and 1939, but have only 29 available in the collection as of now, which is 42% of 69.

Who are you?

This collection is mainly the result of an unhealthy hording habit, which fortunatly for me and my family I managed to confine to digital things. Cross that with an aborted career as military historian, and you get - this. 

I am getting errors while downloading, can you help me?

We are at the mercy here of our digital overlords - the stuff is hosted for free, but there is nothing I can do if something doesn't work. However, if you have specific issues with this website, please do let me know - I can always mail you a document or two if its urgent.

I have some FMs you're missing - how can I help?

You can reach me at usfieldmanuals@gmail.com, and since this is a task-bound email, I am happy everytime I recieve a message!

Whats next?

I am still working on filling gaps and finding new FMs to add - there are several untapped sources that I hope will provide some more. Other than that, i could totally see expanding into Wehrmacht KStNs and Soviet Shtats, alas, that'll take even more time.