About the Online Doctrine Library

The Online Doctrine Library (ODL) is a project by Ametria to collect, digitize and preserve historical documents related to the structure, doctrine, and employment of military forces. What started as a presentation of collected US Army Field Manuals will expanded to cover different nations and time periods as time and ressources permit. 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.

List of Sites by the Online Doctrine Library

US Field Manuals of the Second World War

US Field Manuals from the Cold War

US Field Manuals since 2000

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 we had 1960 files. As of January 2025, the distribution is as follows:

Era FMs In Collection Known FMs Percentage of known FMs*
1919-1939 51 64 78%
1940-1946 415 532 78%
1947-2000 1464 1824 80%
2010- 523 -     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 64 FMs (including versions) that were published between 1919 and 1939, and 50 available in the collection as of now, which is 78% of 69.

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 we can do if something doesn't work. However, if you have specific issues with this website, please do let us know - we 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 us at usfieldmanuals@gmail.com, and since this is a task-bound email, we're happy everytime about every mail!