Nafziger Collection Now In The Public Domain

George Nafziger has donated his well respected Collection to the Combined Arms Research Library (CARL).  CARL is part of the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, USA

This kind donation puts this once commercial resource squarely in the public domain.  CARL have placed the whole Collection online making them freely available to wargamers and historians alike. As they say:

“The Nafziger Collection contains a compilation of orders of battle from 1600 to 1945. It began with the author's interest in Napoleonic Wars, and steadily grew to other areas because of the gaming public's interest in these highly detailed historical orders of battle. Sources range from published works to actual archival documents, which represent the largest single source. Nearly all orders of battle break down to the regimental level. The availability of strength figures and artillery equipment varies from period to period.”

Sadly, I tried to get a complete listing using the CARL finding aid but it didn’t work in Firefox, Chrome or IE8 although the CARL search tool does work.  This is a handicap as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of documents available via the Nafizer listing at CARL.  Luckily, the original indices from Nafziger’s old (commercial) web site are still available.  What a great public domain resource.

Later update:  the finding aid will work if you’re using Adobe Acrobat Reader v8 or v9 as the pdf is written to the latest pdf format; version 1.7.  If you have an earlier version of Reader, and don’t want to use these bloated and insecure latest versions, download the finding aid file (right click, then save link etc) and apply Tweak PDF to downgrade the pdf format to 1.4 which is suitable for Acrobat Reader v5 onwards.

Even later update:  the online finding aid now opens with Reader v5 upwards; problem sorted.