In February 2010, George Nafziger donated his collection of Orders of Battle, etc to the U.S. Army to place online.
His letter as reproduced is:
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Gentlemen (and ladies), I have donated the notorious Nafziger Collection of orders of battle to the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Research Library (CARL). It is online and free to the world. I'm afraid I do not have the URL and I understand that it is still in a "teething" process, but it is there. You may be wondering why. There are several reasons. First, technology was killing me. The collection was in WordStar, a DOS-based program, and Windows XP and Vista would not allow me to print the documents, so I found myself having to maintain a Windows 98 machine (and a spare, just in case). Sooner or later, I would no longer be able to get to the data. Technological changes would lose it to me (and you). Second, I'm 60. Sadly, I'm not going to live forever. I imagined, not unrealistically, that since my wife and kids know nothing about the collection, could care less about it, would see a Windows 98 machine and think "junk" and place the computer, its hard drive and all the collection on the curb for the garbage collector, that my death would result in the disappearance of something that meant a lot to me as a hobby and a labor of love. Soooo, when approached by a friend two to three years ago, I realized this was the best solution. Besides, there is some sweet irony about a Navy Captain having his stuff figure so prominently on a U.S. Army website. :-) And, in some sense, maybe I will achieve a modicum of immortality, leaving a legacy that will haunt you all long after I've shed this mortal shell. And with that, if any of you are silly enough to want to order something on the old website (which is still functional), I will take your money, but pretty soon I'm going to take it down and leave a link to the army's website. Enjoy, make use of it, and consider it my gift to the wargaming community. |
The repository selected to host George's collection was the U.S. Army’s Command & General Staff College’s Combined Arms Research Library (CARL), and they have done so using two links:
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/nafziger.htm (2010 – 2018; now dead)
https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15040coll6 (2019 – Present; still active as of 2021)
In 2010, the contents of the Nafgizer Collection which was at the time 7,985 files (596 MB); were ripped (a process that took six hours) and duplicated on the precedessor (alternatewars.com) of this website. Nearly a decade later, the process was repeated, resulting in 10,048 files (685 MB) and a new online finding aid was constructed through OCR of the finding aid uploaded to CARL in 2011, as well as scraping the contents of the 2019 CARL website; to add Part II, which contains 800+ files covering the American Civil War that were scanned by Brett Schulte, and 800+ more files covering the 1600s and World War II.
Additionally, all 10,048 files were re-hosted locally (GeneralStaff.org), to enable foreign researchers in countries like Russia and China to access them easily. (Official US Government websites (of which CARL is one) tend to IP-ban visitors from those countries due to a variety of reasons).
Online Finding Aid with Links to Individual Files |
Compressed ZIP Archives for off-line storage |
1600-1783 |
60.9 MB ZIP (1,368 files) |
1784-1815 |
124.4 MB ZIP (2,222 files) |
1816-1900 |
69.2 MB ZIP (1,278 files) |
1901 – August 1939 |
33.8 MB ZIP (444 files) |
September 1939 – 1940 |
41.6 MB ZIP (475 files) |
1941-1942 |
103 MB ZIP (1,140 files) |
1943-1945 |
99.1 MB ZIP (1,306 files) |
Part II |
74.6 MB ZIP (1,816 files) |
