These are some of my favorite military history resource sites.
CARL - the Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library - is a fantastic resource for those interested in the United States Army. It’s section of World War II Operational reports is a treasure trove of operations orders, after action reports, intelligence analyses, logistics appraisals, and similar documents. Highly recommended.
USAHEC - the U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center - is an online archives, library, and museum. It includes a large number of oral history archives from veterans of World War II. Although somewhat more difficult to navigate than CARL, the USAHEC site is also highly recommended.
TankDestroyer.net is a superb tribute to a little known and usually denigrated part of the U.S. Army in World War II. Its collection of documents, photographs, memoirs, and oral histories related to the Tank Destroyers is outstanding. The Tank Destroyers will be the subject of my next book.
The 90th Division Association commemorates the 90th Division of World War I and the 90th Infantry Division of World War II. It is another trove of records, memoirs, and oral histories. It also contains a large selection of General Orders from the division’s various components, which are crucial for finding documentation for awards if you are a genealogist.
Lexikon der Wehrmacht is an apolitical German website that covers every aspect of the German war machine from its days as the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr through its buildup as the Nazi war machine the Wehrmacht. It is in German, but if you do not know the language, Google Translate is your friend. Highly recommended for a better understanding of the other si
The Official Army Register for the United States is, unlike most of the content at Ancestry.com, free. It includes over 100 volumes of the United States Army officer’s register covering a wide range of dates from as early as 1813 to 1969. Most years are fully searchable, and some have alphabetical listings directly within the book. However, it only includes officers commissioned in the Regular Army, so excludes most Organized Reserve, National Guard, and Army of the United States officers who never received a Regular Army commission. Nevertheless, it is an excellent source for basic information on many officers’ careers.
The Maneuver Center of Excellence Donovan Research Library at Fort Benning, Georgia, contains the records of the U.S. Army Infantry School, including the student monographs of both the Infantry and the Armored Schools.
The Dupuy Institute. I learned to write well-researched military history under the mentorship of Trevor N. Dupuy, Curt Johnson, and Brian Bader at Trevor’s companies HERO/DMSI (Historical Evaluation Research Organization/Data Memory Systems Incorporated) and TNDA (Trevor N. Dupuy Associates), then, after his death, TDI - The Dupuy Institute. Many of the reports and other documents we produced are available here.
The Coordinates Translator is a marvelous online tool that will convert original American and British map grid references to latitude and longitude locations on Google Maps and/or Mapquest. The areas covered include Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, and Scandinavia, but unfortunately not Germany or Eastern Europe. Highly recommended.
HyperWar is a fabulous web resource for World War II history, including the diplomatic as well as military aspects of the war. It was founded by the late Patrick Clancy, to whom all historians of the period owe a huge debt. After Patrick’s death, Larry Jewell, the creator of the Pearl Harbor Archive took over and it is currently maintained by Otto Torriero. Hyperwar is part of the ibiblio.org Library and Digital Archive.
The Crusader Project is the blog of a good friend, Andreas Biermann. It covers in amazing detail the Winterschlacht (Winter Battle) of November 1941 through February 1942 in North Africa, from both the Allied and Axis perspectives, using original sources.
World War II Armed Forces Orders of Battle and Organizations is a superb site owned by a good friend and colleague Leo Niehorster. Leo’s site includes detailed orders of battle for all of the nation’s involved in World War II, some in surprising detail. He also has included downloadable PDF files of his extraordinary German World War II Organizational series. Highly recommended.
The U.S. Army Center of Military History is the source for information on the U.S. Army in all its wars. However, sadly like too many federal government websites political tinkering and tampering tend to result in many broken links so it is difficult to navigate. The best resources there now are the Army Lineage and Honors and the Publications Catalog, where most books published by the Center and its predecessors are available as PDFs.