Over a year ago, in July 2011, I wrote a long article called Great War Resources with links to the Internet Archive and other places you could find resources of interest to Great War/World War One wargaming.

Here’s a bit of a long-delayed followup, the result of an evening wandering the (virtual) aisles of the US Army’s Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) website. My original post mostly had material from the Internet Archives and just a bit from CARL, as I’d only just discovered that resource. CARL material is biased toward the last two years of the Great War, 1917 & 1918. Given that this is an American military library we’re using, it’s only natural it would have more material for the years when the Americans finally realized there was a war on and joined in. Also, there was a huge outpouring of studies and material from all the combatants as the war ground onward, and as I mentioned in my original article, on the Allied side lot of it was deliberately aimed at bringing the newly-arrived Americans up to speed as rapidly as possible in the harsh environment of the Western Front.

To get the best PDF files quickly from a individual CARL listing, use the pale blue “Download” button on the far right of the page, opposite the title. That’ll get you a PDF with a human-readable filename, which is useful. Using the red-and-white PDF symbol gets you the same file, but with a random alphanumeric filename, kind of hard to keep track of once it lands on your own hard drive!

The following links are a few from the CARL Obsolete Military Manuals collection I happen to have noticed that might be of interest.

• British Tactical Notes, 1917.
• Notes on infantry attacks and raids as organized in the present war. US War Dept, 1917.
• Trench line construction, 1918.
• Scouting and Patrolling, Army War College 1918.

One easy way to sort through the Obsolete Military Manuals material is to sort by date of original publication. I can’t find a way to save links to specific searches (they time out) but use the Advanced Search dropdown on the top bar (beside the search box) and then use the Search By Date function at the bottom of that dropdown. There’s a few random bits and pieces in the 1914-1916 range, then a positive explosion of material from early 1917 onward.

Found any treasures on CARL or elsewhere that I haven’t mentioned? Post them in the comments, please! (Note that comments are moderated, especially if they have multiple links in them, but I do check up on the moderation queue regularly!)