"Compiling Orders of Battle" Topic

I am trying to compile a comprehensive or at least as close to comprehensive as documents will allow, volume of all the Orders of Battle for the wars of Napoleon(yes I know this is a large undertaking). I have found (easily) the Order of battle listings for most of the larger battles, Wagram, Jena, Austerlitz, Borodino etc, but am having difficulty finding order of battle postings for other, less influential battles, like Arcole, Rivoli, Roliça, Raszyn, etc.

Are there any good resources out there that you know of that would aid me in putting this together?

I would prefer OOB that list the number of men in the battalion at the battle rather than the simple number of battalions

Ex: 47th Line (645 men) as opposed to 3rd Regiment (2 battalions)

Thanks for any suggestions.

link

Check out the Nafziger collection one the US Army Center for Military History site. Google Nafziger collection.
VR
James Mattes

Napoleonic Wars Data Book is useful:

link

Oman is pretty good for the Peninsular Wars:

link

Regards

A bit of Googling can work.

I have tried google, but that only really turns up the big OOB for battles like Talavera, Borodino and Aspern-Essling etc. This Nafzinger looks like it might do the trick though.

thanks to all fot eh help!

Just checked out the Nafzinger, it has tons of info, but seems to jump from 1680 to 1939…unless I am missing something.

Just checked out the Nafzinger, it has tons of info, but seems to jump from 1680 to 1939…unless I am missing something.

No, you aren't missing something. Whoever put together the "helper" didn't bother to sort the entries by the file numbers, which are conveniently coded by year. See my complaining about just this (with a little helpful info thrown in):

However, I've found some problems with the Finding Aid. First, the organization is messed up, for no good reason. For example, I've found OBs for the Peninsular War in at least 3 different places. OBs for 1807-1808 begin on page 150, continue on page 151, and stop with the French OB at Baylen. This is followed immediately by a naval OB from 1625. If you want the Spanish OB for Baylen, you have to go to page 218. Peninsular OBs continue to page 230. There are more on pages 286-290. This is particularly annoying since the file names all begin with the year of the OB, so a simple sort should have taken care of this problem. Second, I've found some of the links are wrong, but you can usually fix the URL by comparing the file name in the first column with the address in the browser window.

Alyxander100

You can also download zip files of the complete O.B. collection:

link

At one time Mr. Nafziger had listings of all the O.B.s on his site. The Wayback Machine still has them:

link

link

These are a bit easier to use than the Finding Aid.

Cliff

Camcleod – Very nice find. I'd bought some of these back in 2009 from Mr. Nafzinger and of course hard copies sometimes appear on eBay but never the whole thing. Ta muchly.

Cliff,

This is awesome! This is exactly what I have been looking for!

Now to get to setting them up in a readable OOB format for my games :) Thanks a million!

Some kind soul has packed the nearly 8,000 items together by century which makes the OOBs so much easier to download. The link to this resource is at link

Also from Steve Smith at NSF (Peninsula OOBs)

Estados de la organización y fuerza de los ejércitos españoles beligerantes en la península, durante la guerra de España contra Bonaparte / arreglados por la sección de historia militar en 1821 (1822):

link

To Download, click on the above url;
next – click on the cover image (dark rectangle);
next – click on the upper left dark rectangle again;
then – click on "Obra completa en PDF" on the left side.