Gene Slover’s US Navy Pages preserves more than five hundred pages of primary-source United States Navy material: Bureau of Ordnance pamphlets, complete gun books, range tables, fire control manuals, the Naval Ordnance and Gunnery training volumes, All Hands magazine articles, historic film, and first-person accounts from the sailors who served. Nearly everything here was scanned from original printed documents, and much of it exists nowhere else online.
Eugene Lee Slover (1935–2013) served in the United States Navy as a Fire Control Specialist Second Class — the rating responsible for the gun directors, rangefinders, and computing equipment this archive documents. After the Navy he built a career as an electrician and inventor whose innovations in the cotton ginning industry remain in use today. In retirement, he turned his passion for naval history into this website, so that the technical record of US naval gunnery would not be lost.
Gene became the go-to expert on almost any piece of US Navy equipment. Naval museums from around the United States — and many foreign countries — would send Gene photographs of unidentified equipment, asking if he knew what it was or what it did. Not only did he know: more often than not he had the original Ordnance Pamphlet covering how to operate and maintain it. Those same OPs are now available on this site, each one searchable through its full table of contents.
You can read more about Gene on his remembrance page and in his memoriam.
The site has been maintained since 2008 by JJ, who met Gene online while researching the trajectory of a 16″ projectile — and found that Gene had posted the actual ballistics chart. Since Gene’s passing in 2013, the archive has been kept online, expanded, and modernized in keeping with his wish that it continue serving historians, veterans, modelers, and students of naval history.
Researchers and authors are welcome to cite these documents. Because the pages here are scans of original US Navy publications, cite the original document and note this site as the source of the digitized copy. Example formats for a typical page:
Substitute the title, date, and URL of the document you are using. Every document page on this site shows its original publication details.
The US Navy publications reproduced here are works of the United States government and are in the public domain. The scans on this site are provided free of charge for research, education, restoration, and preservation work. A link back to the page you used is always appreciated — it helps others find the archive.
If you spot an error, a mislabeled photograph, or a broken page — or if you have Navy documents or photographs you would like to see preserved here — please send an email. This archive improves the same way it was built: one sailor, one document at a time.