[Marcel Hogenhuis]

Dear known and (some) unknown friends,

Being a simple Dutch historian, researching the history of Venlo airfield in WW-2 for more than 25 years now, I bought this book of Peter Smith mainly with the intention of getting into a sort of 'reverse engineering': where German records are lost and can no longer describe the amount of sorties with V-1's against the UK, we could try to get an impression of it by studying what was approaching or crashed in the UK.

Yes, somehow Peter Smith had to focus mainly on the British perspective and that was most helpful for me to get an idea what III./KG 3 has done while they stayed at Venlo and Gilze-Rijen between the end of June 1944 and 5th September 1944.
I cannot give a value to the reliability of all information in this book, the most puzzling (and IMHO opinion doubtful) reference found was that of the alleged posting of III./KG 3 in France before this unit came to Gilze-Rijen and Venlo. To do what? We know that the III./KG 3 arrived in Venlo - coming from Hesepe - on 27th June 1944 and they made the first attacks with V-1's on the 7th July 1944, simply because the compass adjusting sheds were not completed before the 7th July.

As I said: a most welcome book describing the British perspective and I had not expected much more. Therefore: who expects a sort of unit history of III./KG 3 (and or I./KG 53) must wait for Chris Goss and Brian Bines joining forces haha!

Nick: intruiging to hear that (some? many?) operations of III./KG 3 show up in the National Archives! Knowing of your marvelous job with ULTRA, can you point us in the right direction: is it in the HW5 files or Air Intelligence files or both?

All the best from Venlo

Marcel Hogenhuis
marcelhogenhuis[at]gmail.com