The first version of this article was posted online on 9 February 2008 and was expanded on 27 December 2010. Jan Horn’s KG 51 history »Das Flurschaden-Geschwader« had been published at the end of that November but I had not seen a copy then.

I bought the book in Summer 2012 and naturally turned first to the Kommando Schenck section (there is of course much more, 400 pages covering KG 51's Ju 88, Me 410, Me 262 and Fw 190 operations from January 1944 to May 1945). I was flattered to see that this site is among the sources quoted, while his passage on the Kommando's attack on Bonnières includes what appears to be a direct translation of my own comments:

On the map this seems a clearly defined target but instead the Messerschmitts attacked a wood southeast of Bonnières, dropping their three AB 500 canisters of SD 10 fragmentation bombs from a horizontal approach at 3–4000 metres' altitude.

In »Das Flurschaden-Geschwader« these become:

Auf der Landkarte erscheint das Ziel … als eindeutig definiert, aber die Me 262 greifen einen Wald südostlich von Bonnières an und werfen ihre drei Abwürfbehälter AB 500/SD 10 mit Splitterbomben im Horizontalangriff aus 3.000 bis 4.000 m. Höhe ab.

His description of the the Kommando's arrival in France, preceded by some weeks by its ground crews, departs, as I have done, from the "traditional" chronology established by Wolfgang Dierich and followed by many authors since. It appears that one of Horn's sources was Ronny Lauer's Flugbuch since he is able to provide so much detail of this pilot's flights (Both Dierich and Horn cite Lauer as a source, Horn noting that he is now deceased). Horn gives specifics that back up the Austrian deserter's account of the Kommando flying several missions in a day, bringing to light a number of previously undocumented flights from Juvincourt.

We do however differ over at least one date: ULTRA puts the Bonnières attack on 26 August while Horn has it taking place the day before, with Melun the target on the 26th. My information came from ULTRA XL 8756 and I surmise that Horn's came from Lauer's Flugbuch since he gives the pilot's exact flight times. It's hard to know which is correct: ULTRA reports can err in their interpretation or reproduce mistakes or ambiguities in a German original; equally Flugbücher were not always compiled by the pilot himself or written up the same day, so mistakes could creep in.

One pointer is offered by CX/MSS/T293/50, also issued on 31 August, on which the relevant section of XL 8743 was based: this begins “Dated 26/8 …” and goes on to describe the mission which set off from 09.34 hours. At the document's foot is this handwritten note:

I take the first and third elements to mean that the original German signal was transmitted over the network Bletchley dubbed “Wasp” and was intercepted at 03.32 GMT on 26 August. If that's the case then it must be describing a mission flown 21 hours earlier, on the morning of the 25th.

Robert Forsyth's "Me 262 Bomber and Reconnaissance Units" (Osprey Publishing, 2012), which also deals of course with Kommando Schenck, has the ground crews arriving in France well before any aircraft, finally meeting up with them at Juvincourt. He describes the mission of 25 August as being against "the bend in the Seine, northwest of Paris", a description which would fit Bonnières.