Yvonne Baseden - WAAF & Special Operations Executive

WAAF & Special Operations Executive

On 4 September 1940 (aged 18), Baseden joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as a General Duties Clerk (Service No 4189). She was commissioned in 1941 (later promoted to the rank of Section Officer) and worked in the RAF Intelligence branch, where she assisted in the interrogation of captured airmen and submarine crews. It was through this work that she came to the attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). She joined the SOE on 24 May 1943.

One of the youngest SOE women to be dropped by parachute, aged 22, Yvonne left from RAF Tempsford airbase near Sandy on the night of 18/19 March 1944. Her field name was "Odette". She was parachuted into France with Gonzague Saint Geniès, a French organizer (field name : Lucien). They were dropped into South West France, close to the village of Gabarret. The local resistance were working for George Starr's network named "Wheelwright". They hid them for a few days, then she made her own way across France, her wireless equipment travelling separately, to Jura in Eastern France where she worked for four months as the wireless operator to the Scholar circuit. Her cover story was that she was Madamoiselle Yvonne Bernier, a shorthand typist and secretary.

Following the largest daylight air drop of the war to that date, during a routine search by the Gestapo on 26 June 1944 she was trapped in a cheese factory with seven colleagues from the network. Her organiser took a suicide pill immediately, as he was known to the Gestapo. Yvonne was found, arrested and taken away for local questioning. At the end of that month she was moved to the Gestapo Headquarters in Dijon and kept in solitary confinement.

On 25 August 1944 she was transferred to a prison in Saarbrücken and then to Ravensbrück concentration camp on 4 September of the same year. While at Ravensbrück she became ill and was put in the camp hospital, nursed by among other Mary Lindell, where she remained until the liberation of the camp. She was one of 50 women released from Ravensbrück to the Swedish Red Cross. All the women were driven in coaches across Germany and Denmark and then on to Sweden. In Malmö they were cleaned and deloused. Yvonne spent her first nights of freedom on a mattress on the floor of the Malmö Museum of Prehistory, sleeping under the skeletons of dinosaurs. She was then flown to Scotland and put on a train to Euston. On her arrival at Euston there was no-one to meet her, so she called the Air Ministry and the duty officer arranged for Vera Atkins to meet her. Miss Atkins then took her home to her father at Brockwell Park.