Yvonne Baseden

Infobox Military Person
name=Yvonne Baseden


caption=
born=birth date|1922|1|20
placeofbirth= Paris
placeofdeath=
nickname=Agent Scholar, Odette
allegiance=United Kingdom, France
branch=WAAF, Special Operations Executive, French Resistance
serviceyears=1944-1945
rank=Flight Officer, Field agent and guerrilla commander
unit=
commands=SOE F Section networks#Scholar
battles=
awards= Croix de Guerre, MBE
relations=
laterwork=

Yvonne Jeanne Therese de Vibraye Baseden (b. January 20 1922, Rue Violet, Paris - d. unk) was a World War II spy.

Background and Early Life

Baseden's father was a World War I pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. He crash landed in France at the home of the Count de Vibrage, where he was invited by the Countess to have dinner. Whilst at the dinner he met and fell in love with the daughter of the Count and Countess. The couple went on to marry and lived in France following the end of the War. The family travelled and lived around Europe, so as a result Baseden was educated at schools in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Spain and in addition to being billingual (English/French) she also spoke a basic level of many other languages. In 1937 the family moved to London, where they settled in Tottenham. Baseden was disinterested in school and left school aged 16 to work apple picking in Bedfordshire. In 1939, before the outbreak of war, she moved to Southampton where she worked as a billingual shorthand typist in an Engineering firm.

WAAF & Special Operations Executive

On 4 September 1940 (aged 18), Baseden joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as an 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.

The youngest SOE woman to be dropped by parachute, aged 22, Yvonne left from Tempsford airbase near Stansted on the night of the March 18/19 1944. Her Field name was "Odette". She was parachted 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 resistants were working for George Starr's network named "Wheelwright". They hid them for a few days, then she made her own way carrying all her wireless operator equipment to Jura in Eastern France where she worked for 4 months as w/t operator to the Scholar circuit. Her cover story was that she was "Madamoiselle Yvonne Bernier", a shorthand typist and secretary.

During a routine search by the Gestapo on June 26 1944 she was trapped in a cheese factory with 7 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 August 25 1944 she was transferred to a prison in Saarbrücken and then to Ravensbrück concentration camp on September 4 of the same year. While at Ravensbrück she became ill and was put in the camp hospital 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.

After the War

After the war she appeared on This is Your Life with Eamonn Andrews in the mid-1950s. She married and moved to what was then Northern Rhodesia. She remarried, took the name Yvonne Burney, and moved to Portugal. [Liane Jones, A Quiet Courage: Women Agents in the French Resistance] She no longer wanted to talk about her experiences in the war, but gave a brief interview to Sarah Helm for her biography of Vera Atkins. She also appeared in a French documentary ("Robert et les Ombres", director : Jean marie Barrère) in which she met, again but 60 years after the events, two of the resistants who were in the field when she was dropped.

References

* Liane Jones, "A Quiet Courage: Women Agents in the French Resistance", London, Transworld Publishers Ltd, 1990. ISBN 0-593-01663-7
* Marucs Binney, "The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Women Agents of SOE in the Second World War", London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2002. ISBN 0-340-81840-9
* Sarah Helm, "A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE", London, Abacus, 2005 ISBN 978-0-349-11936-6