The WAAF Agents - Yvonne Baseden Page 2

Former agent Yvonne Basedon with a suitcase wireless at Duxford

(Filed: 11/10/2002)

Secret agent Yvonne makes radio contact 60 years on

John Shaw meets a courageous woman who 'helped set Europe ablaze' as part of Churchill's Special Operations Executive

A small brown leather suitcase was one of the first things that caught Yvonne Basedon's eye at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford yesterday.

The lid was open to show a powerful portable wireless. Brushing a practised hand across the controls, she smiled and said: "What a surprise. I remember these so well, so well."

The last time she saw one was as a 22-year-old wireless operator with Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France. She was active around Dijon before being captured and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp 50 miles north of Berlin.

Among other prisoners there towards the end of the war were Odette Hallowes and Violette Szabo, GC, whom she met while training.

Mrs Basedon, 80, of Fulham, south-west London, was one of two former secret agents visiting the museum near Cambridge, before a weekend air show that will pay tribute to SOE, which Winston Churchill urged to "set Europe ablaze".

A total of 470 agents, including 39 women, were sent to France. Two hundred were killed, mostly shot on Hitler's instructions.

Mrs Basedon, the daughter of a First World War pilot, is half-French. She was an officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force when she was recruited and parachuted into France in March 1944.

"I was with Lucien, a young French officer," she said. "He was killed. After a daylight bombing raid on Dijon I was caught by the Germans.

"Ravensbruck was a horrible place. I was there when Violette and two others arrived. They came with all the paperwork about their background. They were shot.

"The Germans did not know I was an agent. I had just been rounded up with a lot of others and there was no paperwork or anything on me.

"The fact that there were no documents saved my life. We were liberated by the Swedish Red Cross. I was sent to Sweden and the British military attache told London: 'There is a woman here who says she is this and that. What shall I do?'

"A week later I was home then spent a year and a half in hospital. That is it in a nutshell. A lot of others did the same. It was a chance to be of real use in the war."

Mrs Basedon, who was the subject of This Is Your Life in the 1950s, was at the museum with another agent, Richard Rubinstein, 81, from Hendon, north London, who was active in Brittany, the Loire and Burma.

"The SOE was sent by Churchill to set Europe ablaze and we did our best to do so," he said. "We did a bit of ambushing and demolition.

"The average Frenchman was proud of the Resistance in a way, but did not want anything to do with it because he had a wife and a family to keep and a job to hold down.

"But when the time came, he said, 'Give me a rifle and let me have a go' - and one of our jobs was to give him a rifle."

Szabo, whose exploits were immortalised in the book and film, Carve Her Name With Pride, was tortured then shot in 1945. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross. Hallowes was also awarded the medal and was made an MBE. She died in 1995.