Yvonne Baseden (1922-2017)

DOSSIER:
Yvonne Jeanne Therese de Vibraye Baseden was born on 20 Jan 1922 in Paris, France. After the war she married and moved to what was then Northern Rhodesia, where her husband worked in the Colonial Service. She remarried in 1966 and took the name Yvonne Burney. She died on 28 Oct 2017.

CODE NAMES:
Odette
Mademoiselle Yvonne Bernier

On 4 Sep 1940, Josephine joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as a General Duties Clerk. 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), she left from RAF Tempsford airbase near Sandy on the night of 18/19 Mar 1944. Her field name was "Odette". She was parachuted into France with Gonzague Saint Geniès, a French organizer. They were dropped into South West France, close to the village of Gabarret. The local resistance, who were working for George Starr's Wheelwright network, hid them for a few days before she made her own way across France. Her wireless equipment travelled separately to Jura in Eastern France, where Josephine worked for four months as the wireless operator to the Scholar circuit. Her cover story was that she was Mademoiselle 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 Jun 1944, she was trapped in a cheese factory with seven colleagues from the network. Her organizer took a suicide pill immediately, as he was known to the Gestapo. Josephine 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 Aug 1944, she was transferred to a prison in Saarbrücken and then to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on 4 Sept 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. 

Josephine 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 take her home to her father at Brockwell Park.