1. Yvonne Jeanne de Vibraye Baseden MBE, later known as Yvonne Burney, was one of approximately forty female Special Operations Executive agents who served in France.
17 Facts About Yvonne Baseden
1. 2.
Yvonne Baseden crash-landed in France at the home of the Comte de Vibraye, where he was invited by the Comtesse to have dinner.
3.
The family travelled and lived around Europe, so as a result Yvonne Baseden was educated at schools in England, France, Poland, Italy, and Spain in addition to being bilingual, she spoke a basic level of many other languages.
4.
Yvonne Baseden was uninterested in school and left school aged 16 to work apple picking in Bedfordshire.
5.
On 4 September 1940, Yvonne Baseden joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as a General Duties Clerk.
6.
Yvonne Baseden was commissioned in 1941 and worked in the RAF Intelligence branch, where she assisted in the interrogation of captured airmen and submarine crews.
7.
Yvonne Baseden was parachuted into France with Gonzague de Saint-Genies, a French organizer.
8.
Yvonne Baseden's cover story was that she was "Mademoiselle Yvonne Bernier", a shorthand typist and secretary.
9.
Yvonne Baseden's organiser took a suicide pill immediately, as he was known to the Gestapo.
10.
Yvonne Baseden was found, arrested and taken away for local questioning.
11.
Yvonne Baseden was one of about 500 women released from Ravensbruck to the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945 in the closing days of the war.
12.
Yvonne Baseden spent her first nights of freedom on a mattress on the floor of the Malmo Museum of Prehistory, sleeping under the skeletons of dinosaurs.
13.
Yvonne Baseden was then flown to Scotland and put on a train to Euston.
14.
Yvonne Baseden was awarded the MBE by Britain and the Legion of Honour; the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre avec Palme by France.
15.
Yvonne Baseden married and moved to what was then Northern Rhodesia, where her husband worked in the Colonial Service.
16.
Yvonne Baseden remarried in 1966, took the name Yvonne Burney, and moved to Portugal and then in 1999 returned to London.
17.
Yvonne Baseden appeared in a French documentary in which she met, 60 years after the events, two of the Resistance fighters who were in the field when she was dropped.