Odette: The Story of a British Agent (1952 & 1955) By Jerrard Ticknell
 
Odette Churchill - She met an Englishman, Roy Sansom, in Boulogne, and married him in 1931, moving with him to England. The couple had three daughters: Françoise, Lily and Marianne. Roy Sansom enlisted in 1940. In the spring of 1942, the Admiralty appealed for postcards or family photographs taken on the Continent for possible war use. Hearing the broadcast, she wrote that she had photographs taken around Boulogne, on the French coast of the English Channel, but she inadvertently addressed her letter to the War Office instead of the Admiralty. As a result, she was enrolled in Special Forces of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and trained by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster's Special Operations Executive to be sent into Nazi-occupied France to work with the French underground. She left her three daughters in a convent school. She made a landing near Cannes in 1942, where she made contact with her supervisor, Peter Churchill. Using the code name Lise, she brought him funds and acted as his courier. Churchill's operation in France was infiltrated by Hugo Bleicher, an Abwehr counter-intelligence officer, who arrested Odette and Churchill at the Hotel de la Poste in Saint-Jorioz on 16 April 1943; they were then sent to Fresnes Prison. Although tortured by the Sicherheitsdienst using a red-hot poker at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris, she stuck to her cover story that Churchill was the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that she was his wife. Yvonne Basedon - On 4 September 1940 [aged 18], Baseden joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force [WAAF] 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, Baseden 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 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 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. Baseden 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.
 
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
334 Pages
In Good Condition