The WAAF Agents — Diana Rowden

image-Diana Rowden photographed in her WAAF uniform MBE, Croix de Guerre

Codename(s): Paulette / Marcelle

This brief biography has been extracted from Flames in the Field, copyright © 1995 by Rita Kramer.
I am most grateful to her for agreeing to contribute to the web site.

Diana Rowden is the only Scot from SOE whose name is registered with the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle.

Diana's Scottish mother, separated from her husband and with three children to raise, took them to live in the south of France, where the British pound went further in the between-the-wars years than in Britain. Diana and her brothers grew up on the Riviera, where she became something of a tomboy, fishing, boating and swimming until her idyllic childhood was interrupted by the family's return to England, where Diana was enrolled in boarding school. She missed the Mediterranean sun and the sea and resented the restrictions of dormitory life in the cold atmosphere of school. She was happy to return to France to study at the Sorbonne despite the growing threat of war. When it came, Diana volunteered for the ambulance corps of the British Expeditionary Force but by mid-1941 she decided to make her way back to England via Spain and Portugal. She enlisted in the WAAF and was soon promoted to Section Officer for Intelligence Duties. SOE heard about her love for France, her familiarity with the country, and her fluency in the language, and in March 1943 she began her training. Three months later she stepped out of a Lysander on a moonlit meadow in the Loire Valley. She was bound for the Jura Mountain area in the southeast to work with the Acrobat circuit as "Paulette." She was constantly on the road, traveling by bicycle to deliver wireless messages to and from circuits as far away as Paris, and joining reception committees to receive vital drops of arms and ammunition for sabotage actions.

image-Photograph of Diana Rowden Barely a month after her arrival, Acrobat's organizer, John Starr, was betrayed by a double agent and arrested, and Diana and the W/T operator, John Young, a fellow Scot, went into hiding. Diana was taken in by a local family that operated a sawmill in the countryside, and soon was accepted as one of the family. In the middle of November Young received a message alerting him to the arrival of a new agent. The newcomer brought impeccable credentials, including a letter from Young's wife. Once he had succeeded in making contact, he also brought the German military police.

Diana was sent to the Avenue Foch for interrogation and from there to Fresnes prison, where she joined Odette and other SOE agents who had been caught in the roundups of the latter part of 1943. Both of them were among the group of women F Section agents who were moved to a prison in Karlsruhe, across the border in Germany, less than a month before D Day. On an early morning in early July Diana was one of the four – Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh and Sonia Olschanezky were with her – taken to the concentration camp at Struthof for "special treatment." By the next morning all four young women had been murdered and their bodies incinerated. Today a simple plaque in the crematorium bears their names.

Diana was 29 years old. Posthumously, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre.