page_title: Diana Rowden
section_title: Special Operations Executive (1943-44)
hierarchical_section_title: Diana Rowden / Special Operations Executive (1943-44)
caption_attribution_description: English: Wesland Lysander, flying example at Shuttleworth, 2004,
context_page_description: Diana Hope Rowden served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive during World War II. Rowden was a member of SOE's Acrobat circuit in occupied France where she operated as a courier until arrested by the Gestapo. She was subsequently executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.
context_section_description: In early March 1943, she received an invitation to a preliminary interview with an officer of SOE F Section, during which the interviewer was favourably impressed. It was duly noted that she was "very anxious to return to France and work against the Germans", and after she had been seen by other members of F Section staff, it was decided that she would be given the chance she had been looking for. She was officially posted to Air Intelligence 10, actually seconded to SOE, on 18 March 1943, and immediately sent off to training.
  Her training report described her as "not very agile", but with "plenty of courage", and "physically quite fit". One of her best subjects was fieldcraft, in which she "did some excellent stalks". She was "a very good shot, not at all gun-shy. Grenade throwing, very good". Her instructor found her "very conscientious" and  "a pleasant student to instruct". Her commandant's report described her as a "strange mixture. Very intelligent in many ways but very slow in learning any new subject". She had trouble with technical details and her signalling was described as a grief to herself and others, not worth while persevering with as it only discourages her. She hates being beaten by any subject, so must have got through a lot of hate down here." He concluded, "I think she has enjoyed the course and could be useful."
  On 9 June 1943, Rowden received orders for her first mission, and a week later, on the night of 16/17 June, she stepped out of a Lysander on a moonlit meadow in the Loire Valley a few miles north-east of Angers. Within minutes two other agents, Cecily Lefort  and Noor Inayat Khan, had landed. The three women, who had been sent to operate as couriers for the organizers of various circuits (also known as networks) in different parts of France, were met by a reception committee organized by F Sections' air movements officer, Henri Déricourt, and quickly spirited to their destinations. Rowden was bound to the area of the Jura Mountains south-east of Dijon and just west of the Swiss border to work for the organizer of the Acrobat circuit, led by John Renshaw Starr. Her papers were in her cover name of Juliette Thérèse Rondeau. Her name in the field among fellow agents was Paulette while her code name in messages to London was Chaplain. She lived in a small room at the back of the Hôtel du Commerce with access to a roof if she had to leave in a hurry without being seen.
  Her primary was acting as a courier delivering messages to other agents and members of the underground, and she would travel constantly, mostly by bicycle over the neighbouring roads bordering the Pines, but would also deliver instructions to agents as far afield as Marseille, Lyon, Besançon, Montbéliard, and even Paris, and bring their messages back to the W/T operator (John Young) for transmission. Young was a Scotsman who spoke poor French, so Rowden's duties included escorting him around so he would not have to speak French. On one of her trips to Marseille the German police boarded the train and began inspect papers, so she locked herself in the W/C until they had passed through her car. Rowden got to know the local maquis who described her as without fear – sans peur.
  She went out at night to meet local members of the resistance in the moonlit fields, setting flares and shining flashlights to guide in the planes with parachute drops of arms, ammunition and explosives. Some of these explosives were used to sabotage the Peugeot factory at Sochaux, near the town of Montbéliard, which had been turning out tank turrets for the Wehrmacht and engine parts for the Luftwaffe. A raid by Allied bombers had failed to damage the factory and caused hundreds of civilian deaths in the town, so Harry Rée (an SOE agent known as César) approached the local director of the factory (a Peugeot family member) and convinced him to facilitate sabotage at the factory as the alternative was another bombing raid that could cause many more deaths.
  Barely a month after her arrival, Starr was arrested, betrayed by a double agent who had infiltrated the circ
caption: Westland Lysander Mk III (SD), the type used for special missions into occupied France during World War II.
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