page_title: Diana Rowden
section_title: Red Cross to WAAF (1940-43)
hierarchical_section_title: Diana Rowden / Red Cross to WAAF (1940-43)
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: When Germany invaded France in 1940 she volunteered to serve with the French Red Cross, being assigned to the Anglo-American Ambulance Unit. The Allied collapse in May 1940 prevented her evacuation from France and she remained there until the summer of 1941 when she escaped to England via Spain and Portugal.
  In September 1941, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), working at the Department of the Chief of Air Staff as Assistant Section Officer for Intelligence duties, before being posted in July 1942 to Moreton-in-Marsh, where she was promoted to Section officer.
  During a brief hospitalisation in the West Country to recuperate from a minor operation, Rowden met a convalescing pilot (Squadron Leader William Simpson) who had been working for the French Section of SOE. She first came to the attention of the Special Operations Executive when Harry Sporborg, a senior SOE staff member, saw her file and requested that she be appointed his secretary, but she had already joined the WAAF and began military training. Simpson worked part-time for SOE and with whom she discussed her desire to return to France and take part in resistance work and caused him to tell some of his colleagues in Baker St (SOE occupied much of the western side of Baker Street, hence the nickname "the Baker Street Irregulars").
caption: German troops in Paris (1940).
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