Diana Hope Rowden (31 January 1915 – 6 July 1944) served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II.

[2] The marriage was not successful and her parents separated when she was still a young child, whereupon she moved with her mother and two younger brothers, Maurice Edward Alfred and Cecil William Aldred, to southern France as a small income went farther there than in England.

[3] Sixty years later he was left with a faint impression of Rowden as "a bit of a tomboy", reddish-haired, freckled, with slightly protruding teeth.

[3] Her mother was apparently an eccentric who was remembered by her nephew (Mark) as "amusing even if possessing a somewhat caustic – and biting – wit and not much worried about what she said and to whom".

A girl who shared a room with Rowden (Elizabeth Nicholas), remembered the place later in terms of "the smell of ink and chalk dust, the lazy drones of bees around the flower beds, goal posts pointing bleak and white towards a winter sky."

"[5] Elizabeth was amazed to learn years later from Mrs Rowden about Diana's early years "as a sea urchin", napping on the deck of the Sans Peur with a line tied around her big toe to wake her if a fish bit, gutting her catch "with a cheerful confidence, marketing, carousing, sailing a small boat with reckless skill.

"[7] In 1933, when Rowden was considered sufficiently educated, if not entirely finished, she returned to France with her mother (leaving the two boys at school in England) and enrolled at the Sorbonne, and tried her hand at freelance journalism.

[8] When Germany invaded France in 1940 she volunteered to serve with the French Red Cross, being assigned to the Anglo-American Ambulance Unit.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

[11] 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.

[11] 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.

[12] 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.

[12] 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.

[13] Barely a month after her arrival, Starr was arrested, betrayed by a double agent who had infiltrated the circuit, so Young and Rowden were on the run.

[14] Since her description had likely been distributed, Rowden dyed her hair and changed the way she wore it, got rid of the clothes she had been wearing and borrowed some others.

Benoit arrived at a nearby house and identified himself, after which M. Janier-Dubry drove him to Lons-le-Saunier to retrieve a suitcase and were accompanied by Rowden.

In Lons they met Henri Clerk a résistant from St Amour, and had a drink with him at the Café Strasbourg, one of the circuit's mail drops.

[16] They returned around six that evening and were chatting with Madame Juif, who was cooking dinner, when the door burst open and the room was filled with Feldgendarmerie, the German military police, armed with machine guns.

Rowden liked to say that after the war she would return in her uniform and in a big American car and, instead of the laborious climb to the château on foot, they would shoot up the hill like a rocket.

[20] The agents were treated no differently from other prisoners – markedly better than those in concentration camps – and were given manual work to do, peeling potatoes, sewing, etc., which helped pass the time.

[20] Occasionally, through the high bars, they could hear Allied bombers headed for targets within Germany, so on the whole things looked good for them even if there was the possibility of dying in an air raid.

[24] Albert Guérisse, a Belgian army physician who had headed the Pat O'Leary escape line in Marseille,[25] recognized Borrel as one of his former helpers.

[30] According to a Polish prisoner named Walter Schultz, the SS medical orderly (Emil Brüttel) told him the following: "When the last woman was halfway in the oven (she had been put in feet first), she had come to her senses and struggled.

Franz Berg was sentenced to five years in prison and Straub to 13[32] but both received the death penalty in another trial for a different crime and were hanged on the same day as Rohde.