IN HER work for the Resistance in France, Yvonne Cormeau created an important link between the Gascon Resistance and supplies of arms from England. Yet despite her success she was sent back to England after D-Day by an ungrateful de Gaulle.

Beatrice Yvonne Biesterfeld was born in China, where her father was on business. She came back to Europe with her parents, and settled in Belgium, where she married Charles Cormeau, an army officer, with whom she had a daughter. Before the Second World War she worked as secretary to the legal adviser to the British Embassy.

In the catastrophe of May 1940, her husband was killed in action. Her mother, who stayed in Belgium, was packed off to Ravensbruck, from which she never returned. Yvonne managed to get to England with her two-year-old infant, and decided, on reflection, that it would be better for her child in the long run if she went away to help to defeat Hitler, horrible though the thought of separation was.

She joined the WAAF in the autumn of 1941. She was able to pass for a Frenchwoman, and so moved into the Special Operations Executive a year later. After passing the para military and security schools, she was trained as a wireless-telegraphy operator as well as a parachutist, codenamed "Annette"', and dropped into France on August 22-23, 1943, to work for Colonel George Starr, codenamed "Hilaire", a principal figure in the Resistance in southwest France.

Cormeau had an unusually long and distinguished career in this dangerous role, sending more than 400 messages - a record for the independent French section - and never falling into enemy hands. This was partly because she followed to the letter all the security instructions she had been given under training, with one exception.

It was a rigid rule never to transmit twice running from the same place - a rule she always observed in the plains. But Starr had a headquarters in the Pyrenean foothills at the village of Castelnau-sur-l'Avignon, of which he had become deputy mayor; from there she could see for miles, and she used to work with a pair of field glasses beside her transmitter so that she could close down the moment she spotted a direction-finding van. The Germans knew there was a British officer somewhere about with a wireless set, but they did not think of looking in a village without running water.

With Cormeau's help, Starr's "Wheelwright" circuit received as many as 140 arms drops from the air. It thereby armed and encouraged several thousand maquisards , who played an important part in delaying the movement towards Normandy of German troops in France after the D-Day landings of June 1944. Some of the hectic flavour of their lives can be tasted in Moondrop to Gascony (1946) by Anne-Marie Walters, who was the circuit's courier and a more extrovert though less secure personality than Madame Cormeau, who never published anything.

After D-Day, all three of them became much more mobile. Cormeau distinguished herself repeatedly by keeping to her scheduled times of transmission with home station as battle raged around her - once so closely that a bullet tore through her skirt. Briefly she had to skip over the frontier into Spain, disguised as a cowgirl, but she was soon back at work, and was with Starr when he marched into Toulouse in August. Like him, she was soon dismissed back to England by a furious General de Gaulle, who could not abide any resisters who were not under his own direct command.

After the war, she and her daughter were reunited, and she settled down to the job of bringing up the girl. She was one of the earliest members of the Special Forces Club, served for many years on its committee, and formed in and around it many new friendships. She became a British citizen, and was appointed MBE. The French were more generous with honours, awarding her both a Croix de Guerre and membership of the Legion of Honour. She was tireless in promoting Anglo-French friendship.

She remained alert, cheerful, and vigorous for her years; she was in high spirits when she went by bus to Valencay in 1991 to be present at the inauguration of the monument to the dead of her section. After her 80th birthday she married again, James Edgar Farrow, with whom she lived in Derbyshire. He died before her, but she is survived by her daughter.

Yvonne Cormeau Farrow, MBE, an SOE wartime secret wireless operator, died on Christmas Day aged 88. She was born in Shanghai on December 18, 1909.