Yvonne Burney, who has died aged 95, was a wireless operator for the clandestine Special Operations Executive during the second world war. She played a key role in the first daylight parachute drop of supplies over France and survived Ravensbrück concentration camp. The recommendation for her MBE after the war said that “her courageous and devoted work made possible the delivery of important supplies of arms and ammunition to resistance groups”.

Fluent in French and knowledgable about French customs, Yvonne, aged 22 and working as a secretary in Southampton, was considered highly suitable for “F” section, the French unit of the SOE. Given the codename “Odette” and put into the uniform of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, she underwent extensive training, including specialist instruction as a wireless operator.

She was paired with Gonzagues de Saint-Geniès (“Lucien”), a member of the French resistance. The two successfully parachuted into south-west France on 18 March 1944 and made their way eastwards to the Jura region near the Swiss border. There they worked alongside local resistance fighters, helping to prepare for the Allied invasion.

Yvonne was in contact with Britain, arranging parachute drops of supplies, searching the countryside for suitable dropping grounds and teaching new recruits how to use weapons. Her group was particularly busy around D-day, and she planned and participated in Operation Zebra, the first daytime drop of supplies, which took place on 25 June 1944. She sat in a field operating her wireless set as 36 planes dropped more than 400 containers with provisions to help the resistance effort against the German occupiers.

As Yvonne and the others celebrated, though, disaster struck. A member of the group was arrested by the Germans and gave away the location of their safe house. They hid while the place was searched but a suspicious soldier, seeing bicycles propped outside and a table laid for dinner, fired a shot into the ceiling, killing Lucien instantly. The blood dripping through from the attic prompted the soldiers to search further. They found Yvonne and took her to Dijon prison. There she was interrogated, but she kept to her story that she was a secretary. She was deported to Germany as a French political prisoner.

On the way to Ravensbrück camp for women she was reunited with other female SOE agents. Yvonne noted later: “I was horrified because I thought they had the whole of SOE. My generation, they all seemed to be there.” Twelve of the 39 female agents died in concentration camps but Yvonne survived. Having contracted tuberculosis in February 1945, she was nursed by a fellow prisoner, Mary Lindell, an escape line organiser for MI9, part of the War Office, who managed to secure her a place on the last convoy out of the camp, run by the Swedish Red Cross. Yvonne left Ravensbrück in April 1945 and spent nine months recovering from her ordeal.

She was born in Paris to a French mother, Antoinette de Vibraye, and a British father, Clifford Baseden, an engineer. Having lived in France for the first eight years of her life, Yvonne travelled with her elder brother, Rex, and their parents throughout Europe as her father worked on engineering projects, living in Belgium, Holland, Poland, Italy and leaving Spain as the civil war began. They settled back in France and Yvonne later moved to London to take a course in shorthand typing.

At the outbreak of war, Yvonne was living in Southampton working for the British Powerboat Company. Her French language skills were in demand and she began translation work for those who were escaping from France by boat. Hearing Charles de Gaulle’s “call to honour” radio broadcast in June 1940, Yvonne attempted to volunteer her services. Her dual nationality precluded her from joining the Free French, however, and she instead joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in Britain in September 1940, gaining her commission the following year.

She became an interpreter-secretary to an interrogating officer in the Cage, the MI9 facility where German prisoners were questioned, was then posted to the Royal Patriotic Schools where returning officers from Europe were debriefed and finally deployed at the Directorate of Allied Air Cooperation and Foreign Liaison, where she met Pearl Withington, an agent for the SOE on a break between missions. Pearl recommended Yvonne to the organisation.

After her convalescence, she returned to the WAAF and interpreted aerial photographs before being demobbed in 1948. She was made an MBE, awarded the Croix de Guerre and, in 1996, made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.

Yvonne wrote three articles about her experiences for the Sunday Express, which were published in 1952, but she failed to find a publisher for her manuscript. She appeared in two documentaries, Secret Agent (for BBC2, 2000) and Robert et les Ombres (for the French TV channel France 3, 2005). She never returned to Ravensbrück, where her story was featured in the camp’s museum exhibition.

She married Desmond Bailey in 1949. They lived in Rhodesia, where her husband worked for the Colonial Service, and had a son, Simon. After Desmond’s death in 1966 she married Anthony Burney. They moved to Portugal. When he died in 1999, she returned to London.

She is survived by her son.

• Yvonne Jeanne Therese Burney, resistance agent, born 20 January 1922; died 28 October 2017