A fitting farewell at last for forgotten WWII heroine Eileen: Undertakers agree t foot bill for a proper church funeral after public outcry

Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-day landings in June 1944.

On Tuesday, the anonymity that Ms. Nearne had cherished in life was denied her in death. A funeral service in Torquay featured a military bugler and piper and an array of uniformed mourners. A red cushion atop her casket bore her wartime medals. Eulogies celebrated her as one of 39 British women who were parachuted into France as secret agents by the Special Operations Executive, a wartime agency known informally as “Churchill’s secret army,’’ which recruited more than 14,000 agents to conduct espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines.

Funeral costs were paid by the British Legion, the country’s main veterans’ organization, and by anonymous donors after the circumstances of Ms. Nearne’s death made front-page news in Britain.

Ms. Nearne, known as Didi, had volunteered for work that was as dangerous as any that wartime Britain had to offer: operating a secret radio link from Paris used to organize weapons drops to the French resistance and to shuttle messages back and forth between controllers in London and the resistance.

In March 1944, Didi Nearne followed her sister in parachuting into France, remaining there, under the code name Agent Rose, after her sister was airlifted back to Britain.

The Gestapo had infiltrated many of the Allied spying networks, and Ms. Nearne lived on a knife’s edge.

After several narrow escapes, in July 1944, the Gestapo arrived at her Paris hideout moments after she had completed a coded transmission. She burned the messages and hid the radio, but the Germans found the radio and the pad she had used for coding the transmissions.

She was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp near Berlin, a camp that was primarily intended for women. Tens of thousands died there.

Ms. Nearne survived, though other women working for the Special Operations Executive were executed in the Nazi camps.

As she related in post-war debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen. Yet they failed to force her to yield the secrets they sought: her real identity, the names of others working with her in the resistance, and the assignments given to her by London. She was 23.

The account she gave her captors was that she was an innocent, gullible Frenchwoman named Jacqueline Duterte, and she was recruited to transmit messages she didn’t understand.

She recalled one interrogator’s attempts to break her will: “He said, ‘Liar! Spy!’ and hit me on the face. He said, ‘We have ways of making people who don’t want to talk, talk.’ ’’

From Ravensbruck, Ms. Nearne was shuttled eastward through an archipelago of Nazi death camps, her head shaved. After first refusing to work in the camps, she changed her mind, seeing the work assignments as the only means of survival.

In December 1944 she was moved to the Markleberg camp, near Leipzig, where she worked on a road-repair gang for 12 hours a day. But while being transferred, she and two French women escaped and eventually linked up with US troops.

US intelligence officers initially identified her as a Nazi collaborator and held her at a detention canter with captured SS personnel until her account, that she was a British secret agent, was verified by her superiors.

Describing how she lived undercover, she said after the war: “I wasn’t nervous. In my mind, I was never going to be arrested. But of course I was careful. There were Gestapo in plainclothes everywhere. I always looked at my reflection in the shop windows to see if I was being followed.’’