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Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

36. The Teen Heroine of Chartres

Simone Segouin, during the Paris Uprising that helped liberate the French capital in 1944. Rare Historical Photos

In August of 1944, Life Magazine correspondent Jack Belden entered the French town of Chartres, where he met a most interesting character: a gun-toting teenage girl who stood out from all and sundry around her. She was Simone Segouin, also known by her nome de guerre Nicole Minet, and Belden ended up doing a story on her that made her a temporary celebrity.

Born in 1925 into a poor peasant family near Chartres, about 55 miles from Paris, Simone grew up knowing how to hold her own among men, being the only girl among three brothers. She joined the fight in 1943, when a local French Resistance leader killed a collaborator in the center of Charters, then went on the lam. Moving about the countryside, he came in contact with then-17-year-old Simone, and impressed by her poise, recruited her into the Resistance as a courier.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.