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Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

33. Simone Helps Liberate Her Hometown and Paris

Simone Segouin in 1944. Rare Historical Photos

Simone Segouin was with the Resistance fighters of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans when they helped liberate Charters on August 23^rd, 1944. She helped capture 25 Germans, and shepherded them to POW pens. Simone and her comrades then linked up with the French 2^nd Armored Division as it headed out to liberate Paris, and she was in the thick of the fighting that freed the French capital on August 25^th.

Simone Segouin being greeted by the mayor of Courville-sur-Eure, at a ceremony naming a street in her honor. Daily Mail

For her performance, Simone was promoted to lieutenant and awarded a Croix de Guerre. After the war, she became a pediatric nurse, and in 2017, a street in Courville-sur-Eure, a small town near Charters in which she now lives, was named in her honor.

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.