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The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2019 31 min

Lyudmila Pavlichenko - World War II — WWII Red Army snipers. Pintrest

4. The Life Magazine Sensation

Simone Segouin in 1944. Rare Historical Photos

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

Simone was born in 1925 into a poor peasant family near Chartres, about 55 miles from Paris. As the only girl among three brothers, she grew up knowing how to hold her own among men. In 1943, a local French Resistance leader killed a collaborator in the center of Charters, then fled. 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.