← Back to the front page

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

2. Simone’s First Dead Nazi

Simone Segouin posing for journalists in 1944. US National Archives

On July 14^th, 1944, on France national holiday, Bastille Day, Simone Segouin killed her first Nazi. Around five that morning, she lay in ambush in a roadside ditch, and when two Germans pedaled by in bicycles, she fired upon them with her submachine gun, killing both. She then went on the road, searched the bodies, collected their papers and weapons, and made her way alone through the woods, to deliver the haul to her Resistance hideout.

It came as no surprise to Simone’s comrades when she confessed to having enjoyed killing the detested occupiers. She was intensely patriotic, and was inspired by her father, a decorated WWI combat veteran. When first recruited into the Resistance, Simone had been asked if she felt uneasy about killing Germans, and she replied: “No. It would please me to kill Boche“. As she put it decades later, it was simple: “The Germans were our enemies – we were French“.

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.