In August, 1944, American correspondent Jack Belden entered the recently-liberated French town of Chartres. There, he encountered an interesting character: an armed teenage girl of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, part of the French Resistance, who stood out from all around her. She was Simone Segouin, also known by her nome de guerre Nicole Minet. Belden wrote an article about her in Life magazine, that made her internationally famous. Below are some interesting facts about that fascinating warrior of World War II’s French Resistance.
Joining the French Resistance
Simone Segouin was born in 1925 into a poor peasant family near Chartres, about fifty miles from Paris. The only girl in the family and raised amidst three brothers, she grew up knowing how to hold her own among men. She joined the fight in 1943, when a local Resistance leader executed a collaborator in the center of Charters, then fled. As he moved about the countryside, he came in contact with the then-seventeen-year-old Segouin. She impressed him, so he recruited her into the Resistance as a courier.
Segouin was taught how to operate a submachine gun – a weapon with which she became highly proficient. She was also gradually brought up to speed on the activities of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, a combat alliance of militant communists and French nationalists. As a courier, she needed a bicycle to get about, but she did not have one. So her first Resistance mission was to steal one from the Germans. She pulled it off, and the bike was repainted and became her personal reconnaissance vehicle.
A Teenage Girl Who Liked to Kill Nazis
Segouin’s stolen bike enabled her to deliver messages and stake out targets. Once she demonstrated that she could handle herself, she was allowed to take part in hazardous combat missions. Segouin helped blow up bridges, derail trains, and kill or capture Germans. She killed her first Nazis on July 14th, 1944. She had spent the night hiding in a roadside ditch, waiting for the enemy. When two Germans rode by in bicycles in the early morning hours, Segouin opened fire with her submachine gun and killed both. She then rushed to the road, searched the bodies, collected their papers and weapons, then made her way alone through the woods, to deliver the haul to her Resistance hideout.
Segouin confessed that she had enjoyed killing the detested occupiers. That came as no surprise to her comrades. She was intensely patriotic, and was inspired by her father, a decorated soldier who had fought in World War I. When first recruited into the Resistance, she had been asked if the thought of personally killing Germans made her queasy. She replied: “No. It would please me to kill Boche”. As she described how she felt about it, it was not complicated: “The Germans were our enemies – we were French”.
The Adventure of War
The teenaged Segouin enjoyed the thrill and adventure of the war. As Jack Belden put it in the Life magazine article that brought her to the world’s attention: “After routine farm life, she finds her present job thrilling and exhilarating. Now that the war is passing beyond her own home district she does not think of going back to the farm. She wants to go on with the Partisans and help free the rest of France”. She did go on to help free the rest of France. When Belden met her, it was shortly after she had fought with the Resistance fighters of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans when they helped liberate Charters on August 23rd, 1944. She had helped capture 25 Germans, and shepherded them to POW pens. She and her comrades then linked up with the French 2nd Armored Division as it headed out to liberate Paris.
Segouin was in the thick of the fighting that freed the French capital on August 25th. Photographer Robert Capa captured images of Segouin, submachine gun in hand and fighting alongside her comrades to liberate Paris, that made her more famous still. For her wartime 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 lived, was named in her honor. In 2021, she was appointed a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest and most prestigious order of merit. Simone Segouin passed away in 2023, at age 97.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Life Magazine, September 4th, 1944 – The Girl Partisan of Chartres
