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Her identify was Simone Segouin, however she was recognized by her nom de guerre, Nicole.
That’s how Jack Belden, a Life journal warfare correspondent, got here to know that armed teenage French resistance fighter after he entered Chartres, France, with america Third Military in August 1944, across the time of the city’s liberation from German occupation.
“She was clad in a light-brown jacket and an inexpensive flowered skirt of many hues, which ended simply above her knees,” Mr. Belden wrote. “Her legs had been naked and brown. About her arm went a ribband bearing the legend FTPF. Within the waistband of her skirt was caught a small revolver.”
The FTPF, the Francs-tireurs et partisans français, was one of the vital efficient militias of the French resistance.
“Underneath my stumbling French questioning,” Mr. Belden wrote, “she admitted that she was a partisan fighter.”
His article, headlined “The Lady Partisan of Chartres” within the Sept. 4, 1944, problem of Life, made “Nicole” a world image of the French resistance. Its sub-headline — “Fairly 17-year-old Nicole tells Life’s warfare reporter the story of how she killed a Boche,” French slang for a German — provided a whiff of the sensational.
When President Emmanuel Macron of France introduced her demise, in Courville-sur-Eure, France, on Feb. 21, he cited the article within the second sentence of a information launch. She was 97.
“The article gave her a larger-than-life profile,” Robert Gildea, the writer of “Fighters within the Shadows: A New Historical past of French Resistance,” wrote in an e-mail. “Most girls resisters operated within the shadow and had been modest about their resistance actions.”
She was hardly within the shadows the morning after her first assembly with Mr. Belden, when she and several other comrades led into city 25 German troopers they’d captured hours earlier at a mill.
“Because the column drew abreast of a bunch of U.S. troopers, the G.I.s set free a collection of whistles,” he wrote. “On the finish of the column walked the partisan woman, nonchalantly holding a German Schmeisser pistol. When she had taken the prisoners to the M.P.s, she walked over to me, and for the primary time I seen slightly shyness in her, as if she had been making an attempt to cover her satisfaction in her accomplishments from an American.”
Simone Segouin was born on Oct. 3, 1925, in Thivars, France, south of Chartres. After the warfare started, her father let partisans use the household farm as a hide-out. By these encounters, she met Lt. Roland Boursier, an area resistance chief, code-named Germain, in early 1944.
“After I found she had French emotions, I advised her little by little concerning the work I used to be doing,” Lt. Boursier advised Life. “I requested her if she could be scared to do such work. She stated, ‘No it could please me to kill Boches.’”
Given false papers saying she was Nicole Minet, of Dunkirk, Ms. Segouin ferried messages and weapons amongst members of the native partisan community on a bicycle she had stolen from a German. Lt. Boursier stated he taught her easy methods to use submachine weapons, rifles and handguns. In response to President Macron’s workplace, she additionally helped the partisans sabotage German troop trains.
“Nothing happy Nicole a lot because the killing of the Germans,” Mr. Belden wrote in Life, however she was undecided if she had ever killed anybody. In 2014, she recalled being concerned in an ambush.
“Two German troopers glided by on a motorbike and three of us fired on the similar time,” her obituary in The Telegraph quoted her as as soon as saying, “so I don’t know who precisely killed them.”
After the liberation of Chartres, she and different members of her resistance group went to Paris with the American Second Armored Division, combating for a number of days till Germany surrendered town on Aug. 25.
Through the combating, she was photographed with two comrades, her weapon prepared, by the famend photojournalist Robert Capa. A minimum of one in all his pictures additionally appeared in Life, per week after the Belden article.
Mr. Belden was not the one American to seek out Ms. Segouin a worthy image of the French Resistance. George Stevens, the Hollywood movie director, took his United States Military Sign Corps crew to Chartres however used his private digital camera to seize her, with a slight smile, and a submachine gun slung over her proper shoulder.
On the day after Paris’s liberation, Ms. Segouin marched in a victory parade solely steps away from Gen. Charles de Gaulle, chief of the Free French Forces, down the Champs-Élysées.
After the warfare, she was promoted to lieutenant and acquired the Croix de Guerre, a army honor for heroism in fight. She labored as a pediatric nurse. A avenue in Courville-sur-Eure was named after her.
Details about her survivors was not obtainable.
When she acquired the Soldiering On Worldwide Award from a British army charity in 2016, Ms. Segouin said that her proudest moment as a member of the resistance “was most likely going to Paris with Gen. Charles de Gaulle.”
“It was an exquisite feeling getting into town,” she stated, “however my pleasure was restricted as a result of it felt very harmful.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.
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