25. The Teenaged Resistance Fighter Who Became a Media Sensation
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 Simone that made her a wartime celebrity. She was about to become one of the most famous women fighters of WWII.
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 the then-17-year-old Simone. Impressed by her poise, he recruited her into the Resistance as a courier.