WW2 girls
by MoskolonelOriginal Post
“Simone Segouin, mostly known by her codename, Nicole Minet, was only 18 when the Germans invaded. Her first act of rebellion was to steal a bicycle from a German military administration, slicing the tires of all of the other bikes and motorcycles so they couldn't pursue her. She found a pocket of the Resistance and joined the fight, using the stolen bike to deliver messages between Resistance groups.
She was an extremely fast learner and quickly became an expert at tactics and explosives. She led teams of Resistance fighters to capture German troops, set traps, and sabotage German equipment. As the war dragged on, her deeds escalated to derailing German trains, blocking roads, and blowing up bridges, helping to create a German-free path to help the Allied forces retake France from the inside. She was never caught.
Segouin was present at the liberation of Chartres on August 23, 1944, and then the liberation of Paris two days later. She was promoted to lieutenant and awarded several medals, including the Croix de Guerre.
After the war, she studied medicine and became a pediatric nurse. She is still going strong, and this October (2020) will turn 95.”
I've thrown a before and after photo together, enjoy this absolute legend 
.Freddie Oversteegen
Freddie Oversteegen was only 14, petite with long braids, when she became an assassin and saboteur.
It was 1940, Germany had invaded the Netherlands, and she and her sister, Truus, who was two years older, had been recruited by the local Dutch resistance commander, in the city of Haarlem.
“Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: Sabotage bridges and railway lines recalled in a 2014 book, “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We told him we’d like to do that.”
Then the commander added, “ ‘And learn to shoot — to shoot *,’ ” she said.
“I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ”
The sisters, along with a lapsed law student, Hannie Schaft, became a singular female underground squad, part of a cell of seven, that killed collaborators and occupying troops.
The three staged drive-by shootings from their bicycles; seductively lured German soldiers from bars to nearby woods, where they would execute them; and sheltered fleeing Jews, political dissidents, gay people and others who were being hunted by the invaders.
Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, the last surviving member of the trio, died on Sept. 5, the day before her 93rd birthday, at a nursing home in Driehuis in the Netherlands, about five miles from where she was born.
Freddie Oversteegen was only 14, petite with long braids, when she became an assassin and saboteur.
It was 1940, Germany had invaded the Netherlands, and she and her sister, Truus, who was two years older, had been recruited by the local Dutch resistance commander, in the city of Haarlem.
“Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: Sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus Menger-Oversteegen recalled in a 2014 book, “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We told him we’d like to do that.”
Then the commander added, “ ‘And learn to shoot — to shoot *,’ ” she said.
“I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ”
The sisters, along with a lapsed law student, Hannie Schaft, became a singular female underground squad, part of a cell of seven, that killed collaborators and occupying troops.
The three staged drive-by shootings from their bicycles; seductively lured German soldiers from bars to nearby woods, where they would execute them; and sheltered fleeing Jews, political dissidents, gay people and others who were being hunted by the invaders.
Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, the last surviving member of the trio, died on Sept. 5, the day before her 93rd birthday, at a nursing home in Driehuis in the Netherlands, about five miles from where she was born.
Freddie Oversteegen said she had felt sidelined after the war, in part because she had been a member of a Communist youth group; the Dutch government was soundly anti-Soviet.
Of the three young women, she was the most reserved, even though she was the first of them to fatally shoot a German soldier. (He had been lured from a bar into the woods.) Asked in 2016 by the online magazine Vice Netherlands how she had later dealt with her participating in wartime brutality, she replied, “By getting married and having babies.”
She also said that until she and Truus were profiled in a 2016 television documentary in the Netherlands titled “Two Sisters in the Resistance,” she had been envious of her sister. By then, Truus had become a well-known author.
“I have always been a little jealous of her because she got so much attention after the war,” she said of Truus. “But then I’d just think, ‘I was in the resistance as well.’ ”
In 2014, both sisters were awarded the Mobilization War Cross by Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister.
Ms. Oversteegen married Jan Dekker, an engineer for the Dutch steel producer Koninklijke Hoogovens. She is survived by their three children, four grandchildren and a stepbrother from her mother’s second marriage.
Freddie Nanda Oversteegen was born on Sept. 6, 1925, in Schoten, a village in the province of North Holland, to Jacob Oversteegen and Trijntje van der Molen. (Schoten is now part of Haarlem.)
Her parents were members of International Red Aid, a social service group organized by the Communist International. Freddie and her sister joined the Dutch Youth Federation, another Communist affiliate, and made dolls for children caught up in the Spanish Civil War.
After their parents divorced, amicably (Jacob sang a farewell serenade in French), the girls moved with their mother into a small North Holland apartment, where the sisters shared a bunk. As early as the mid-1930s, the family took in Jews fleeing from Germany.
After the Germans invaded, Jews were hidden elsewhere because the Oversteegens feared that their Communist leanings might invite exposure. Many were discovered nevertheless.
“They were all deported and murdered,” Ms. Oversteegen was quoted as telling the anthropologist Ellis Jonker in “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We never heard from them again. It still moves me dreadfully, whenever I talk about it.”
The sisters worked as nurses in Enschede, on the German border in eastern Holland, where they could surreptitiously report on a German military airport. They also distributed leaflets and anti-Nazi posters.
Their anti-Nazi activities brought them to the attention of Frans van der Wiel, the Dutch underground leader in Haarlem, who visited them and, with their mother’s blessing, persuaded them to join the Council of Resistance. Their mother gave them only one rule, Ms. Oversteegen said: “Always stay human.”
Retaining their humanity became more challenging once the sisters joined the seven-member underground cell based in Haarlem (they and Ms. Schaft were the only women) and learned that their job would entail blowing up bridges and railway tracks — and murder.
“Yes, I’ve shot a gun myself and I’ve seen them fall,” Freddie Oversteegen told a TV interviewer. “And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”
Still, she justified killing collaborators, who had betrayed her neighbors, and foreign soldiers, who had invaded and occupied her country.
“We had to do it,” she said. “It was a necessary evil.”
Ms. Oversteegen also rebutted criticism that the resistance had provoked German retaliation against innocent civilians.
“What about the six million Jews?” she said. “Weren’t they innocent people? Killing them was no act of reprisal. We were no terrorists. The real act of terror was the kidnapping and execution of innocent people after the resistance acted.”
The three women drew the line once, though, according to Kathryn J. Atwood’s book “Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue” (2011).
They had been ordered to kidnap the children of the politician and senior Nazi officer Arthur Seyss-Inquart, reichkommissar of the occupied Netherlands. The plan was to swap the children for imprisoned members of the Dutch underground. The three refused because the children could have been killed if the exchange went awry.
“We are no Hitlerites,” Ms. Schaft was quoted as saying in the book. “Resistance fighters don’t murder children.”
Hedy Lamarr
A Hollywood starlet from the 1930s until the 1950s, Hedy Lamarr was known as “the most beautiful woman in Europe” – but her looks and acting skills were far from the defining aspects of her life.
When not acting, the Austrian immigrant dabbled in tech. During the early stages of WWII, Lamarr and composer George Antheil created a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes.
“She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed,” Lamarr’s biographer, Richard Rhodes, wrote. “But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won’t know where it is.”
Lamarr and Antheil successfully developed a means to prevent the jamming of torpedoes’ frequency hopping – along with spread spectrum technology. The invention — which would lead to the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and guided missile systems — was patented in 1941, but the Navy did not put their invention to use until the 1960s during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hedy Lamarr was honored in 1997 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, a BULBIE (basically the Oscars of inventing) and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Noor Inayat Khan
When war broke out in 1939, the descendant of Indian royalty Noor Inayat Khan trained as a nurse with the French Red Cross. Quiet and unassuming, Khan was passionate about her father’s pacifist teachings – so it was a surprise to some when Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force after escaping to England during the German occupation of France. There, she was trained as a wireless radio operator.
Shortly after, Khan was recruited into the Special Operations Executive for service in Nazi-occupied France. Some doubted her suitability for the job, but her fluent French and the shortage of agents had her flying to Paris as a radio operator for the resistance network, under the code name “Madeleine.”
After the arrest of many in the Paris resistance, Khan continued to move around undercover, sending messages back to London HQ. In October 1943 she was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. She managed to escape for a few hours, but upon her recapture she was sent to solitary confinement at Pforzheim prison in Germany. She was held in chains and tortured, but never revealed any information about the resistance.
From the German prison, Khan was sent to Dachau Concentration Camp where she was brutally beaten and possibly sexually assaulted. When she still revealed no secrets, the young Muslim woman was shot execution-style in the back of the head. Her last word as the firing squad took aim was “Liberté.”
Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross for courage in 1949, and the French military decoration, the Croix de guerre, or Cross of War.
Judging from all the discussions and upvotes I'd say many people are interested in the roles women played in the war. You may see it as pandering but BFV isn't the first game to have women woven into the story and certainly won't be the last.
Besides, those are just pixels; the women here actually did their part (and then some)
Don't be sad, this is just how it works out sometimes
