Das Fantom: The Untold Story of Major Pete Ortiz, One of WWII’s Most Decorated Marine Officers

Germans knew U.S. Marine Pete Ortiz simply as Das Fantom. They had placed a half a million French francs on his head because of his extraordinary and disruptive work in Nazi-occupied Europe as a scout, spy, saboteur, and leader of the French Resistance. Now, in the newly published book The Phantom, authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin reveal the untold story of this marine legend—a man who ultimately became one of the most highly decorated Marine officers of World War II.

PROLOGUE

August 1944: Savoie Department, France

Fresh blood, even a mere smear, carries a distinct, sharp metallic odor. Clean and impersonal, it resembles the smell of a sheared brass bullet casing. That scent filled Major Pete Ortiz’s nostrils as he bent over the broken body of his fellow United States Marine, Sergeant Chuck Perry.

Thin red rivulets, like scarlet worms, leaked from Perry’s nose and ears, streaking his tawny hair. The twenty-two-year-old noncommissioned officer had bitten off the tip of his tongue, and a flap of the severed muscle remained impaled on a broken front tooth. Pete Ortiz had witnessed violent death before, having inhaled its pungent musk from corpses across two continents—Arab and Italian, French and German, alongside fellow Americans. Yet, this felt entirely different, as though he were personally responsible for the tragedy.

Earlier that morning, prior to climbing into the hold of the B-17 bomber that would jounce across the English Channel, pass over the secured Normandy beachheads, and soar inland above occupied France, young Perry had confessed to Ortiz that he possessed a profound "bad feeling" about the mission.

Ortiz had known the young soldier for only a few weeks, barely long enough to learn that Perry had just married his stateside sweetheart before volunteering to drop behind enemy lines. Recalling his own first clandestine insertion into enemy territory, Ortiz understood the overwhelming dread. To soothe Perry’s frayed nerves, Ortiz had offered to switch parachutes, telling the sergeant he could jump with Ortiz’s lucky silk chute, the one he had packed himself. The gesture—coming from an officer whose exploits were already legend across the French Foreign Legion, the U.S. Marine Corps, and America’s nascent spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—had the desired effect. Perry visibly calmed as the two exchanged gear on the rutted tarmac.

To minimize casualties against anti-aircraft batteries and Luftwaffe sorties, Ortiz and his six-man team had boarded separate planes. Tragically, none of Sergeant Perry’s flight crew noticed that the steel static line connecting his deployment bag to the cable in the belly of the bomber had somehow kinked when he hooked it in place. The wire snapped the moment Perry leaped from the rear side door. His parachute—Ortiz’s lucky chute—never opened. Perry plunged some four hundred feet before crumpling into an alpine meadow with a broken neck.

It was not a promising omen, particularly considering that even before any of the Americans had jumped, the entire operation appeared to be sliding sideways into what military service slang terms Tits Up.

The Drop Over the Col des Saisies

The trouble began on the approach to the target area—referred to as the pinpoint in special operations jargon—a thirty-mile break in the French Alps known as the Col des Saisies. The rugged and isolated mountain pass, rising some fifty-five hundred feet in the shadow of the towering Mont Blanc, was the logical site to deposit a squad of Allied spy-saboteurs. Although a small detachment of Germans was known to occupy the nearby town of Albertville, the vast majority of enemy troops had been headquartered far enough away in Grenoble, about seventy miles to the south, to make a daylight jump feasible. The peaks to the east were dusted gold by the sun when three waves of Flying Fortresses approached the alpine saddle at staggered altitudes. Seventy-eight planes were tasked with delivering their human cargo, alongside nearly nine hundred canisters of weapons and provisions, to the disparate French Resistance cells collectively known as the Maquis.

Although the bombers had picked up a squadron of American P-51 fighter escorts somewhere over the Channel, the formation had improbably encountered no opposition since lifting off from England’s Knettishall Air Station nearly seven hours earlier. Perhaps it was the fierce air battle currently being waged over Chartres, far to the north, that had attracted the attention of what remained of the German Luftwaffe.

As the aircraft neared the pass, however, the pilots of the first wave—designated Group A, carrying Ortiz, his men, and a portion of the provisions—failed to spot the smudge pots and bonfires delineating the drop zone. Following preflight instructions, the bombers overflew the Col before turning to make a second pass. This time, coming in hot and flying so low that Marine Sergeant John Bodnar could clearly discern the cowbells hanging from the necks of small herds below, the airmen finally spotted the drop zone smoke.

Each man on Ortiz’s team, all dressed in uniform, was heavily freighted with a wire-reinforced canvas bag containing a Winchester semi-automatic M1 carbine featuring a folding metal stock—about half the weight of the standard Marine-issue Garand rifle—alongside a Colt .45 sidearm and a double-edged Fairbairn-Sykes stiletto. Their mountain packs were stuffed with topography maps printed on silk and enclosed in cylindrical leather cases, a hip flask of medicinal cognac, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the equivalent of $1,000 in French francs concealed in secret flaps sewn into their boxer shorts. Ortiz, lumbering under the additional burden of a Thompson submachine gun and a second rucksack holding nearly a million francs to be delivered to partisan fighters, had to be physically lifted and tossed from his bomber by the waist and tail gunners.

He was barely out of the jump door when the navigators of Group A belatedly realized they were vectoring on a direct collision course with the planes of Groups B and C, which were approaching from the west.

On the ground, Ortiz blanched as he peered up into the cornflower-blue sky. A tangle of thirty-two-ton aircraft were hurtling toward each other at closing speeds of nearly three hundred miles per hour, pitching, rolling, and jinking out of one another’s way. Through sheer pilot skill, instinct, or extraordinary luck, none of the planes collided while the crews from all three flight groups frantically jettisoned steel supply containers. Each crate, dangling from its own parachute, weighed between 150 and 300 pounds and was packed with material ranging from Sten guns and hand grenades to explosive charges, medical supplies, spare bicycle tires, and boxes of chewing gum.

Meeting the Resistance and Facing a New Enemy Threat

Chuck Perry, however, was not the afternoon’s only casualty. As scores of guerrilla fighters poured from the enveloping conifers like choreographed dancers to pry open the bomb-shaped canisters, Major Ortiz—while collecting Perry’s dog tags and personal effects—spotted a small circle of men forming around the body of Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bob LaSalle. The somber group included the veteran Free French fighter Joseph "Jo-Jo" Arcelin, an experienced wireless radio operator. The sinewy twenty-one-year-old Arcelin had been tasked with acting as the American team’s liaison with the various factions of maquisards awaiting their arrival.

Arcelin initially struck Ortiz’s fellow Marines as an unusual figure to encounter in a war zone. As thin as a Giacometti bronze, he sported a dark beret worn at an angle just a degree or so shy of jaunty, resting above a corvine face and spectacles resembling those of a rural parson. Adding to the incongruity was his jerky gait, which resembled a praying mantis folding and unfolding its spindly legs before a strike. Yet despite his youth, Ortiz knew Arcelin to possess exceptional courage, having witnessed his fearless driving during previous covert operations in the country.

Crouched over the inert LaSalle, Arcelin was conferring with a French physician working with the Maquis, while a third Frenchman stood silently nearby. Unlike Chuck Perry, the gunnery sergeant’s chute had opened, but his static line had somehow coiled around his torso during the descent, tightening like a boa constrictor and causing him to black out. Ortiz initially feared his spine was snapped, but the French doctor waved off the thought, explaining that the wire had merely broken several ribs, wrenched LaSalle’s back, and shattered his ankle upon impact. Examining the Marine’s dilated pupils, the doctor added that he likely suffered a concussion and would need to be carried. The tiny American outfit had barely touched the ground, and they were already down two men.

Ortiz opened his rucksack and tossed Arcelin the identification papers and spare Marine sergeant’s uniform provided by his OSS handlers in London. Although the Frenchman had been born and raised in the nearby Haute-Savoie region, he was now to pose as a French Canadian named George Andrew who had enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. While the ruse would not stop the Gestapo from executing him if captured—following the Normandy landings, Adolf Hitler had personally ordered all Allied commandos taken behind enemy lines, even those in uniform, to be shot immediately—the gambit might shield Arcelin’s three sisters, who served as couriers for the Maquis.

Arcelin then introduced Ortiz to the third man: Jean-Marie Bulle, the legendary commander of the Free French Maquis battalion bearing his name. Bulle delivered alarming news, informing Ortiz that close to twelve thousand German troops were currently stationed in and around Grenoble. Months earlier, during Ortiz’s first infiltration, he had surreptitiously entered the Alpine city on multiple occasions to gather intelligence and scout enemy strength. At that time, the Gestapo’s presence hovered over the cobblestoned streets like a toxic vapor, but Grenoble had housed nowhere near that many Wehrmacht soldiers, relying instead on skeleton security battalions of older, less fit men alongside conscripted Eastern Europeans.

Since D-Day, however, Bulle explained that new Wehrmacht replacement troops had arrived, including ruthless Ost Bataillones transferred from the Eastern Front. These units had participated in the murder of thousands of civilians across Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. Equally ominous was the presence of Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen Schutzstaffel—black-uniformed SS combat units that had seeped into the area since the Normandy invasion. Having sworn absolute allegiance to Hitler alone, these fanatical troops answered to no one and were entirely outside the control of regular Wehrmacht military authorities.

Both Bulle and Ortiz understood that Vichy spotters had undoubtedly reported the daylight parachute drop to the Wehrmacht command center in Grenoble. Yet with several hundred maquisards setting up ambush sites along the mountain paths leading up to the Col des Saisies, it would be hours before pursuers could arrive. Nevertheless, speed was essential.

As dusk approached, Bulle and his guerrillas loaded the tons of military gear onto mule-drawn carts. Arcelin joined Ortiz, Sergeant Bodnar, and Sergeant Jack Risler in hefting the bodies of their fallen Marine comrades onto makeshift stretchers. Ortiz informed his team that he would preside over a formal military interment for Sergeant Perry as soon as possible, regardless of closing Nazi forces, after which the injured LaSalle would be safely ensconced in a secure hiding place far from Albertville.

Ortiz knew Albertville well, and the Germans there knew him. Das Fantom, the Gestapo had dubbed him during his earlier operations across the region. Hitler’s security forces had placed a bounty of half a million French francs on the head of the brazen American Marine who operated at the head of local partisan units. Over four months of spying and sabotage, Ortiz had blown bridges, attacked munitions plants, ambushed troop convoys, and spirited downed Allied airmen to safety in Spain.

For this latest assignment, however, the major carried an even larger responsibility. Once a singular ghost tasked with tactical assaults to distract the Germans from the unfolding Normandy landings, Ortiz had returned to unify disparate and feuding partisan units into a cohesive fighting force. Within two weeks, another half million Allied troops would swarm into southern France from the Mediterranean in a second invasion, originally code-named Operation ANVIL. It was now up to Ortiz and his squad of infiltrators to ensure that a unified resistance army would act as the hammer to that anvil, striking the enemy from within.