The Untold Story of "Das Fantom": Inside Bob Drury and Tom Clavin’s New World War II History

To the German military authorities occupying France, he was known simply as Das Fantom—The Phantom. So disruptive was his campaign of espionage, sabotage, and guerrilla leadership behind enemy lines that the Gestapo placed a bounty of half a million French francs on his head. Now, in their forthcoming book The Phantom, bestselling authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin pull back the curtain on the extraordinary life of Major Peter Julien Ortiz, one of the most highly decorated United States Marine Corps officers of the Second World War.

The book recounts a legendary career that bridged the French Foreign Legion, the U.S. Marine Corps, and America’s nascent wartime spy apparatus, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). A featured excerpt from The Phantom transports readers directly to the tense, high-stakes reality of occupied Europe during the final, brutal phase of the conflict.

PROLOGUE: August 1944, Savoie Department, France

Fresh blood possesses a distinct, unmistakable odor. Clean, impersonal, and sharp like the smell of a sheared brass bullet casing, it filled Major Pete Ortiz’s nostrils as he bent over the broken body of a fellow United States Marine, Sergeant Chuck Perry.

Thin red rivulets 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 in the fatal descent, and a flap of the severed muscle remained impaled on a broken front tooth. Ortiz was no stranger to violent death; he had inhaled its pungent scent from corpses across two continents, spanning Arab, Italian, French, German, and American fallen. But this loss felt profoundly different—almost as if he bore personal responsibility for it.

Earlier that morning, prior to boarding the B-17 Flying Fortress that would rumble across the English Channel, clear the secured Normandy beachheads, and soar inland above occupied France, young Perry had confessed to Ortiz that he possessed a deeply unsettling premonition about the mission. Ortiz had known the young soldier for barely a few weeks—just long enough to learn that Perry had married his stateside sweetheart mere days before volunteering to drop behind enemy lines. Recognizing the raw, consuming dread of a first clandestine insertion, Ortiz had offered to switch parachutes, inviting the sergeant to jump with his own lucky silk rig, which he had packed himself.

Coming from a legendary officer whose exploits were already whispered about across the French Foreign Legion, the Marine Corps, and the OSS, the gesture had its intended effect. Perry visibly calmed as the two exchanged rigs on the rutted tarmac.

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

It was an inauspicious start to an operation that seemed to be unraveling before it even began.

A Chaotic Drop Over the Alps

The trouble deepened as the armada approached its pinpoint target: a thirty-mile break in the French Alps known as the Col des Saisies. Rising some fifty-five hundred feet in the shadow of Mont Blanc, the rugged and isolated mountain pass was the logical site to insert a squad of Allied spy-saboteurs. Although a small German detachment occupied nearby Albertville, the bulk of the enemy forces were headquartered far to the south in Grenoble, roughly seventy miles away, making a daylight jump feasible. The eastern peaks were bathed in golden morning light when three waves of Flying Fortresses approached the alpine saddle at staggered altitudes, deploying seventy-eight planes tasked with delivering human cargo and nearly nine hundred supply canisters to the French Resistance cells collectively known as the Maquis.

Although the bombers encountered no aerial opposition during their seven-hour flight from England’s Knettishall Air Station—likely distracted by a fierce air battle raging near Chartres far to the north—the initial navigation proved problematic. The pilots of the first wave, designated Group A and carrying Ortiz, his men, and vital provisions, failed to spot the smudge pots and bonfires marking the drop zone. Following protocol, the bombers overflew the pass before circling back for a second run. Flying low enough for Marine Sergeant John Bodnar to spot cowbells on herds grazing below, the airmen finally located the target smoke.

Each member of Ortiz’s team was heavily laden. They carried wire-reinforced canvas bags housing Winchester semiautomatic M1 carbines with folding metal stocks—weighing roughly half as much as the standard Marine Garand—alongside Colt .45 sidearms and double-edged Fairbairn-Sykes stilettos. Their mountain packs contained silk topographical maps in leather cases, medicinal cognac, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the equivalent of $1,000 in French francs sewn into their boxer shorts. Ortiz himself lumbered under a Thompson submachine gun and a second rucksack containing nearly a million francs intended for partisan fighters, requiring assistance from the bomber’s gunners just to clear the jump door.

Scarcely had Ortiz exited the aircraft when Group A’s navigators realized they were on a direct collision course with the approaching planes of Groups B and C. For a heart-stopping moment in the cornflower sky, thirty-two-ton aircraft hurtled toward one another at closing speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour. Through pilot skill, instinct, and raw luck, no midair collisions occurred while aircrews frantically jettisoned steel supply containers loaded with Sten guns, hand grenades, explosives, medical supplies, and even bicycle tires and chewing gum.

Yet Chuck Perry was not the afternoon’s only casualty. As guerrilla fighters emerged from the conifers to open the canisters, Ortiz—while collecting Perry’s personal effects—discovered another grim scene gathering around Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bob LaSalle. Among the group was Joseph "Jo-Jo" Arcelin, a sinewy, twenty-one-year-old Free French wireless radio operator and seasoned getaway driver.

Unlike Perry, LaSalle’s parachute had deployed, but his static line had wrapped around his torso like a boa constrictor during the descent, knocking him unconscious and fracturing several ribs and his back, alongside a shattered ankle and a likely concussion. The tiny American team was on the ground barely moments and was already down two men.

A Changed Occupied Landscape

Ortiz provided Arcelin with identification papers and a spare Marine uniform from London handlers. The young Frenchman, despite being born and raised in the Haute-Savoie region, was instructed to pose as a French Canadian named George Andrew. While this ruse offered no protection against Adolf Hitler’s strict directive to immediately execute all captured Allied commandos, it might help shield Arcelin’s three sisters, who served as Maquis couriers.

Arcelin introduced Ortiz to Jean-Marie Bulle, legendary commander of the Free French Maquis battalion bearing his name. Bulle delivered alarming news: close to twelve thousand German troops were now stationed in and around Grenoble. During Ortiz’s earlier infiltration months prior, the regional presence had consisted largely of skeleton security battalions and older soldiers.

However, since D-Day, the Wehrmacht had reinforced the area with ruthless Ost Bataillones—veterans of the Eastern Front linked to mass atrocities across Poland and Ukraine—alongside black-uniformed Waffen-SS combat units loyal solely to Hitler. Unresponsive to regular military command, these SS units practiced a brutal form of total war that ignored the distinction between resistance fighters and civilians, casting a dark shadow over the region following massacres elsewhere in France earlier that summer.

Bulle and Ortiz recognized that Vichy spotters had undoubtedly reported the daylight parachute drop, but with hundreds of maquisards blocking dirt footpaths leading up the Col des Saisies, pursuit would be delayed. As dusk approached, the Americans and the Maquis battalion loaded military gear onto mule-drawn carts. Ortiz, Bodnar, and Risler hoisted the bodies of their fallen comrades onto makeshift stretchers, with Ortiz vowing to hold a formal military interment for Sergeant Perry regardless of closing enemy forces.

As the expedition pressed deeper into the southeastern mountains, Ortiz reflected on the core directive given to him by OSS spymaster General William Donovan: to let fly an arrow of penetration deep behind enemy lines. With a second major Allied invasion of southern France—originally coded Operation ANVIL—just two weeks away, Ortiz and his unified partisan force stood ready to act as the hammer striking the cornered enemy from within.

The Phantom by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin offers an unprecedented look at this remarkable chapter of World War II history, capturing the courage, peril, and relentless grit of a Marine legend.