The Untold Story of Marine Legend Major Pete Ortiz: How ‘Das Fantom’ Terrorized the Nazis in Occupied France

Germans knew United States Marine Major Pete Ortiz simply as Das Fantom. To the Nazi occupation forces in France, he was a terrifying apparition, a scout, spy, saboteur, and French Resistance leader whose exploits behind enemy lines prompted the Gestapo to place a bounty of half a million French francs on his head. Now, in the gripping new book The Phantom, acclaimed authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin reveal the untold story of this remarkable Marine legend, who would go on to become one of the most highly decorated officers of the Second World War.

PROLOGUE: August 1944, Savoie Department, France

Fresh blood, even a mere smear, carries a distinct, metallic odor. It is a clean, impersonal scent, reminiscent 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, twenty-two-year-old Sergeant Chuck Perry.

Thin red rivulets, resembling scarlet worms, leaked from Perry’s nose and ears, streaking his tawny hair. The young noncommissioned officer had bitten off the tip of his tongue during the catastrophic fall, and a flap of the severed muscle remained impaled on a broken front tooth. Major Ortiz was no stranger to violent death; he had inhaled its pungent musk from corpses across two continents, spanning Arab, Italian, French, German, and fellow American lives. Yet, this felt fundamentally different—as if he bore personal responsibility for the tragedy.

Earlier that morning, prior to climbing into the hold of a B-17 Flying Fortress that would jounce across the English Channel, pass safely 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 boy for barely a few weeks, just long enough to learn that Perry had only recently married his stateside sweetheart before eagerly volunteering to drop behind Nazi lines.

Recalling his own first clandestine insertion into enemy territory, Ortiz deeply understood that paralyzing dread. To soothe Perry’s frayed nerves, Ortiz had offered to switch parachutes, telling the young soldier he could jump with Ortiz’s own lucky silk rig, which he had packed meticulously himself. The gesture, coming from a legendary officer whose exploits were already revered across the French Foreign Legion, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the United States’ nascent espionage apparatus—the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS—had the desired effect. Perry visibly calmed as the two men exchanged their gear on the rutted tarmac.

To minimize casualties against heavy antiaircraft batteries and Luftwaffe interceptors, 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 anchor cable inside the bomber had somehow kinked when he hooked it in place. The wire snapped violently the moment Perry leaped from the rear side door. His parachute—Ortiz’s personal chute—never deployed. Perry plunged approximately four hundred feet before crumpling into an alpine meadow with a broken neck.

It was an inauspicious and grim omen, particularly because the entire operation appeared to be sliding sideways before the Americans even hit the ground. In military service slang, the mission was rapidly going Tits Up.

The Drop at the Col des Saisies

The trouble began on the approach to the target area—referred to in special operations jargon as the pinpoint—a thirty-mile break in the French Alps known as the Col des Saisies. This rugged, isolated mountain pass, rising some fifty-five hundred feet in the imposing shadow of Mont Blanc, was chosen as the logical location to deposit a squad of Allied spy-saboteurs. Although a small German detachment occupied the nearby town of Albertville, the vast majority of enemy troops were headquartered far to the south in Grenoble, roughly seventy miles away, making a daring daylight jump feasible.

The peaks to the east were dusted gold by the morning sun when three waves of Flying Fortresses approached the alpine saddle at staggered altitudes. Seventy-eight heavy bombers were tasked with delivering their human cargo, alongside nearly nine hundred supply canisters filled with weapons and provisions, to the disparate French Resistance cells collectively known as the Maquis.

Although the bombers had rendezvoused with a squadron of American P-51 fighter escorts somewhere over the Channel, the formation had encountered virtually no enemy opposition since lifting off from England’s Knettishall Air Station nearly seven hours earlier. Perhaps a fierce air battle raging far to the north over Chartres had successfully drawn off the remainder of the Luftwaffe.

However, as the aircraft neared the pass, the pilots of the first wave—designated Group A, which carried 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 banking to make a second pass. This time, coming in low and fast enough for Marine Sergeant John Bodnar to clearly distinguish the cowbells hanging from the necks of herds grazing below, the airmen finally spotted the drop zone smoke.

Every member of Ortiz’s team was weighed down heavily. Each man wore a uniform and carried a wire-reinforced canvas bag containing a Winchester semiautomatic M1 carbine with a folding metal stock—roughly 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 bulged with topography maps printed on silk and sealed in cylindrical leather cases, hip flasks of medicinal cognac, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the equivalent of one thousand dollars in French francs concealed inside secret flaps sewn into their boxer shorts.

Ortiz himself lumbered under an even greater burden: a Thompson submachine gun and a second rucksack containing nearly a million francs intended for partisan fighters. He had to be physically lifted and pushed out of the bomber door by the waist and tail gunners. Barely had he exited when Group A’s navigators realized they were on a direct collision course with the planes of Groups B and C, which were simultaneously approaching from the west.

Gazing up into the cornflower-blue sky from the ground, Ortiz watched in horror as a tangle of thirty-two-ton aircraft hurtled toward one another at closing speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour, pitching, rolling, and violently jinking to avoid disaster. Through a combination of pilot skill, split-second instinct, and sheer luck, no midair collisions occurred, even as flight crews frantically jettisoned hundreds of heavy steel supply containers. Each crate, suspended from a parachute, weighed between 150 and 300 pounds and was packed with everything from Sten guns and hand grenades to explosives, medical supplies, spare bicycle tires, and boxes of chewing gum.

Assessing the Toll and Facing a New Enemy

Tragically, Chuck Perry was not the afternoon’s only casualty. As scores of guerrilla fighters emerged from the surrounding conifers to pry open the heavy metal canisters, Major Ortiz collected Perry’s dog tags and personal effects. He soon spotted another small circle of men gathered around the body of Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bob LaSalle. Among them was the veteran Free French fighter Joseph "Jo-Jo" Arcelin, a sinewy twenty-one-year-old wireless radio operator tasked with serving as the American team’s liaison to the local maquisards.

Arcelin, wearing a dark beret tilted at a jaunty angle and peering through wire-rimmed spectacles, presented an unusual figure in a war zone, moving with the jerky gait of a praying mantis. Yet Ortiz knew Arcelin possessed nerves of steel, having proven his fearlessness as a getaway driver during previous covert operations.

Crouched over the inert LaSalle, Arcelin was conferring with a French physician working alongside the Maquis. Unlike Perry, the gunnery sergeant’s parachute had deployed, but his static line had wrapped tightly around his torso during the descent like a boa constrictor, causing him to black out. While Ortiz initially feared a broken spine, the French doctor examined LaSalle and determined that the wire had merely broken several ribs, wrenched his back, and shattered his ankle upon impact. With dilated pupils suggesting a concussion, LaSalle would have to be carried. The tiny American unit had barely touched French soil and was already down two men.

Ortiz opened his rucksack and handed Arcelin identification papers and a spare Marine sergeant’s uniform provided by OSS handlers in London. Although Arcelin was a native of the nearby Haute-Savoie region, he was ordered to pose as a French Canadian named George Andrew who had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. While the ruse would not protect him from Gestapo execution if captured—Adolf Hitler had personally ordered all captured Allied commandos, even those in uniform, to be shot immediately—it might safeguard Arcelin’s three sisters, who served as couriers for the resistance.

Arcelin then introduced Ortiz to Jean-Marie Bulle, the legendary commander of the Free French Maquis battalion bearing his name. Bulle delivered staggering news: close to twelve thousand German troops were currently stationed in and around Grenoble.

Months earlier, during Ortiz’s initial infiltration, he had surreptitiously scouted the Alpine city and found only a skeleton force of aging security battalions and conscripted auxiliary troops. However, since the Normandy landings, the Wehrmacht had reinforced the region with ruthless Ost Bataillones—veterans transferred from the Eastern Front who had participated in horrific atrocities across Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. Furthermore, Heinrich Himmler’s black-uniformed Waffen-SS combat units had infiltrated the sector. Sworn in absolute loyalty to Hitler alone, these fanatical troops operated entirely outside regular military command and were already notorious for brutal reprisals against French civilians, such as the massacres at Oradour-sur-Glane and Vassieux-en-Vercors.

The Mission Ahead

Bulle’s grim report made it clear that the Nazi occupation had turned increasingly desperate and vicious as the Western Front closed in. Knowing that Vichy sympathizers had likely reported the daylight parachute drop to Wehrmacht headquarters, Ortiz and his men understood that speed was essential. Hundreds of maquisards were already establishing ambush positions along the narrow dirt footpaths leading up to the Col des Saisies to buy the Americans time.

As twilight—l’heure bleu—approached, Bulle and his guerrillas loaded the tons of military equipment onto mule-drawn carts. Arcelin, Ortiz, Sergeant Bodnar, and Sergeant Jack Risler hoisted the bodies of their fallen comrades onto makeshift stretchers. Ortiz vowed to hold a formal military burial for Sergeant Perry as soon as possible, regardless of closing German patrols, while the injured LaSalle was dispatched to a secure safe house to await eventual rescue.

Albertville was familiar territory to Ortiz, and the Germans there knew him well. Das Fantom, the Gestapo had christened him during his earlier campaigns across the region, placing a half-million-franc bounty on the head of the audacious American officer who led partisan units while wearing his immaculate Marine whipcords. For four months, Ortiz had blown up bridges, attacked munitions plants, ambushed convoys, and spirited downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to safety in Spain.

Now, his mission was even larger. Initially deployed as a singular ghost to disrupt German forces and distract them from the Normandy landings, Ortiz had returned to unify the fractured partisan factions into a cohesive fighting force. In two weeks, a massive secondary Allied force—Operation ANVIL—would storm ashore in southern France from the Mediterranean. It was up to Ortiz and his band of infiltrators to ensure that a unified resistance army would act as the hammer striking directly against the enemy’s rear.

As the Americans and the Maquis battalion marched deeper into the rugged mountains of southeastern France that August evening, the guiding words of OSS spymaster General William Donovan echoed in Ortiz’s mind: "Your job is to let fly an arrow of penetration behind enemy lines." Major Pete Ortiz and his team were undeniably the sharpest tip of that weapon.