Unveiling The Phantom: The Untold World War II Story of Marine Legend Major Pete Ortiz

Germans in Nazi-occupied Europe knew him simply as Das Fantom. For his relentless work as a scout, spy, saboteur, and leader of the French Resistance, they had placed a half-a-million French franc bounty on his head. Now, in the gripping new book The Phantom, authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin reveal the extraordinary, untold story of Major Pete Ortiz, who cemented his legacy as one of the most highly decorated United States Marine Corps officers of World War II.

The following is a detailed look at the prologue and opening moments of this remarkable historical account, capturing the dangers, the human cost, and the sheer audacity of Allied special operations behind enemy lines in the summer of 1944.

PROLOGUE: August 1944 — Savoie Department, France

Fresh blood possesses a distinct, unmistakable metallic odor. Clean and impersonal, it carries the scent of a sheared brass bullet casing. That metallic tang filled Major Pete Ortiz’s nostrils as he bent over the broken body of a fellow United States Marine, Sergeant Chuck Perry, high in the French Alps.

Thin red rivulets, resembling 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 in the fatal descent, and a flap of the severed muscle remained impaled on a broken front tooth.

Pete Ortiz had witnessed violent death before, inhaling its pungent musk from corpses across two continents—Arab and Italian, French and German, and even his fellow Americans. But this felt profoundly different, as if the burden of responsibility rested squarely on his own shoulders.

Earlier that morning, prior to climbing into the hold of a B-17 Flying Fortress 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 sense of dread about the mission. Ortiz had known the boy 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 hostile territory, Ortiz intimately understood the terror. To soothe Perry’s frayed nerves, the seasoned officer offered to switch parachutes, telling the sergeant he could jump with Ortiz’s lucky silk chute, which he had packed himself. The gesture—coming from a living legend whose exploits were already revered within 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 rigs on the rutted tarmac.

To minimize casualties against German 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 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 an ominous start to an operation that seemed to be sliding sideways from the very beginning. In military service slang, the mission was rapidly going Tits Up.

The Drop Over the Col des Saisies

The trouble began in earnest upon approach to the target area—referred to as a pinpoint in special operations jargon—located within a thirty-mile break in the French Alps known as the Col des Saisies. The rugged, isolated mountain pass, rising some 5,500 feet in the shadow of the towering Mont Blanc, was chosen as 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 were headquartered far to the south in Grenoble, roughly seventy miles away, making a daylight jump a calculated risk. 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 planes were tasked with delivering their human cargo, along with nearly nine hundred canisters of weapons and provisions, to the disparate French Resistance cells collectively known as the Maquis.

Although the bomber formation had picked up a squadron of American P-51 fighter escorts somewhere over the Channel, they had encountered virtually no opposition since lifting off from England’s Knettishall Air Station nearly seven hours earlier. Perhaps a fierce air battle raging over Chartres far to the north had drawn the attention of what remained of the Luftwaffe.

However, as the aircraft neared the pass, the pilots of the first wave—designated Group A and carrying Ortiz, his men, and a portion of the supplies—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. Coming in low enough that Marine Sergeant John Bodnar could clearly make out cowbells hanging from the necks of herds below, the airmen finally spotted the drop zone smoke.

Every member of Ortiz’s team was heavily freighted. Each man carried a wirereinforced 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 were stuffed with topographical maps printed on silk inside cylindrical leather cases, a hip flask of medicinal cognac, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the equivalent of $1,000 in French francs sewn into secret flaps in their boxer shorts.

Ortiz himself lumbered under the additional burden of a Thompson submachine gun and a second rucksack holding nearly a million francs destined for local partisan fighters. He had to be physically lifted and pushed from his bomber by the waist and tail gunners. Barely out the jump door, the navigators of Group A belatedly realized they were on a direct collision course with the planes of Groups B and C approaching from the west.

Standing on the ground, Ortiz blanched as he looked up into the cornflower-blue sky. A tangle of massive aircraft headed toward each other at closing speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour, pitching and rolling to avoid a catastrophe. Through pilot skill, instinct, and pure luck, none of the planes collided, while flight crews frantically jettisoned steel supply containers. Each crate, dangling from a parachute and weighing between 150 and 300 pounds, was packed with Sten guns, hand grenades, explosives, medical supplies, spare bicycle tires, and chewing gum.

A Second Casualty and Rising Dangers

Tragically, Chuck Perry was not the afternoon’s only casualty. As guerrilla fighters emerged from the conifers to open the bomb-shaped supply canisters, Major Ortiz—while collecting Perry’s personal effects—spotted a small circle of men forming around the body of Gunnery Sergeant Bob LaSalle. Among them was the veteran Free French fighter Joseph "Jo-Jo" Arcelin, an experienced wireless radio operator.

The sinewy twenty-one-year-old Arcelin wore a dark beret tilted at a jaunty angle above a corvine face and spectacles, moving with the jerky, deliberate gait of a praying mantis. Despite his youthful appearance, Ortiz knew Arcelin possessed nerves of steel, having proved himself as a fearless getaway driver during previous covert operations.

Crouched over the inert LaSalle, Arcelin was conferring with a French physician working with the Maquis. Unlike Perry, the gunnery sergeant’s parachute had opened, but his static line had coiled around his torso during the jump, tightening like a boa constrictor and knocking him unconscious. While Ortiz initially feared a broken spine, the French doctor assured him that the wire had merely broken several ribs and wrenched LaSalle’s back. However, the Marine had also shattered his ankle upon impact and likely suffered a concussion, meaning he would have to be carried. The tiny American unit was barely on the ground 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 born and raised in the local Haute-Savoie region, he was instructed to pose as a French Canadian named George Andrew who had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. While this ruse would not stop the Gestapo from executing him if captured—Adolf Hitler had recently ordered all captured Allied commandos shot immediately—it might shield Arcelin’s three sisters, who served as couriers for the Maquis.

The Changing Face of the Enemy

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

Months earlier, during Ortiz’s first infiltration, Grenoble had housed only a skeleton force of somewhat passive security battalions composed of elderly soldiers alongside forced conscripts. But since D-Day, Bulle reported, the Wehrmacht had brought in ruthless replacement troops, including Ost Bataillones—veterans transferred from the Eastern Front who had participated in brutal pacification campaigns across Poland and Ukraine. Furthermore, Heinrich Himmler’s black-uniformed Waffen Schutzstaffel combat units had infiltrated the sector. Sworn to loyalty to Hitler alone, these SS units operated outside the control of regular Wehrmacht commanders and practiced a terrifying brand of total war that made no distinction between resistance fighters and civilians.

Both Bulle and Ortiz knew that Vichy spotters had undoubtedly reported the daylight parachute drop to German command in Grenoble. Yet with hundreds of maquisards establishing ambush sites along mountain footpaths, pursuers would be delayed for hours, giving the team precious time to move.

As dusk approached—l’heure bleu—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 comrades onto makeshift stretchers. Ortiz made it clear that a formal military interment for Sergeant Perry would be held immediately, regardless of closing German forces, after which the injured LaSalle would be safely stowed away.

Ortiz was no stranger to the region, and the enemy knew him well. The Gestapo had dubbed him Das Fantom, placing a bounty of half a million French francs on the head of the audacious American Marine who operated at the head of local partisan units. Over four months, Ortiz had blown bridges, attacked munitions plants, ambushed convoys, and guided downed Allied airmen to safety in Spain.

For this new assignment, however, the major’s mission was larger. He had returned to coalesce feuding partisan units into a unified resistance army capable of acting as a hammer against enemy forces ahead of a second major Allied invasion in southern France, code-named Operation ANVIL. As Ortiz and the Maquis battalion marched deeper into the mountains that August evening, the words of OSS spymaster General William Donovan echoed in his mind: "Your job is to let fly an arrow of penetration behind enemy lines."

Major Pete Ortiz and his team were the razor-sharp tip of that weapon.