{"id":2337,"date":"2026-10-09T06:48:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T06:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/?p=2337"},"modified":"2026-10-09T06:48:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T06:48:17","slug":"untold-story-of-legendary-marine-major-pete-ortiz-revealed-in-new-book-the-phantom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/?p=2337","title":{"rendered":"Untold Story of Legendary Marine Major Pete Ortiz Revealed in New Book \u2018The Phantom\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the Nazi occupiers of World War II-era France, he was known simply as Das Fantom<\/em>. With a staggering half-million French francs placed on his head by the Gestapo, Major Pete Ortiz operated as a scout, spy, saboteur, and fierce French Resistance leader in the shadows of enemy territory. Now, in the gripping new book The Phantom<\/em>, bestselling authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin unearth the untold story of this remarkable United States Marine legend, who would ultimately earn a reputation as one of the most highly decorated Marine officers of the Second World War.<\/p>\n

PROLOGUE<\/h3>\n

August 1944: Savoie Department, France<\/h4>\n

Fresh blood carries a distinct, sharp metallic odor. Clean and impersonal, it shares the exact scent of a sheared brass bullet casing. That copper-toned iron filled Major Pete Ortiz\u2019s nostrils as he bent over the broken, motionless body of his fellow United States Marine, Sergeant Chuck Perry. <\/p>\n

Thin red rivulets, resembling scarlet worms, leaked from Perry\u2019s nose and ears, streaking his tawny hair. The twenty-two-year-old noncommissioned officer had bitten off the tip of his tongue during his fatal descent, leaving a flap of the severed muscle impaled on a broken front tooth. Pete 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 casualties. Yet, looking down at Perry, this felt fundamentally different. It carried the heavy, suffocating weight of personal responsibility.<\/p>\n

Earlier that very morning, before climbing into the dark, roaring hold of the B-17 Flying Fortress that would bounce across the English Channel, pass safely over the secured Normandy beachheads, and soar inland above occupied France, young Perry had confessed to Ortiz. He admitted he possessed a deep, unsettling "bad feeling" about the mission ahead. <\/p>\n

Ortiz had known the young man for barely a few weeks\u2014just long enough to learn that Perry had only recently married his stateside sweetheart before eagerly volunteering to drop behind enemy Nazi lines. Recalling his own initial clandestine insertion into hostile territory, Ortiz instantly understood the profound dread gripping the younger soldier. To soothe Perry\u2019s frayed nerves, Ortiz had made a generous, reassuring offer: they would switch parachutes. The sergeant could jump using Ortiz\u2019s personal, lucky silk parachute, the one Ortiz had packed meticulously with his own hands. <\/p>\n

The gesture, coming from a seasoned officer whose wartime exploits were already legendary across the French Foreign Legion, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the United States\u2019 nascent espionage organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had the desired psychological effect. Perry visibly calmed down as the two men exchanged their gear on the rutted, muddy tarmac of England’s Knettishall Air Station.<\/p>\n

To minimize catastrophic casualties against heavy antiaircraft batteries and lurking Luftwaffe fighter sorties, Ortiz and his six-man team had boarded separate aircraft. None of Sergeant Perry\u2019s flight crew noticed that the heavy steel static line connecting his deployment bag to the interior cable of the bomber had somehow kinked when he hooked it hastily into place. The wire snapped under the sudden strain the moment Perry leaped backward through the rear side door. His parachute\u2014Ortiz\u2019s lucky chute\u2014never deployed. Perry plunged approximately four hundred feet before violently striking an alpine meadow with a broken neck.<\/p>\n

It was an ominous start. And it unfolded against an operation that, even before the Americans touched French soil, appeared to be sliding rapidly sideways\u2014what military service slang terms Tits Up<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The trouble truly began as the massive armada approached the designated target area, known in special operations jargon as the pinpoint: a treacherous thirty-mile break in the French Alps called the Col des Saisies. This rugged, isolated mountain pass, rising roughly fifty-five hundred feet in the towering shadow of Mont Blanc, was chosen as the logical drop zone to deposit a specialized squad of Allied spy-saboteurs. Although a small detachment of German troops was known to occupy the nearby town of Albertville, the vast majority of enemy forces were headquartered far enough away in Grenoble, situated about seventy miles to the south, to justify a daring daylight jump. <\/p>\n

The jagged mountain peaks to the east were dusted with a golden morning light when three separate 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 heavy steel canisters filled with weapons, ammunition, and vital provisions, to the disparate French Resistance cells collectively known as the Maquis.<\/p>\n

Although the bombers had picked up a protective squadron of American P-51 fighter escorts somewhere over the English Channel, the vast formation had improbably encountered zero opposition since lifting off nearly seven hours earlier. Perhaps a fierce air battle raging simultaneously over Chartres, far to the north, had successfully drawn away the remaining remnants of the German Luftwaffe.<\/p>\n

As the aircraft neared the high-altitude pass, however, the pilots of the first wave\u2014designated Group A, carrying Ortiz, his men, and a portion of the cargo\u2014failed to spot the smudge pots and bonfires meticulously lit to delineate the drop zone. Adhering to strict preflight instructions, the heavy bombers overflew the Col before banking to execute a second pass. This time, coming in hot and descending so low that Marine Sergeant John Bodnar could easily distinguish the heavy cowbells hanging from the necks of grazing herds below, the airmen finally spotted the welcoming smoke signals.<\/p>\n

Every man on Ortiz\u2019s team, all dressed in full uniform, carried a heavy, wire-reinforced canvas bag containing a Winchester semiautomatic M1 carbine with a folding metal stock\u2014roughly half the weight of the standard Marine-issue Garand rifle\u2014alongside a Colt .45 sidearm and a double-edged Fairbairn-Sykes stiletto. Their rugged mountain rucksacks were tightly packed with detailed topography maps printed on silk and safely sealed inside cylindrical leather cases, a hip flask of medicinal cognac, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the equivalent of one thousand U.S. dollars in French francs, cleverly concealed within secret flaps sewn securely into their boxer undershorts. <\/p>\n

Ortiz himself, lumbering under the immense additional burden of a Thompson submachine gun and a second heavy rucksack holding nearly a million francs destined for local partisan fighters, had to be physically lifted and shoved out of the bomber\u2019s jump door by the waist and tail gunners. He had barely cleared the aircraft when the navigators of Group A belatedly realized they were on a direct collision course with the oncoming planes of Groups B and C, which were approaching swiftly from the west.<\/p>\n

Standing safely on the solid earth below, Ortiz blanched as he gazed up into the bright cornflower sky. A massive, terrifying tangle of thirty-two-ton aircraft was hurtling toward one another at closing speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour, pitching, rolling, and desperately jinking out of each other’s flight paths. Through sheer pilot skill, instinct, and a tremendous stroke of luck, none of the planes collided. Meanwhile, the aircrews from all three flight groups frantically jettisoned the heavy steel supply containers. Each crate, dangling beneath its own parachute, weighed between 150 and 300 pounds and was packed with lethal and medical mat\u00e9riel, ranging from Sten guns and hand grenades to high explosives, medical supplies, spare bicycle tires, and boxes of chewing gum.<\/p>\n

Tragically, Chuck Perry was not the afternoon’s only casualty. As scores of guerrilla fighters poured out from the enveloping evergreen conifers like choreographed dancers to pry open the heavy, bomb-shaped canisters, Major Ortiz\u2014while collecting Perry\u2019s dog tags and personal effects\u2014spotted another somber circle of men forming around the injured body of Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bob LaSalle. <\/p>\n

Among the group was the veteran Free French fighter Joseph "Jo-Jo" Arcelin, an experienced and cool-headed wireless radio operator. The sinewy twenty-one-year-old Arcelin was tasked with acting as the American team\u2019s crucial liaison with the various factions of local maquisards. Initially striking Ortiz\u2019s fellow Marines as an eccentric figure for a brutal war zone\u2014thin as a Giacometti bronze, wearing a dark beret tilted at a jaunty angle above a sharp, corvine face and wire-rimmed spectacles\u2014Arcelin possessed nerves of absolute steel. He had already proven his fearless nature as a getaway driver during Ortiz\u2019s prior covert missions in the country.<\/p>\n

Crouched over the inert LaSalle, Arcelin was conferring with a local French physician. A third Frenchman stood silently a few feet away. Unlike Chuck Perry, Gunnery Sergeant LaSalle\u2019s parachute had deployed successfully, but during the turbulent jump, his static line had wrapped around his torso, tightening like a constricting boa constrictor and causing him to blackout during the descent. When Ortiz first reached LaSalle, he feared the Marine’s spine was broken. <\/p>\n

The French doctor quickly waved off that unspoken fear, explaining that the wire had merely fractured several ribs and severely wrenched LaSalle\u2019s back. However, LaSalle had also shattered his ankle upon impact. After lifting the Marine\u2019s eyelids to examine his dilated pupils, the physician added that LaSalle had likely suffered a concussion and would need to be carried out on a stretcher. The tiny American reconnaissance outfit had barely touched the ground, and they were already down two key men.<\/p>\n

Ortiz opened his rucksack and tossed Arcelin a set of identification papers and a spare Marine sergeant\u2019s 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 instructed to pose as a French Canadian named George Andrew who had enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. The clever ruse would not stop the ruthless Gestapo from executing him if he were captured\u2014especially since Adolf Hitler had recently issued a direct, personal order demanding that all captured Allied commandos behind enemy lines, even those wearing standard uniforms, be shot immediately. Still, the clever gambit might shield Arcelin\u2019s three sisters, who bravely served as couriers for the Maquis.<\/p>\n

Arcelin then introduced Ortiz to the third man present: Jean-Marie Bulle, the legendary commander of the Free French Maquis battalion that bore his name. Bulle delivered sobering news that fundamentally altered the tactical landscape. Close to twelve thousand German troops were currently stationed in and around the nearby city of Grenoble. <\/p>\n

This revelation came as a profound shock. Months earlier, during Ortiz\u2019s initial infiltration, he had surreptitiously entered the picturesque City of the Alps on multiple occasions to gather intelligence and gauge enemy strength. At that time, while the heavy shadow of the Gestapo hovered over the cobblestone streets, Grenoble housed nowhere near that many Wehrmacht soldiers. The Germans had originally maintained a mere skeleton force of passive security battalions composed of elderly soldiers deemed unfit for frontline combat, alongside auxiliary companies of impressed Czech, Poles, and Russians.<\/p>\n

However, Bulle explained, the post-D-Day arrival of replacement troops included several ruthless Ost Bataillones<\/em>\u2014veteran units transferred directly from the Eastern Front. Alongside specialized action groups, these men had participated in horrific atrocities across Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus, slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, predominantly Jews, and burying them in mass graves. The French Resistance knew those grim village names well, and now those hardened veterans were operating locally, bringing a brutal style of total war that made little distinction between armed resistants and unfortunate civilians.<\/p>\n

Equally ominous was the arrival of Heinrich Himmler\u2019s Waffen Schutzstaffel<\/em> combat units\u2014black-uniformed SS troops who had filtered into the region following the Normandy landings. Having sworn absolute allegiance to Adolf Hitler alone, these fanatical units operated entirely outside the command of the regular Wehrmacht authorities who had governed the sector since replacing Italian forces in late 1943. Senior German military officers could not control these SS fighters, even if they attempted to do so.<\/p>\n

Bulle\u2019s grim report signaled that the war had taken a dark, desperate turn. The Nazi occupation was increasingly willing to burn towns and execute civilian populations, as evidenced by recent massacres at Oradour-sur-Glane and Vassieux-en-Vercors. Cornered like dangerous animals, the retreating German forces were more vicious than ever.<\/p>\n

Recognizing that Vichy spotters had undoubtedly reported the daylight parachute drop to Wehrmacht command in Grenoble, Ortiz and Bulle knew time was of the essence. Fortunately, hundreds of guerrillas were already establishing ambush positions along the narrow footpaths leading up to the Col des Saisies, buying the team precious time.<\/p>\n

As twilight\u2014l\u2019heure bleu<\/em>\u2014approached, Bulle and his fighters loaded tons of military equipment onto a pack train of mule-drawn carts. Arcelin joined Ortiz and Sergeants Bodnar and Risler in hoisting the bodies of their fallen Marine comrades onto makeshift stretchers. Bodnar and Risler formed a starkly contrasting pair. Bodnar, twenty-one, with a barrel chest and a broken, left-slanting nose, projected the earnest demeanor of a well-trained hound. Risler, twenty-four, was leaner, feline, and visibly wary, possessing sharp blue eyes and a tight, reserved expression. <\/p>\n

Ortiz firmly informed his men that he would preside over a formal military interment for Sergeant Perry at the earliest possible moment, regardless of any closing enemy patrols. Afterward, the injured Bob LaSalle would be safely secreted away in a secure safe house far from Albertville to await eventual rescue.<\/p>\n

Ortiz knew Albertville well, and the Germans there knew him even better. Das Fantom<\/em>, the Gestapo had christened him during his prior underground operations. Hitler\u2019s secret police had even placed a half-million-franc bounty on the head of the brazen American officer who swaggered through the alpine countryside rallying local partisans. For four months, Ortiz had blown up bridges, sabotaged munitions plants, ambushed convoys, and smuggled downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. <\/p>\n

For this new assignment, however, the major carried a much larger strategic burden. Initially deployed as a solitary ghost meant to disrupt enemy communications ahead of the Normandy landings, he had now returned to unify feuding partisan factions into a disciplined fighting force. In just two weeks, another half-million Allied troops would pour ashore in southern France from the Mediterranean during the upcoming invasion originally code-named Operation ANVIL. It was the solemn duty of Ortiz and his intrepid infiltrators to ensure that a unified resistance army stood ready to act as a devastating hammer against the retreating enemy.<\/p>\n

As the Americans and the Maquis battalion trudged resolutely up the dusty mountain paths that August evening, the words of spymaster General William Donovan echoed clearly in Ortiz\u2019s mind. Donovan was fond of reminding his operatives that their primary mission behind enemy lines was simple: to let fly an arrow of penetration. Major Pete Ortiz and his team remained the sharpest tip of that weapon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the Nazi occupiers of World War II-era France, he was known simply as Das Fantom. With a staggering half-million French francs placed on his head by the Gestapo, Major Pete Ortiz operated as a scout, spy, saboteur, and fierce French Resistance leader in the shadows of enemy territory. Now, in the gripping new book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[230,828,231,126,229,1554,1207,1398,2589,2588,3334,3333,1137,1497],"class_list":["post-2337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-eastern-heritage-and-history","tag-archaeology","tag-book","tag-eastern-culture","tag-heritage","tag-history","tag-legendary","tag-major","tag-marine","tag-ortiz","tag-pete","tag-phantom","tag-revealed","tag-story","tag-untold"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}