Read Online Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass by Douglas Boyd - Free Book Online

SOE’s Colonel Thackthwaite and a US Marine Corps officer seconded to OSS, Captain Peter Ortiz. He was a flamboyant character who had served five tough years in the French Foreign Legion pre-war, enlisting under the name of his Polish girlfriend in an effort to prevent his influential French father curbing his youthful urge for adventure by buying him out. Stationed in North Africa, he rose from engagé volontaire to acting lieutenant in his five-year term and would have been promoted to full lieutenant if he had signed on for a further five-year term. Instead, he left the Legion in 1937, but re-enlisted in October 1939 at the beginning of the phoney war, gaining a battlefield commission in May 1940.
    He was wounded in northern France in June 1940 while driving a motorcycle through the German lines to blow up a fuel dump that should have been destroyed as a routine measure during the French retreat. Mission accomplished, Ortiz was returning through the lines when shot and left paralysed with a bullet-chipped spine. He recovered in a POW camp but, after fifteen months that included several escape attempts, he made his way to Lisbon in December 1941, whence he was repatriated to the United States.
    Having an American mother, he was bilingual even before his service with the Legion and also had reasonable German, Spanish and Arabic, which earned him a promise of a commission in American intelligence. Ortiz, however, grew impatient to get back into the war and enlisted in the US Marine Corps Reserve, to be recommended for an officer’s commission by the commanding officer of the training camp on Parris Island. On 1 August 1942, Ortiz was commissioned and then – in the way of the military – this ex-legionnaire who had made more than 100 jumps in North Africa was posted to Camp Lejeune for parachute training.
    His second spell in the war began in Tangier after the Allied invasion of North Africa. With the rank of captain, he commanded a band of Tunisian nomads who could, as neutrals, move freely through the desert collecting intelligence on German dispositions. Accompanying them on a mission, he was wounded a second time during an encounter with a German patrol. No less a person than Major Gen. William J. Donovan, director of OSS, wrote of this exploit:
While on reconnaissance on the Tunisian front, Captain Peter Ortiz U.S.M.C.R. was severely wounded in the right hand while engaged in a personal encounter with a German patrol. He dispersed the patrol with grenades. Captain Ortiz is making good recovery in hospital at Algiers. The P[urple] H[eart] was awarded to him. 1
    After a spell of convalescent leave, in July 1943 Ortiz was posted to London and parachuted by OSS into France with Thackthwaite’s party on 6 January 1944. Once on the ground, Ortiz donned his USMC uniform and became the first Allied officer to be seen openly wearing a uniform in south-east France since 1940. 2 Thackthwaite once said, ‘Ortiz knew no fear.’ The allegation was denied by the man himself, who insisted that he carried out this display of bravado to raise the locals’ morale. It also enabled informers to track the mission’s movements and relay them to the Germans and Milice.
    The Union mission spent four months visiting Maquis groups, conferring with Resistance leaders and prospecting suitable sites for airdrops, not only of arms and ammunition but also blankets, clothes and food. Like other Allied missions, they swiftly picked up the friction between the Resistance networks of different political persuasions, and passed warnings of this to London. On completion of the mission in late May 1944, Thackthwaite and Ortiz returned safely to Britain, but Fourcaud was arrested and held for two months by the Gestapo before being released.
    Ortiz’s citation for his award of the OBE included the words:
For four months this officer assisted in the organisation of the Maquis in a most difficult département where members were in constant danger of