Gunny G's Old Salt Marines Tavern Weblog: Col Peter Ortiz, OSS Marine

COLONEL PETER JULIEN ORTIZ, OSS MARINE

While preparing the Marine POWs appendix for Victory and Occupation, vol V of Historyof U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, to locate the names and places of the variousPOW camps in which Marines were incarcerated, I had to use the casualty report prepared by theReports and Statistical Unit, Personnel Service Branch at Headquarters Marine Corps.

This reportwas prepared in 1952, and is the final accounting of Marine casualties in World War II. It was oneof these very wide machine records printout with a large number of columns, each one having itsown code for a prison camp or for POWs, or whether the individual was KIA, WIA, or Missing inAction Presumed Dead.

As I went from the printout to the code sheet, I was surprised to find thata handful of Marines had been captured in Europe. I immediately assumed that these may havebeen OSS Marines, and to validate this assumption, I randomly selected the name of one of thePOWs, Major Peter J. Ortiz, and retrieved from the St. Louis personnel records center hisofficer’s qualification jacket.

via Gunny G’s Old Salt Marines Tavern Weblog: Col Peter Ortiz, OSS Marine.

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