Several excruciating days had passed since the telegram reached my great-grandmother’s doorstep in Queens, New York:
The secretary of war desires me to express his deep regret that your son Second Lieutenant Murray L. Simon has been reported missing in action. … If further details or other information are received, you will be promptly notified.
At 1:41 a.m. on May 6, 1944, a German fighter plane shot down the B-24 Liberator that Simon was piloting on a secret moonlit mission over Nazi-occupied France. His crew of seven airmen leapt from the burning plane, and he followed. Barreling down from the inferno while tugging his parachute open, he closed his eyes and thrust his hands up before finding himself dangling a foot from the ground, his chute harness tangled in a tree.
The Roanne area was teeming with Vichy French and German troops searching for the fallen American airmen. My grandfather was a 23-year-old, six-foot-tall American Jew who could hardly pronounce the French phrases listed on the notecard he’d been told to read if shot down. If captured by the Germans, he could be viewed as a spy and tortured and killed accordingly. His best chance of getting home was finding the French Resistance.
After about a week of bouncing from helper to helper, Simon reached a safe house in Valence, where resistance fighters introduced him to a 30-year-old American Marine Corps major who had helped several other downed Allied airmen escape across the Spanish border. He went by several aliases, including Chambellan and Jean-Pierre, or J.P. He was 6-foot-2, with chiseled cheekbones, bright blue eyes and a posh English accent. He spoke English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. And his real name was Pierre Julien Ortiz, often anglicized as Peter J. Ortiz.
