Reading like a fictional movie plot, the life story of the LHS Alumni of the Year Isaac “Tito” Moruza is made up of more adventure than seems possible.
He was born in Santander, Spain in 1921, graduated as senior class president of Lassen in 1939 and earned a degree from Cal Berkeley.
He married his wife Margaret in 1942 and volunteered for the Army where he received training in the 10th Mountain Division, the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps and parachute training in Georgia.
He crash landed in a glider with the 82nd AirBorne on D-Day in Normandy, France. A crash which took the lives of the three soldiers next to him. From the crash site Moruza made his way to St. Mere-Eglise, the first town liberated, to a rendevous point with the French resistance.
As the invasion of Europe began in earnest he assumed the disguise of a “migrant farm worker” enroute to Paris, which he entered on August 7th, 1944. His job was to keep track of activities of Gestapo HQ and its records. Three days before the liberation of Paris he saved Nazi files from being destroyed by fire, files that were later used as crucial evidence in the Nuremburg trials.
Speaking four languages, Tito assisted displaced persons and war refugees following the war, while presumably looking for infiltrators, spies and Germans trying to avoid detection. As a U.S. Military advisor Colonel Moruza was called on for planning in both Vietnam and Grenada.
San Francisco newspaper columnist Martin Sapp wrote a wonderful little piece about Colonel Moruza, you can find it at this link.
