Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

by Christopher McDougall

  “Have you any personal objection to murder?” Jack began.

  Xan had to admit the only time he had come close to acting like a hero—the only time he’d come close to a fight—was when he tried to stop a gang of drunk Australians from bullying a Jewish family. One of the Aussies grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him off his feet, snarling, “Whose side are you on, Galahad?” That did it for Xan’s chivalry.

  To be honest, Jack was okay with that. The army didn’t make him a hero; the army made him a baker. It was only when Jack was abandoned, when he was on the run and in the hands of the Cretans, that he turned into a force to be reckoned with. And that gave Jack an idea….

  In Scotland, Fairbairn and Sykes were trying to reconstruct the art of the hero and pass it along to their students. But on Crete, Xan could skip the middlemen and learn the same ancient skills directly from the source. If Xan put himself in the hands of Beowulf and that canny young shepherd George Psychoundakis, maybe he would learn more in action than he would at any school. He’d get pankration from the source. He’d discover how shepherds climbed mountains all night on a starvation diet, and learn instinctive shooting from shepherds and bandits who could split a man’s skull from a quarter-mile away without any sights on the rifle.

  Jack knew it could be done, because one man had already done it. John Pendlebury was a British archeologist who’d come to Crete well before the war. Pendlebury was missing an eye, had never served in the military, and was nearly twice Xan’s age, so of course he had to get off the island as soon as Hitler pivoted toward the Mediterranean. Except Pendlebury stayed put. “It required more resolution in an Englishman to stay behind voluntarily and be submerged by the German tide than to return later,” reflected Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge archeologist and one of Pendlebury’s friends. “But for John the choice did not exist.” Before long, the Oxford academic had been transformed into a legend whose name would send Hitler into a rage.

  That’s because strange things can happen on that island, Jack discovered—fierce, audacious, brilliant things that no one should be expected to pull off, least of all a baker and a one-eyed archeologist. That tiny rock in the sea had made Hitler bleed, and it changed the Third Reich’s military strategy forever: never again would the Hunters from the Sky lead an invasion. “Crete has always been a theatre for strange and splendid events,” Paddy would later agree, marveling at Crete’s “indestructible old men” and their “extremely handsome” sons, the way “their eyes kindle and their grins widen at the suggestion of any rash scheme.”

  “Especially,” he added, “if the scheme involves danger.”

  —

  Two weeks later, Xan poked his head out of a submarine hatch and into a howling gale. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. “The shriek of the wind,” he realized, “drowned every other sound.” Waves smashed against the side of the sub, shattering and sinking a collapsible canoe—the canoe Xan was supposed to be in.

  Instead of four months of round-the-clock training at SOE school, Xan had spent three days blowing up abandoned trains. “The knowledge that no railway existed in Crete did not dampen my immediate ardour for demolition work,” he’d comment. “Those daily explosions in the sand represented all the training I received before being recalled to Cairo a few days after Christmas.”

  As soon as Xan got back from his bomb-blasting holiday, he was told to pack a duffel and get to the waterfront. First they set off toward Crete in a camouflaged navy trawler, but twice fierce seas forced them to turn around and return to Egypt. Finally, sub commander Anthony “Crap” Miers offered to bring them in beneath the waves. They got within sight of the island, but just as they launched the first man in his canoe, a storm blew in and swirled him off into the darkness.

  After that…nothing. For half an hour they scanned the churn, hoping for a sign he was still alive and afloat.

  Crap couldn’t linger any longer. Bad business, he finally said. Your man is either dead, adrift, or surrounded by Ger—

  A pinprick of light flashed. Good old Guy! He and his canoe had made it. Guy Delaney was an Australian staff sergeant in his fifties with bushy eyebrows and bristling whiskers, a survivor of the Fallschirmjäger invasion who, like Jack Smith-Hughes, had managed to hide for months in the mountains and escape by way of the Preveli monastery. If a battered piece of army surplus like Guy Delaney could survive that surf, Xan figured, so could he. The sailors quickly readied another canoe, but the waves crushed it, then the next one. Xan and his partner had one last chance of making it to shore, Crap told them: a rubber raft would swamp if they sat inside, but they might be able to straddle it like a rodeo bronco, clutching it between their thighs as they thrashed like hell with their paddles.

  Three sailors fought to hold the raft as it lunged alongside the sub like “a grey monster-fish cavorting in and out of the surf,” as Xan put it. “Not courage, I think, but fear prompted the decision,” Xan continued; he dreaded the thought of cramming himself back inside the stifling sub. He threw himself onto the raft, followed by a man he’d recently met and already hated. Captain Guy Turrall was even older than Delaney; he was a World War I vet who’d spent the years since then pip-pipping around the British tropics in a pith helmet. Turrall was driving Xan nuts, trying to speak to Greek crewmen in his colonial français and constantly repeating, “You see, I’ve lived so long in the bush…” and “offering advice that was more applicable to a peace-time safari than a clandestine naval operation.” True to form, Turrall had shown up for the undercover mission with a pack stuffed with pajamas and an enamel washbasin. He was also in full military uniform and his pith helmet, which Xan chucked overboard as soon as Turrall wasn’t looking.

  The sailors released the rope, and the current sucked the raft away and began spinning it in circles. And at that moment, as the raft twirled “like a buoyant saucer trapped in a whirlpool,” Xan and Turrall achieved a kind of perfection: the two novice secret agents were the perfect expression of everything that Churchill’s generals told him was foolish about his plan. This was going to stop Hitler—Capt. Right-Ho splashing around the Mediterranean with some smart-ass slacker, an obnoxious little “artist” whose first order of business as a member of an ultrasecret force behind enemy lines was to prank the only man who could cover his back? Face it; Turrall might be handy with explosives and had a drawerful of dusty medals, but how was he going to infiltrate hostile territory when he kept forgetting that in Greece they don’t speak French?

  Xan and Turrall chopped at the water with their paddles and finally managed to stop spinning. Crap’s sub submerged behind them and disappeared, leaving them adrift on a squishy raft in a sea as dark as the sky. Guy Delaney, bless his bristly Aussie mug, was still flicking his flashlight on the beach. Xan and Turrall spotted him through the waves and began digging toward shore. For half an hour they paddled through the surf, slowly getting closer to Delaney’s light—until suddenly it went black.

  Was that a pistol shot they heard? A shout? Impossible to tell. Xan and Turrall waited, floating…but the light never reappeared. With no other choice, they pushed on toward the beach.

  CHAPTER 14

  Θά πάρωμεν Τ’ άρματα νά Φύγωμεν στά Μαδάρα.

  TRANSLATION: “We will take our arms and flee to the White Mountains.”

  —JOHN PENDLEBURY,

  in a last letter to his wife before the German invasion

  XAN’S BOOTS scraped pebbly sand, then a wave cracked and sent him tumbling. He stumbled to his feet, and together with Turrall he struggled through the surf and up onto the beach. There was no sign of Guy Delaney.

  “Something must have gone wrong,” Turrall said.

  “But he signaled OK.”

  “That doesn’t mean a thing. The Germans may have intentionally let him make his signal before nabbing him, in the hope of nabbing us as well.”

  Xan knew Turrall was right. Their original plan was to come ashore a few miles away and rendezvous with an
other British agent in a hidden cove, but rough seas had forced them farther down the coast. More than likely, they’d landed near a German lookout, which meant Guy was a goner. Delaney would be lucky if the Germans didn’t open fire the instant they spotted his light, thanks to that whole Operation Flipper fiasco: a few weeks earlier, a British commando assault team using the same rubber rafts as Xan and Turrall and launching from the same sub came ashore on another Mediterranean beachfront, this one in Libya. They were hunting Erwin Rommel, “the Desert Fox,” whose unstoppable Afrika Korps panzers were threatening to overrun Cairo. The Brits burst through Rommel’s bedroom door with grenades flying and guns blazing…except Rommel, famous for his Fingerspitzengefühl—“fingertip feel,” or sixth sense—had already moved base. But the fact that Allied raiders got within pistol range of a top general’s bed, even an empty one, left a lasting impression of what to expect from strangers in the night in rubber rafts.

  The storm; that’s what must have saved Xan and Turrall. They must have blown past the sentries, who couldn’t spot their gray raft in the dark chop. They had to get to cover—fast—but where do you run when you don’t know where anyone is? Xan saw a faint strip of light in the distance. Let’s crawl in for a look, Turrall urged. It was risky, but shrewd: they could at least figure out where not to go, and hopefully confirm Guy’s whereabouts.

  Xan pulled his pistol and slipped off the safety. “I started creeping up the beach towards the light, which as I approached revealed itself as a gap in a shuttered window.” Xan inched closer and picked up a snatch of conversation. He listened intently, then got to his feet. “Be ready to give me covering fire,” he whispered to Turrall. “I’m going in.” Before Turrall could grab him, Xan charged. “I kicked open the door, at the same time flourishing my pistol and flashing on my torch.” And there, “sitting by a twig fire in steaming long-legged underwear,” was Guy Delaney, drying his clothes and chatting with the fisherman who owned the hut.

  “You’ve been bloody slow getting here,” Delaney grumbled.

  —

  Xan had recognized Delaney’s voice and understood the fisherman’s Greek, so he’d only mock-attacked, to get Turrall’s goat. Delaney was just as relieved; he’d been chilled to the bone on the beach and finally had to get warm or risk hypothermia. Even the fisherman was delighted; he wanted to call the whole village to arms, and was just a bit crestfallen when Xan explained that the three midnight guests were alone and not the advance team of a full Allied invasion. Only Turrall was in a foul mood—he’d been through too much in his life, not to mention that night alone, to tolerate any more of Xan’s shit.

  But the fisherman had a little gift to cheer him up: a prisoner!

  “There’s a German here in Tsoutsouros!” A deserter had turned up a few days ago and kept hanging around, hoping to find someone he could surrender to. He couldn’t have wandered into better luck: that little cove was too barren and inaccessible for the Germans to bother with, so Xan and his team were the only outsiders anyone had seen for weeks. Crap was supposed to surface again the following night to offload rifles for the Cretans and supplies for the British agents, so Turrall could paddle the forlorn German out to the sub and notch himself a capture.

  By the time Xan dried and warmed himself, dawn was breaking. He’d only seen Crete through the sub’s periscope, so as the sun rose, he went outside for his first good look. You’d expect to be dazzled by sea views on a skinny sausage of an island like that—161 miles long and 37 wide at its thickest, 12 at its thinnest—but even those turquoise shimmers are overshadowed by the startling explosion of mountains. From the beach it all looks so easy, so summery, Alpine and inviting. It’s only when you push into the hills and find yourself twisting through gorges and smacking into sheer rock faces hidden by trees that you discover why there was no coast-to-coast road and why a two-mile trek could take four hours and leave you where you started.

  No wonder Crap’s sub was able to come within a mile of the beach without being spotted: all that elevation meant Xan was nicely hidden by a giant stone fence. Most of Crete’s mountains run right through the middle of the island, creating a jagged belt separating the Germans in the north from the rebels in the south. Just east of Xan, ablaze in the early-morning sun, was the skyscraping prenatal unit of the world’s first guerrilla fighter: Zeus, greatest of the Greek gods.

  Zeus wasn’t born to the throne; he scrapped his way there, Cretan style. Zeus’s father was Kronos, the Titan who ruled the earth and swallowed his children so they wouldn’t overthrow him. When Kronos’s wife was pregnant with Zeus, she snuck away to Psychro Cave, in Crete’s easternmost Dikti Mountains. After giving birth, she returned home and fooled Kronos into swallowing a stone wrapped in a baby’s blanket, while the infant—“safe in Crete, strong of limb and crafty”—was raised by Diktynna, the cunning and elusive goat-nymph. A tribe of mountain warriors, the Kouretes, guarded the baby and performed a shield-clanging war dance so Kronos wouldn’t hear him crying. When Zeus was big enough, he cut his brothers and sisters free from Dad’s belly and led them in bringing down the tyrant.

  Some insist Zeus’s birth cave was farther west of Xan on Mount Ida, Crete’s highest peak, which made a lot of sense. Ida is snow-crowned and glorious, home to golden eagles and the kri-kri, the rare and magnificent Cretan ibex. Sure enough, searchers located a palatial cave on Ida overlooking the Amari, Crete’s lushest valley. Buried inside this natural throne room were ancient offerings: bracelets, Egyptian pottery, bronze knives. Pythagoras was even said to have made a pilgrimage to the Idaean Cave, and Euripides mentioned “Idaean Zeus” in his play The Cretans. The Idaean Cave is majestic enough for a king—but the infant Zeus was a fugitive with a death sentence. That’s one reason why, in 1901, the British archeologist D. G. Hobarth decided to take another look at Psychro.

  The Dikti range is dark and rough, exactly the kind of place where a wild child could disappear from the world and be raised by a band of loyal mountain men and a mystical she-goat. Hobarth pushed deep into the rocked-off recesses of Psychro. Blasting his way with dynamite into an “abysmal chasm,” he discovered a treasury of other devotional gifts, including Cretan double axes, believed to be a sacred emblem of Zeus—far more than the trinkets discovered in the Idaean Cave, but more important, far older. “The Cave of Ida, however rich it proved in offerings when explored some years ago, has no sanctuary approaching the mystery of this,” Hobarth wrote. Visitors assumed regal Mount Ida was the place for a god, but true Cretans knew the Dikti is where a hunted man would hide.

  The killers were coming for Xan, too. German troops may have spotted the sub and could already be closing in, so the longer he lingered in Tsoutsouros, the more he risked himself and everyone in the village. He now had to search for Monty Woodhouse, the other British agent stationed on the island. Luckily, the solution soon appeared, high on a ridge behind him.

  Trotting down the rock slope came two Cretan highlanders, both dressed in black shirts and old-time shepherd’s breeches, with the knee-length crotch for easy running. The highlanders hurried into Tsoutsouros with news: they could lead Xan to Monty, but they had to leave at once. Xan had been on the move for nearly two full days by that point and eaten little more than bread crusts, but rested or exhausted, fed or famished, go-time for a guerrilla is non-negotiable. Xan set off behind one of the highlanders and got his first taste of the Cretan Bounce.

  “As soon as we reached the foothills and started climbing he was in his element at once,” Xan noted, “bounding from stone to stone with a speed and precision which defied our breathless attempts to emulate him.” Monty’s man was patient but relentless, slowing his uphill rock hopping long enough to keep Xan in sight but pushing steadily through the afternoon and into the evening. Finally, at nightfall, Xan trudged out of the mountains and into a bizarre dream world.

  “Through the open door of the village coffee shop I saw a horde of frenzied giants in tattered khaki and slouch hats,” he observed. “The chorus
of Waltzing Matilda filled the dusk.” More than a dozen drunk Australian soldiers were sloshing about, guzzling Cretan moonshine. After months on the run, the fugitive Aussies had heard that Crap was on the way and came out of hiding to slip down to the beach. When they discovered Crap had come and gone without them, their determination to remain invisible gave way to desperate drinking. For one night at least.

  Xan slunk past, head down. “The sight of them reminded me of the last time I had to deal with drunken Australians,” he’d remark, recalling his quick surrender when he tried to defend a Jewish family from some Aussie bullies. Xan was led to a small house and entered to find his boss: a twenty-four-year-old Oxford classics scholar who not only looked like a college boy on spring break, but not long ago was. Montgomery Woodhouse was tall and gawky, so blond and pink-cheeked in that roomful of ferocious stubble that he almost looked albino.

  Still, Monty had style. Xan had to admire the “superb shepherd’s cloak” Monty had chosen for his disguise. “Clandestine life came easily enough to me,” Monty would explain. “My Greek was good enough to deceive the enemy, though my appearance was against me. Of course no Greek was ever deceived either by my accent or my disguise, but that was an asset, because as soon as I was recognized a spontaneous conspiracy sprang up to protect me.”

  Seven weeks behind enemy lines had also hard-sharpened him, so Monty got straight down to business. Hitler suspects Crete is his Achilles’ heel, Monty explained; Xan’s job was to convince him. Only four or five thousand troops should be necessary to secure an island of Crete’s size, but the Resistance had done such a superb job of making Hitler nervous that more than eighty thousand Germans were still stationed there. Hitler desperately needed that manpower in North Africa and the Russian front, but he couldn’t risk shifting them if it meant that an underground army would overthrow his Mediterranean base.