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

by Christopher McDougall

  Even more intriguing: greens keep Cretans in harmony with two million years of human history. For most of our ancestral existence, humans maintained a healthy balance between omega-6 fatty acids—which provide a healthy amount of protective inflammation—and omega-3’s, which keep inflammation in check. Overdo it with omega-6 and you become high-risk for heart disease and neurological disorders. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a one-to-one ratio. Today, ours is more like sixteen to one. Since the proliferation of vegetable and soybean oils in processed foods, omega-6 consumption has been through the roof. Instead of a small fire to warm the house, we’ve created an inferno that’s burning it down.

  Except on Crete. “By including daily wild greens in their diet, the population of Crete was able to supplement their diet not only with vitamins and antioxidants but also with essential fatty acids in a ratio similar to that kept by the local Minoan population 4,500 years ago,” the researchers found. “The traditional diet of Crete,” they add, “is similar to the ratio kept during human evolution.”

  But for beginners, foraging is bewildering. Books aren’t much help: greens all kind of look the same on the page, and they’re usually photographed in blossom, when the pictures are prettiest but the prime plucking period has already passed. Luckily, Leda came up with a genius solution: let hatred be your guide.

  “Do you have something around your house you can’t stand?” she asked.

  “Nettles,” I immediately replied. “Burn nettles. I can’t get rid of it.”

  “Stop trying. You’re lucky. Nettles are free spinach.” Cooking or drying neutralizes the sting, and what you’re left with is a tasty, leafy green that makes a great lasagna, pesto, soup, or pizza topping.

  “If you hate it, you’ll recognize it,” Leda explains. “Start with two or three things you see all the time—like dandelions and Lady’s Thumb—and add things you hate, like nettles, and that’s plenty to keep you busy as you expand your visual vocabulary.” And like the “Evaders” on Crete, who scrabbled to feed themselves from the harsh stones of the Samaría Gorge, it won’t be long before you realize that everything you need to survive—and thrive—is right at your feet.

  —

  From the top of the Samaría Gorge, Chris White took aim for the hilltop village of Lakki.

  By map it was only a few miles off, but that meant nothing on an island where geography is measured by degree of difficulty rather than distance. We found a faint footpath, but when it climbed into the rocky highlands and disappeared, we seized on a free guide service: goats. Goats head back to the fold as it gets dark, and since there was nothing else between us and Lakki, all we had to do was follow the coppery clong of their bells and they’d lead us right to the village.

  “Wait wait WAIT!” Chris threw his arms wide to stop us. He was staring down at a long drop a few inches from his feet and remembering a crucial detail we’d forgotten: goats have a much different approach to risk management. Our guides had bounded right over the edge, hopping along a staircase of tiny perches that was impossible to follow without hooves or ropes. We had to back up and bushwhack a new route; which failed; so we reversed course; tried again; failed again….

  By the time we got off the cliff, the bells were long gone. We found a dry creek bed and decided to stick with it, clambering over driftwood jams and rock washes until, just before nightfall, we reached the last hill below Lakki. Thank heaven. Fourteen hours of hard trail were coming to an end.

  An hour later, Lakki was no closer.

  The village was right there. We could see it; we could smell it as the woodsmoke from evening fires drifted down. But. We. Could. Not. Get. There. We’d pushed our way through brambles and climbed rock walls, but every route we tried was a dead end or a semicircle, dropping us right back in the creek bed. The stinking hill was bewitched.

  To hell with it. Pete dropped to his belly and began to claw his way straight up, kneeing and pulling himself along like a man escaping quicksand. Chris and I watched, knowing he wouldn’t get far before he hit an unclimbable cliff and gave up. Then we shrugged, dropped to our bellies, and followed. Stupid movement seemed better than no movement at all. Instead of a cliff, Pete came to an ancient stack of lava rock, wedged nicely into the hill like a climbing wall, and on the far side, a muddy pen behind a lonely farm house. We crawled up and sploshed through and came out to find the road.

  You pull any stunts out there, I thought as we trudged under the early-evening moon into the tiny village, you better know what you’re doing. We were filthy, exhausted, and shivering. It was hard to fathom sleeping a few hours in a cave and setting off to do it again—or racing up that hill, with a hostile German general in tow, to save our own lives.

  CHAPTER 22

  [Xan] Fielding had a plan to kidnap the GERMAN commanding officer…and hold him as a hostage.

  —OFFICIAL BRITISH REPORT OF THE CRETAN RESISTANCE,

  1941–1945

  LET’S GET THE BUTCHER.

  The idea was insane, but once it took hold in Paddy’s mind, it refused to let go.

  Let’s make the Butcher…disappear.

  If Paddy could learn what the Clown knew, he might just be able to pull it off. It would be a masterpiece of street magic, the perfect crime perpetrated on one of the world’s worst criminals—a man protected by five divisions of German troops suddenly vanishing without a trace. George Psychoundakis liked to tell the British secret agents he’d teach them the Cretan art of sheep stealing so they could go home after the war with a practical skill. Well, this was his chance. They’d bring the rules of the shepherd to the battlefield.

  But for a romantic poet, Paddy had a hard-nosed side. He’d lived by his wits during his years on the road and understood the difference between striving and surviving. Getting the Butcher wasn’t the biggest problem; the biggest problem would be getting away. As far as Paddy knew, no one had even thought of kidnapping a general before. Colin Gubbins had written an entire “Art of Guerrilla Warfare” manual for SOE agents after Churchill put him in charge of training, but nothing in there related to sneaking a general through enemy lines and off a fortified island. Nothing, that is, except Gubbins’s motto:

  To inflict damage and death on the enemy and to escape scot-free has an irritant and depressing effect…. The object must be to strike hard and disappear before the enemy can strike back.

  And in a peculiar way, John Pendlebury was proving it. About the time Paddy arrived in June, information was surfacing from Cretans who’d been with Pendlebury during the invasion. Bit by bit, it was beginning to sound as if he’d never made it to the White Mountains at all. In fact, Pendlebury may have been killed while Allied troops were still being evacuated from the island. Fragments of the story were still coming together, but if true, then for nearly a year the Germans had been chasing a dead man. Even in death, Pendlebury was still in the fight.

  Maybe that was the best Paddy and George could hope for. “I had read somewhere that the average life of an infantry officer in the First World War was eight weeks, and I had no reason to think that the odds would be much better in the Second,” Paddy acknowledged. He was even more at risk as a sabotage agent—and if a mountain-hardened, Crete-savvy outdoorsman like Pendlebury couldn’t make it, what chance did Paddy have? Likewise, George knew he was a marked man. German storm troopers had already tried to trap him once in his village. They’d be back. The noose was tightening.

  So why not die a hunter, rather than the hunted? When the Germans captured Athens, they ordered the old flag keeper at the Acropolis to lower the Greek flag and replace it with the swastika-emblazoned Reichskriegsflagge. Konstandinos Koukidis obediently took down the Greek flag—then wrapped himself in it and dived headfirst from a battlement. The Germans raised the Reichskriegsflagge over his corpse, but a few nights later, two Greek teenagers snuck behind the guards, cut it down, and ran for it. The Gestapo issued a death order for the two boys and anyone harboring them, but months afterwards, they were still on the
loose. At a time when no force on earth seemed powerful enough to defy the Nazis, two boys electrified Europe by honoring an old man’s sacrifice and snatching Hitler’s flag. Imagine snatching one of his generals.

  There was one chance of pulling it off, Paddy figured: they’d have to become as strong and wily as the Clown. They’d have to master the art of survival in those “merciless mountains,” as Paddy called them, and rely on whatever it was the Clown did out there—running, climbing, dodging, conniving, foraging on the fly. They’d have to go places the Germans couldn’t, and move faster and more nimbly than anyone thought possible.

  They’d have to follow in the footsteps of Odysseus, that other inventive and unstoppable Greek—and try to forget that, out of all his crew, only Odysseus made it home alive.

  —

  Oddly, both Paddy and Xan had come up with the same idea on their own. Before Paddy told Xan about his plan to snatch the Butcher, Xan was already mulling the possibility of grabbing a general to protect the villagers from German attacks.

  We grab the bugger, tie him up, and tell the Jerries whatever they do to a Cretan, we do to him. It was an idea worth considering, but first Xan would have to endure a different ordeal. George led him through the night to a tiny village in the mountains—and there, ready to celebrate Christmas, were Paddy and Tom Dunbabin, another Oxford archeologist, who’d been sent to replace Monty Woodhouse.

  The three men were positive the Germans would ease up for the holidays—well, pretty positive—so they threw themselves into the full onslaught of Cretan merrymaking. “We reeled happily from home to home eating and drinking with hosts who seemed as carefree as though no Germans had ever been heard of in Crete,” Xan recalled. “We found the same conditions in every village we passed during our slow three-day procession down the valley.”

  Paddy knew the Germans weren’t having this kind of fun, because he’d heard them say so. Shortly before Xan’s return, the Firm sent Paddy on a mission to blow up German warships with some magnetic mines. Paddy infiltrated the port and quickly made his assessment: Not Bloody Likely. They wanted him to swim across the harbor between the searchlights with those big hunks of metal strapped to his back? The only way he wouldn’t get shot was if he drowned first. Which raised another tactical difficulty: the partner he’d been assigned couldn’t swim. Paddy decided to abort and beat it out of town. He holed up in a safe house to wait for dark, but suddenly heard German voices. Two German sergeants, he realized, were billeted next door. He tuned in to their conversation and heard something intriguing. “Weit von der Heimat…” he heard one say. Far from Mother Germany…

  See? They’re homesick. That was the actionable intel Paddy had picked up while Xan was away. This is the fourth year in a row the Germans have missed Christmas with their families. They’re not out drinking and singing with friends like we are. They’re scratching lice and eating awful grub and wondering why they haven’t heard from their wives. They’re lonely and uncertain. We can use that.

  Xan had to marvel at Paddy. Xan’s first winter on Crete had left him bony and ragged as a hobo, but this guy—magnificent! Somehow, six months of cave living and mountain scrambling had turned Paddy into a Hollywood pirate. “His moustache always had a dashing twist in it,” Xan noted. “His boots, which he wore out at the rate of one pair a month, were beautifully kept until they fell to pieces on his feet; to knot his black turban at the most becoming angle, he took infinite pains; and to complete his operational wardrobe he had just ordered a Cretan waistcoat of royal-blue broadcloth lined with scarlet shot-silk and embroidered with arabesques of black braid.” One way or the other, Paddy was coming out of this war in style.

  Tom Dunbabin was just as handsome but less of a dandy; when it came to protective coloring, the worse he looked, the better he felt. He was a towering, farm-raised Tasmanian with a mind formidable enough to take him to Oxford and a professorship in Greek classics, so masquerading as a harmless mountain peasant took some serious stagecraft. Xan was quite impressed with the result. “In ragged breeches and black fringed turban, with his overgrown corkscrew moustache coiling and uncoiling in the breeze of his own breath, he looked like a successful local sheep-thief,” Xan observed. “He even managed to introduce a characteristic note of hysteria into his high-pitched voice.”

  Crooks were Tom’s favorite mentors, and he recruited as many as he could find. “The best man you can have with you in the hills is a converted sheep thief,” Tom explained. “He knows all the paths and pathless ways, and where to lie up and spy out the land. He is a good mover over any country, day or night.” You couldn’t go wrong with a good murderer, either. “He has probably spent years in the hills avoiding the justice of the state and his victims’ kinsmen,” Tom pointed out, “and knows every crag and cave.” Tom learned so much from his bandit buddies that once, during a recon mission, he came face-to-face with an old acquaintance—a German archeologist turned Wehrmacht officer—who looked Tom dead in the eye without recognizing him inside the shepherd’s disguise.

  While the outlaws were schooling Tom and Paddy in evasion, shepherds showed them how to forage for survival. “They knew the mountains, knew the paths and hiding places, and most of them had a rifle. If necessary, they could do without the villages and lowlands, and live on their own milk and meat,” Tom explained. “They were naturally in fine physical condition, could run up a hill-side most of us would find it hard to get up at all, and were wonderfully light on their feet.” Tom and Paddy crested so many mountains during their apprenticeship that they were left with only a single pair of decent boots between them. “I crippled myself over these boots,” Tom grimaced, “marching in a pair too small for me while Paddy borrowed the good pair.”

  But despite all those miles, they were still wrestling with the final test of authenticity: the Cretan Bounce. Paddy once leaped to the top of a stone wall to demonstrate he had it, only to amuse the Clown by toppling back over again. “The quick eyes of the Cretans could generally pick us out by our walk,” Tom admitted. “Other details—dress, features, moustache—could pass, but none of us acquired the gait of a Cretan hillman, for all our practice.”

  The three men had a wonderful Christmas. For four days they wandered about “slightly drunk and unescorted,” as Xan put it, calling on friends across the highlands. They sang and danced and feasted, forgetting for a time that they were living under a death sentence. No matter how glib their Greek or how convincing their farmer’s cloaks and women’s dresses, they knew they couldn’t get away with this game for long. Sooner or later they’d meet an ambush, a traitor, or a dark and icy cliff, and Crete would become—as it had for John Pendlebury—their Appointment in Samarra.

  Because Paddy was right: down below in the barracks, the Germans weren’t having nearly as much fun. They were loading weapons, squeezing informants, and eyeing the weather in the mountains above. Hitler smelled trouble on the Sliver, and he wanted it taken care of now.

  —

  Defense wasn’t Hitler’s specialty. He knew how to knock you down; he had no plan for when you got back up. He liked sneak attacks and lightning strikes, the kind of shock tactics that were great when his troops were on the move but useless when they were pushed back and hunkered into trenches. But as Hitler looked at the giant map in his command room during the final weeks of 1942, his eye for a stab in the back came in handy: it told him exactly what Churchill would do next and where he would do it.

  Crete had to be Churchill’s next target; by Christmas, it was already the sweet spot between Hitler’s shoulder blades. He’d pushed his troops deep into Africa and Russia, and now they were mired in exactly the nightmare he’d dreaded. Germany’s prize panzer corps was gasping for survival in Egypt, while Stalingrad was on the verge of becoming Hitler’s bloodiest defeat. The Soviets who’d been surrounded by the Third Reich’s Sixth Army had pulled off a miraculous reversal and surrounded them right back, trapping the Germans inside the city and exposing the Führer’s inability to
counterattack. The German response to the Soviet push was sheer bedlam. Day by day, the German high command second-guessed and dithered while nearly a quarter-million German soldiers trapped in Stalingrad were wiped out by bombs, bullets, disease, and starvation.

  The last thing Hitler needed now was to wheel around and discover Crete was ablaze. He’d already seen what kind of havoc those lunatic farmers could get up to with their ancient guns and homemade bayonets, and all it would take for them to erupt was the go-ahead from Great Britain that help was on the way. German soldiers were already said to be wary of venturing into the White Mountains because some phantom from New Zealand had taken over for John Pendlebury as the new Lion of Crete.

  Rumor had it the Lion was haunting the highlands with his own band of Cretan killers, and the truth wasn’t far off. When the war broke out, Dudley Perkins was a university student following in his father’s footsteps toward the ministry. He was soon behind barbed wire in a German POW camp after the fall of Crete, but he escaped into the White Mountains and spent a long winter learning to live off the land. Cretan woodsmen taught Dudley to search the riverbanks for eels and snails and freshwater crabs, and how to boil olive-tree fungus and wild mushrooms into a hearty and surprisingly tasty stew. By the time he met Xan Fielding, the aspiring preacher was a new and much deadlier man. The Lion appeared “much like I imagined Lawrence of Arabia must have looked,” Xan would comment. “And in character, too, he closely resembled what I had read of the famous Arab leader.” After German troops incinerated one village in the high country, Dudley formed the survivors into a fighting force two hundred strong. Not long after, a German patrol entered the Lion’s territory; none of them made it out alive. The local German garrison sent eleven soldiers out to commandeer some food; their bodies were found at the bottom of a slot canyon.

  This was Hitler’s nightmare: invisible agitators who could stir the entire island into revolt. So Hitler decided to beat Churchill to the punch. Soldiers who were desperately needed in Russia were flown to Crete instead, boosting the on-ground strength to a combined German-Italian force of more than eighty thousand. Bunkers were dug, bridges were wired with explosives, access to the southern coast was triple-fortified, and a warning shot was fired from behind the walls of Fortress Crete, the impenetrable garrison in western Chania: “We will in the event of an invasion,” German command announced, “defend Crete to the last man and the last round.”