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

by Christopher McDougall

  Chris pointed to the cliff rising at our backs. Only a Japanese painter could have loved that thing. It was snarled with prickly oak and so sheer it could have been cut from the mountain with a cleaver. “Somewhere in that mess, Billy stashed the general the first night,” Chris said. He and Pete had punished themselves searching for the cave on their last trip, but I could see why they’d gotten nowhere. Even if you knew where to go, you’d be at the mercy of prickers and dodgy handholds. Billy Moss described the cave as so painfully small and hard to reach that they only pushed inside as a last resort.

  “Germans coming!” one of the guerrillas had warned him. “Plenty Germans in village!” Billy and his crew were right out in the open, taking a breather along the banks of the stream because Paddy had told them Anogia would be safe. “We hurriedly threw our kit on to our backs and made off along the bank of the stream,” Billy would recall. “Five minutes later, we reached a steep cliff face and up it we scrambled, heaving the General from foothold to foothold until we found ourselves at the entrance of a tiny cave.” All four squeezed into a space barely big enough for two, then screened the entrance with branches. They huddled there, listening to the rasp of their own breathing as a German search plane growled by so low that Billy could peek out and see one of the rear crewmen searching the valley through binoculars.

  That evening, Billy and his crew led the general back down to the creek to meet up with Paddy. It was here, roughly where Chris and I were standing, that Paddy and Billy discovered that the man they were counting on most—Tom Dunbabin—might already have been captured.

  —

  How is it going? Paddy asked. Is the General putting up a fuss?

  “Quite a pleasant catch” was Billy’s assessment. “Not the raving Nazi he might well have been.”

  Have you heard anything from Tom? Paddy asked.

  Nothing, Billy replied. His messenger had returned from Tom’s hideout dumbfounded. “He said he had searched the entire area for Tom, but had found no trace of him, nor had anyone in the district a notion of his whereabouts.” This was sad news. Tom’s radio operator turned up, but with a broken radio and no more idea than anyone else what happened to his boss. Tom Dunbabin wasn’t just their link to the outside world. He was supposed to be spearheading all clandestine ops on the island. That meant one man and one man alone knew the secret locations of the last two remaining wireless operators: Tom.

  “He was the only Open Sesame to the other two stations,” Paddy realized. Without him, they could send messages only through a series of human firewalls, with each guerrilla knowing only the identity of the next man in the chain. Xan Fielding had as much credibility on Crete as “O Tom,” as Dunbabin was known, and could possibly tighten up communications, but Xan hadn’t made it back from Egypt yet. Were the Germans tightening the noose so quickly that Tom had to go into hiding? Or was he already in their hands? Paddy and Billy had both taken the precaution of using the human relay to send news of the kidnapping to another radio operator, but predictably, it arrived disastrously garbled: at that moment, the BBC was reporting that General Kreipe would be taken off the island, not was off.

  What about our leaflet drop? Paddy asked.

  Canceled, Billy replied. Too much cloud cover for our planes to get through.

  Billy and Paddy were still absorbing the bad news when worse arrived. The guerrillas escorting the general’s driver showed up—without the driver. Germans are everywhere, the guerrillas reported. There were full-scale drives, the Cretans told Paddy, launched in every direction, and they themselves had only just escaped capture.

  Okay. But where’s the driver?

  Andoni sliced a finger across his throat.

  Paddy was heartsick. Their chances for escape had just plummeted, and his dream of a bloodless, Magic Gang–style triumph was over. As soon as the driver’s body was discovered, the Butcher would go berserk. He’d have to assume General Kreipe was dead as well, which meant he no longer had to worry about getting a hostage back alive. Instead of a rescue operation, it would be total war. The Butcher’s only objective now would be vengeance for the murder of a brother officer.

  Time to get moving. Ahead lay Mount Ida, sprawling across a quarter of the island and climbing to over eight thousand feet. The general was still complaining about his injured leg, so they helped him up on the donkey and moved out, following a nearly invisible goat track into the woods. “It was vital for us to get into the mountains and among friends,” Paddy decided, “away from the enemy-infested plain and in the right direction for escape by sea, at high speed.”

  Wait. By sea? The guerrillas were doubtful. Why don’t we fly him out, Wolf style?

  Ugh. Wasn’t the sky already dark enough without that name coming up? Otto Skorzeny: “Hitler’s Wolf.” The evil genius with a dueling scar down his cheek and a specialty in killing anyone, anywhere, and disappearing without a trace. Whenever a job seemed impossible, the Wolf was called in. He led a special force of Jagdkommandos—“Hunting Warriors”—who were said to “live off the land, think for themselves and never be daunted by the disastrous mess they often found themselves in.” A year earlier, Skorzeny and his Hunters had snuck into a fortified Italian castle high on a mountain and broken Benito Mussolini out of prison. Mussolini had been overthrown in a coup, but Hitler was determined to rescue “Italy’s greatest son, our dear friend and close ally,” and restore him to power. Skorzeny landed by glider at night with a small attack squad, then forced the two-hundred-man guard detail to surrender. Skorzeny spirited Mussolini to an escape plane in a nearby field, and before long Il Duce was back in command. To prevent Hungary’s leader, Admiral Miklós Horthy, from surrendering to the Soviets, Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son, rolled him into a carpet, and snuck him off to a concentration camp, where he was held hostage until the end of the war.

  A few months later, as the story goes, the Wolf parachuted into Iran intent on assassinating Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt with a single blow. The Wolf and his Hunters crept closer as the Big Three Allied leaders were meeting in Tehran to discuss war strategy. Just in time, a Russian spy exposed Operation Long Jump and many of the Hunters were captured. But Skorzeny got away, reemerging in an American uniform and jeep far behind enemy lines as he atomized from place to place, sabotaging Allied troops and getting so close to Supreme Headquarters that for days at a time, General Dwight Eisenhower had to be hidden in a guarded location. Skorzeny is “the most dangerous man in Europe,” Eisenhower fumed. “Public Enemy No. 1.”

  “We couldn’t evacuate our prisoners by air, in Skorzeny style,” Paddy told the disappointed Cretans. “The Germans had put all the big mountain plateaux out of action for long-range aircraft by forcing labour-gangs to litter them with cairns of stones.” But the burning question wasn’t whether they could follow in the Wolf’s footsteps; it was whether the Wolf was following theirs. Rather than flail around in pursuit of the kidnappers, why wouldn’t the Butcher call in Skorzeny and put the Hunters on their trail? It made perfect sense. As an outlaw himself, Skorzeny would know exactly what Paddy was planning. Instead of chasing the kidnappers, he’d think ten moves ahead and be waiting in ambush.

  So the faster Paddy and his crew ran, the closer they could be getting to the Wolf.

  CHAPTER 31

  It makes people rub their eyes in amazement that this proverbial home of individuality, lawlessness and revolt should unite, when the need came, in this durable harmony.

  But so it was.

  —PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  CHRIS AND I ARRIVED in Anogia about the time of day Paddy would have been slipping out, pulling ourselves up the last terrace as the sun went down. At the entrance to town was an iron signpost so ominous, it looked more like a warning than a welcome. When we got closer, we discovered why: once the Butcher discovered his suspicions about Anogia were true, he erupted in a Hitler-like fury. What he did next was engraved on that grim memorial:

  Order of the German Commander of the Garrison of C
rete:

  Since the town of Anogia is a centre of the English espionage in Crete, since the Anogians carried out the murder of the sergeant of the Yeni-Gavé garrison, since the Anogians carried out the sabotage at Damasta, since the andartes of various Resistance bands find asylum and protection in Anogia, and since the abductors of General Kreipe passed through Anogia, using Anogia as a stopping place when transporting him, we order its RAZING to the ground and the execution of every male Anogian who is found within the village and within an area of one kilometre round it.

  Chania, 13-8-44.

  The Commander of the Garrison of Crete

  H. Müller

  The Butcher’s troops surrounded the village and penned everyone inside. More than a hundred people were dragged to the town square and murdered. The survivors fled into the mountains while everything they had—their homes, their food, their clothing and blankets—went up in flames behind them. Two elderly sisters were too afraid to leave their home; they were burned to death inside. The Butcher was unrelenting; for three weeks, his men pounded away at the little town, dynamiting buildings and searching the hills for any Anogian men who escaped the dragnet. By the time the Butcher’s rage subsided, there was nothing left of the nine-hundred-year-old city on the hill except rotting corpses and smoldering rubble.

  Chris and I got a glimpse of the aftermath in a taverna off the town square. A mural filled the entire side wall, and depicted the valley Chris and I had just climbed up from. Two German soldiers have their hands in the air, and a third has dropped to his knees. They’re surrounded by Anogian freedom fighters about to open fire. It’s a strange and awful image to stare at over a glass of raki and a plate of spanakopita, but it explains why Anogia exists again today. Guerrilla sniping became so common that for the rest of the war and afterwards, the area around Anogia would be known as “the Devil’s Triangle.” “I saw Germans crying,” one Anogian would recall. “I saw it when they shuffled into our ambush like sheep and didn’t stand a ghost of a chance.”

  Strategically, the Butcher’s massacre was a terrible mistake. Stripped of everything they had to live for, the Anogians were ready to fight to the death. They dug in, determined to out-endure the invaders. And they did: Anogia was eventually rebuilt with such pride and charm, it feels like it was never gone. The streets are steep and narrow, sloping naturally into the side of the mountain. Small, whitewashed houses cluster around a pleasant town square ringed by shady trees and family cafés. Looming overhead by daylight and moonlight is the majestic, snowy presence of mighty Mount Ida—symbolic birthplace of the rebel lord Zeus and gateway to bandit country and the freedom of the sea.

  But as gateways go, it’s a punisher. By foot, the fastest route out of Anogia is the trail created by and for goats. It starts with a climb steep enough to make you pump your knees with your hands, then plunges you through acres of the same kind of knife-edge lava rock that left Paddy barefoot the day he arrived. One look was enough for the general to insist his leg was so injured he needed to ride the whole way. “Seen in silhouette upon his mule, the General looked for all the world like Napoleon on his retreat from Moscow,” Billy observed. “And we, as jaded-looking a rabble as ever fought an enemy, must have perfectly suited this picture.”

  By two in the morning, the kidnap party had been hiking for more than six hours. Through the darkness, they followed the clonging of sheep bells to a small hut with the smell of wood smoke wafting from the roof hole. “The shepherd, a dear old man with white whiskers and almost no teeth, was delighted to see us and immediately asked us into his hut so we could rest and warm ourselves in front of the fire,” Billy would relate. Even though the old man had been rousted from sleep and opened his door to find a band of armed thugs leading a German general on a donkey, he obeyed the Cretan hospitality code of xenía: He offered food. He offered shelter. He asked no questions.

  “The shepherd gave us some cheese to eat, and with it some rock bread which was first left to soak in a stone jug,” Billy noted. Once the general had thawed out and the starving kidnappers had shared portions of the shepherd’s prison-style rations, it was time to be off. “We gave him a fond farewell and were soon on our way again.” Giving an enemy who’d terrorized his island a bite to eat and a place by the fire was the last kindness the old man would ever perform; soon after, Billy later found out, a German foraging patrol in search of food shot the shepherd in the back of the head and stole his flock.

  The kidnappers had to pick up the pace. Dawn was coming fast, and the most treacherous obstacle still lay ahead: the Nida Plateau, a nearly half-mile stretch of pasture as smooth and open as a football field. Nida is one of the marvels of the Cretan mountains: it’s treeless and almost supernaturally flat, leading like a royal carpet straight to the base of Mount Ida. It would be an ideal airstrip if it weren’t such a death trap; it’s perfect for landing planes, but the surrounding hills make it a sniper’s dream. Nida could only be crossed by night; by day, the Germans would be watching it from the air with search planes growling around and around the perimeter.

  Except the more the kidnappers walked, the farther away Nida got. The Lasithi range, south of Anogia, is bewitched; it’s a masterpiece of deceptive topography, with hills so steep and tightly packed together that when you see one in the distance, you won’t notice the other three in between. Every time you pull yourself up a peak and expect to see Nida waiting below, you’re sure to find another climb awaiting. You won’t find it any easier on the descents, either; the gorges are so clotted with tumble-down stone from the mountaintops, the kidnappers could only avoid tripping by lifting their tired legs as high on the way down as they did on the way up.

  Just as the sky was turning pink, the band made it to the grassy plain and hurried the general across. In the gray morning light, they could see the dark outlines of rebel watchmen all across the hilltops. The general was shocked—the Butcher’s propaganda had made him believe rebel manpower was nothing more than a few scared Brits and a handful of bandits. “Kreipe was very impressed,” noted the rebel fighter Giorgios Phrangoulitakis, known as “Scuttle George,” “by our guerrillas posted all along the southern heights, watching over us without coming down. He must have thought the whole mountain was full of them.” When one of the band wanted to slip into town past German sentries, several others offered him their German travel passes.

  “Have they all got our identity papers?” Kreipe asked Paddy.

  “You would never be able to escape from the men you see all around you,” replied Paddy. Angry elf eyes backed him up: whenever the general glanced back, he found a little old man glaring daggers at him. Manolis Tsikritsis “was very small and wore a sort of fez like a deacon’s cap,” as Scuttle George put it. “He didn’t care for the General either and stared at him fiercely throughout the journey.”

  Tough talk didn’t come naturally to Paddy, but as they pushed into a damp cave at the foot of Mount Ida to hide out for the day, the time had come to make the general believe this was checkmate and his last chance for rescue was gone. Because the following night, they’d be fully exposed as they summited the barren moonscape of Mount Ida. Even if there were someplace up there to hide, their footprints in the snow would give them away. It was a vampire’s mission: either get off the mountain and under cover by sunrise or you’re dead.

  And if the general figured out they were making it up as they went along, he could outfox them with the slow drip of subtle sabotage. All he had to do was drop items from his pockets in the dark for search teams to follow. Or detour the escape route by pretending he knew German outposts were up ahead. Or simply clutch his chest and fall down. Paddy couldn’t let that happen; he had to persuade the general he was in the grip of a clockwork operation run by skilled and deadly masterminds, and not, in reality, a seat-of-the-pants scheme cooked up in a bathroom after an all-night party by a military school reject who spent the past five years freeloading across Europe as a wandering playboy poet. So when the general sighed one mo
rning as the sun was rising over Mount Ida and recalled Horace’s ode to Mount Soracte, Paddy seized the chance to take his rook:

  “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte,” the general murmured. You see Soracte standing white and deep with snow…

  Nec jam sustineant onus, Paddy blurted.

  Silvae laborantes geluque,

  Flumina constiterint acuto. The woods in trouble, hardly able to carry their burden, and the rivers halted by sharp ice.

  “One of the few odes of Horace I know by heart,” Paddy would reveal. “I was in luck.” He kept reeling off verses until he reached the end.

  The general sat in silence.

  “Well remembered,” he finally muttered.

  —

  While the general dozed inside the cave, Paddy and Billy sat outside in the morning sun and got the morning’s bad news. Tom Dunbabin was still missing, which meant their communication with Cairo was getting worse by the mile: the farther they fled, the farther behind they left the two remaining wireless operators. “In both cases,” Billy realized, “the journey would take the fleetest of runners at least two days to reach his destination, a further day to await Cairo’s reply, and another two days in which to return to us.”

  Five days round-trip for a single message. So instead of a few days, it would now take a few weeks to coordinate a pickup to get the general off the island. Food was dangerously thin and about to get thinner; for the past two days, they’d hiked twelve hours each night on little more than bread crusts and water. Now they were facing two more weeks on the same starvation diet. “It was impossible for our friends to help,” Scuttle George reported. “The villages that would have helped us were all surrounded.”

  They were exhausted and hungry, but they couldn’t give themselves more than a few hours to rest. Every day they spent in the same location increased the risk of getting trapped inside a German dragnet or tracked to their hideout if Hitler’s Wolf showed up. Troops were already mobilizing to cut off their escape route on the far side of Mount Ida. “Large numbers of Germans are concentrating around the foothills of this mountain and there is every reason to believe a full-scale drive over the area is imminent,” the guerrillas told Billy.