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

by Christopher McDougall

  “Yasou,” Yiorgos said not long after they emerged from hiding. “Farewell.” He’d reached the limit of the countryside he knew, so it was time for a fresh mount and guide to take over. “Yiorgos Pattakos left to return east with the Kourkoulases’ wonderful mule, which had made our journey so much faster in spite of the General’s accident,” recalled his cousin, who remained on with the kidnappers. Within a few days Yiorgos had retraced his stealthy steps back through the German patrols and arrived home.

  —

  “If I can ask a question,” I said. “Would you do it again? Now that you’re ninety-one years old, looking back—the Germans were murdering entire villages. Was it wise to put your family at risk?”

  Vasilios began translating, but erupted before he finished. “Everyone from this village was a patriot!” he simmered, outraged I’d suggest otherwise. But Yiorgos quietly raised a hand.

  “It’s a good question,” Yiorgos said, and then gave an answer which stayed with me for a long time and, the more I thought about it, kept extending further and further—from the four of us around the table to the ends of that tiny village, all the way across this embattled island and back to my own home and family. “When you live in a place like this—small, by itself—you’re brought up to give help, not wait for it,” Yiorgos began. When your neighbor needs something, he needs you. The person he knows. Not the army. Not the police. You. And if you’re not there, someday you’ll have to look him in the face and explain.

  Vasilios was listening so intently, Chris had to prompt him to translate. “The Germans didn’t know us, and they believed they could not lose,” Yiorgos continued. “They believed they’d never have to look anyone in the face and explain. They’d never have to pay for what they did. And I believe that is why we defeated them.” Because we have to answer to one another, and they did not.

  Even Kreipe, who barely escaped the Russian front with his life and was now a prisoner in the wilderness, was still convinced Hitler would come out of this a winner. Kreipe told his captors exactly that: when Yiorgos’s cousin joked that Kreipe was the last general they’d have to kidnap, since the Allies were on their way to victory, Kreipe responded—quite sincerely—that Germany was unbeatable. “The ‘Wall of the Atlantic’ was unbreakable,” Kreipe said. “If the Allies tried to land in France or the Low Countries, they would be crushed.” Germany might get pushed back, but eventually the Allies would wear out and negotiate for peace—just the way the Butcher, at that moment, was wearing out Paddy and his kidnap band.

  Certainly, Paddy and his Cretan friends had their moment of glory—“This Husarenstück,” as Kreipe called it, a “show-off’s prank”—but playtime was coming to an end. Every day, the Butcher’s men were getting closer. German soldiers were streaming down the mountains, they were lying in wait along the coastline, they had just missed rescuing Kreipe twice in the past few days alone. Kreipe could see Paddy was breaking down, and Paddy knew it himself. (“My right arm felt stranger and stranger; it was quite painless, but I found I could neither straighten it nor raise it very high,” Paddy discovered). The kidnappers were outgunned and outmanned, and it was only a matter of time until they were out of options. This little heroic fantasy, Kreipe knew, was about to come to its painful and inevitable finale.

  It was around that time, Yiorgos said—around the very day we were talking, in fact, May 10—that Paddy returned from his undercover recon mission. Yiorgos’s cousin was there, and he could tell at a glance that something was up. “Late at night, Leigh Fermor himself arrived, astonishingly lively despite the distance of over 100 kilometers he had to cover in the last three days,” George Harokopos would recall. Paddy always knew how to make an entrance, and this time he had a reason.

  Yasou, koumbaroi. We’re back, god brothers. And we may have something.

  CHAPTER 37

  If the Russian Peoples succeeded in raising their tired bodies in front of the gates of Moscow to set back the German torrent, they owe it to the Greek people…. The gigantomachy of Crete was the climax of the Greek contribution.

  —SOVIET GENERAL GEORGY ZHUKOV

  Gigantomachy: the struggle between the gods of Olympus and the demons of underworld

  CHRIS AND I heaved our backpacks over the wire fence, then belly-crawled after them and into the final chapter of the chase.

  Gunfire was crackling a few miles from this olive grove when Paddy and Billy’s band got here. In one direction, Paddy could hear so many villages being dynamited that “it sounded like a naval battle.” In another, Gestapo interrogators were going house to house in search of the man that, sooner or later, they always found: the one who said more than he meant to. A German garrison was less than an hour away over the hills, and the weird semi-paralysis in Paddy’s arm was spreading down his right side, making him wonder, privately, how much farther he could go.

  During his undercover recon, Paddy found trouble in every direction.

  The Butcher had studied the chessboard and realized the kidnappers had only one move left; they had to be running along the southern coast, hurrying from east to west in search of a safe beach. Unfortunately, British command helped confirm the Butcher’s suspicions. Cairo had sent a rescue boat one night in the blind hope that Paddy was waiting near a drop spot the Brits had used before. When the captain flashed a cautious signal toward shore, machine-gun fire answered. Immediately after, two neighboring villages were destroyed. “They have burnt the place down and lots of Huns have been snooping round there,” Paddy was told. “There was a lot of going and coming of Germans all along the coast. It was very sinister.” Now that he was sure where the bandits were headed, the Butcher could do more than give chase; he could head them off. German troops began splashing ashore, securing the western shoreline. “Not only had the garrison at Preveli been doubled, but a strong German contingent had been landed by sea,” Paddy learned.

  The dragnet was looped together, and the Butcher was pulling it tight. Paddy and Billy had to face facts: it was time to stop running from the Germans.

  And start running toward them. Crazy as it seemed, Paddy had enough close shaves under his belt by then to know that when it came to battling the Butcher, the worst strategy usually worked best. When Xan Fielding walked into the Chania mayor’s office, he expected to find German officers, but they never expected to find him, allowing him to saunter in and out without attracting a glance. Paddy nearly got pinched when he was high in the remote mountains, yet he found it relatively easy to operate in the Butcher’s backyard, where he pilfered documents from a staff sergeant’s bedroom, whisked an Italian general out of the capital, staged a crackerjack of an ambush on the island’s busiest road, and drove a kidnapped general at parade pace past the front door of Gestapo headquarters. The trick was getting so close, the enemy looked right past you.

  So, in this olive grove below the village of Photeinou, Paddy and Billy knew their worst, best chance was right here—in the shadow of a German stronghold, on a stretch of beach that was suicidally exposed. It was awfully risky, which might just make it perfect. Paddy sent a message off by runner to the radio operator, and then the band climbed into Photeinou to prepare for the final showdown.

  —

  Chris White and I were driving our knees down with our hands as we made the final push up the donkey trail that winds from the grove toward Photeinou. When Chris arrived here the previous year, he and his brother showed their paper to the first person they saw, an old woman passing by the village fountain. She had read it, then pointed to herself. Despina Perros had met the kidnappers as a young bride and made such an impression on them that Billy never forgot her.

  Despina was in the midst of the wildest week of her life even before Paddy and Billy slunk into the grove. Her family had an ancient blood feud with a rival clan, and, after an eighty-year lull, it had erupted again when Despina’s father killed a member of the Perros clan. Seven people were killed in the back-and-forth revenge attacks before someone dreamed up a way to st
op the bloodshed: marry the kids. Despina was promised to Andoni, the youngest of the Perros boys. She sewed herself a wedding dress from salvaged German parachute silk, and peace between the families was restored.

  “The time-lapse between their engagement and wedding had broken all speed-records in Crete,” an amused Billy Moss observed, “but it seems to me that they are very fond of each other despite the stormy overture to their betrothal.” The clans were staunch Resistance fighters when not battling each other, so they hurried down to the olive grove as soon as they got word that Paddy’s band was approaching. The Perros boys set themselves around the perimeter on guard duty, while Despina cooked chickpeas and lentils. Paddy and Billy were famished and dug right in, but something about the armed-to-the-teeth Perros family made the general suspicious.

  “The general thought they were going to poison him, so my father brought him boiled eggs,” Stephanos Perros, Despina’s nephew, told Chris and me after we made our way up to Photeinou. The village is even tinier than Patsos, with fewer than ten homes and no café. Stephanos lives only a few steps from the fountain where the White brothers first met Despina, who was away this time. “Kreipe wouldn’t touch the eggs, either, so my father said, ‘You have to eat something, general.’ ”

  “I used to be a general,” Kreipe replied. “Now I’m shit.”

  Stephanos invited us into his backyard garden, and there, over homemade wine and plates of nuts and olives, he told us about the last time anyone on Crete saw the General alive. As he spoke, we looked down at where it all unfolded, at those green hills tumbling from Photeinou straight to the twinkling blue sea—the Greek sea that was so close, so tempting, so skilled at luring men to their deaths.

  —

  Paddy knew that if they kept fleeing west, they’d be snared by the Germans who’d landed by boat. If they pushed back into the mountains, they’d run into the search parties coming down. So he sent word to Cairo that this would be the place: from here, they’d gamble that the Butcher was too preoccupied with distant beaches to worry about one right under his nose, just one mile from a German outpost.

  Whether Cairo would agree, Paddy had good reason to doubt; in all likelihood, they wouldn’t sign on for such a high-wire scheme from a military school reject they believed “requires firm handling.” Still, Paddy was already fantasizing about what kind of booze a rescue boat might carry—“Pink Gin? Whisky? Brandy? Champagne perhaps…?”—when he heard “a sudden, hysterical shriek,” as Billy put it, ending in a heavy thud.

  Some twenty feet below, a limp figure lay on the ground. The band had just set off from Photeinou toward a fresh hideout when the general slipped off a cliff and tumbled over the rocks. Billy couldn’t believe it. For more than half a month, they’d fought and starved and scrambled to keep the general alive, and now, just before their last throw of the dice, he accidentally kills himself? The kidnappers slid down in a panic and found the general had landed on a thick bed of rotten leaves. He was uninjured, but furious and screeching curses. “The poor man must have lost whatever nerve he had been able to retain over the period of the past seventeen days,” Billy acknowledged. They quieted him down and moved on.

  The band made its way to a snug cave to wait for Cairo’s reply—which, astonishingly, arrived almost immediately. Cairo finally had a communication link with the kidnappers, and it wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. Every British wireless on Crete was soon buzzing with variations of these instructions:

  Affirmative. Pickup vessel to approach location on May 14 at 22:00 hours. Code signals are S.B.

  “Ten o’clock tomorrow night!” Paddy was stunned when he got the message. “We would only just be able to manage it.” Quickly, Paddy split the band in two. He sent Billy off as a decoy with the Clown’s outlaw companions—“Yanni Katsias and his two wild boys,” Billy called them—since the four of them had the best hope of shooting their way out of an ambush. Then Paddy and Manoli pulled the general off the donkey and went the long way on foot, feeling their way by moonlight over the “limestone sickles and daggers,” as Paddy put it, of boot-shredding Krioneritis mountains.

  “Not one of the highest ranges of Crete,” Paddy knew, “but they are among the steepest and are certainly the worst going.” They were facing a long night, but not long enough: both bands had to be under cover by sunrise, yet close enough to the shore to reach the boat by dark. Billy’s outlaw escorts faced this kind of challenge all the time with contraband deliveries, so they knew exactly what to do. “At times we almost ran, our route taking us up and down steep gradients like a madman’s switchbacks,” Billy marveled. “I don’t think I have ever walked so fast in my life; and this was largely due to the cat-like maneuvers of the two sheep thieves.”

  By dawn, they’d reached an overlook above the beach. Billy pulled out his binoculars and saw gray-green uniforms everywhere. “Just below us, within full view, is a German coastal post,” he noted. “There are a further forty Germans stationed less than one mile to the west, and since these positions are linked by telephone we have been careful to keep out of sight behind the rocks.” At the moment, though, one of Billy’s biggest worries was his partner. “Paddy is walking very stiffly and his cramp seems to be getting much worse,” Billy realized. “He doesn’t know what is wrong with him, and says he has never had anything like this before.”

  But soon after, Billy and the bandits were delighted to see Paddy and the general creep into camp. “It had taken them less than thirteen hours,” Billy marveled. “Only five hours slower than our own breakneck rush.” Somehow, the playboy poet who’d barely survived officer training and had a life expectancy of about three weeks when he first ventured behind enemy lines was now strong and adaptable enough—even with his right arm seizing up—to march a prisoner over the mountains all night through razor-sharp rocks. Paddy and Billy might never make it across that last bit of sand to safety, but it wouldn’t be from any lack of hero schooling from the Cretan underground.

  It was their own army training, in fact, that let them down in the end.

  —

  “How do you spell S.B. in dots and dashes?” Billy whispered on the beach that night.

  “Haven’t a clue,” Paddy whispered back. “I thought you knew how to do it.”

  “Not I.”

  “Sure?”

  “I know how to do SOS.”

  “God forbid!”

  Through the deep fog hanging over the sea, the muffled throb of engines approached. Billy and Paddy knew at least one letter, so maybe they could fake the other. They flashed three crisp dots for S, then a few hopeful blinks before starting over with three more dots. The boat engines came closer, slowed—and then began fading away. Paddy and Billy were staring into the mist, heartsick and helpless, when someone called their names from the rocks. Dennis Ciclitira, a British agent filling in for Xan Fielding, had just arrived over the mountain with a German deserter and two prisoners he wanted to ship out with the general.

  “Do you know the Morse code?” Paddy and Billy hissed.

  Dennis grabbed the flashlight and began blinking.

  S…B…

  S…B…

  S…B…

  Dennis kept flashing, hoping the light would cut through the fog to the departing boat yet remain invisible to the Germans down the beach. After half an hour, the only reply was hissing surf. Billy was trying so hard to will the boat back, he could hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears—and then he realized the thudding was approaching through the waves. A black shadow detached from the dark and drifted toward shore.

  Billy’s outlaws hugged him hard and scraped his cheeks with good-bye kisses. In return, Billy and Paddy yanked off their tattered boots and presented them to the sheep thieves and shepherds, the Clowns and the killers, who were staying behind to carry on the fight. Billy and Paddy helped the general into the dinghy, then pulled themselves aboard. Soon they were gliding into the darkness. Paddy kept staring at the beach, watching as the men who transforme
d him slowly disappeared.

  “Crete is always difficult to leave,” Paddy sighed. “It was especially so now.”

  THE AFTERMATH

  All at once I heard shouts and music and cheers, and realizing the entry had begun, I ran toward the shouting as fast as my legs would carry me.

  —GEORGE PSYCHOUNDAKIS, on the day Crete was liberated

  BILLY MOSS enjoyed kidnapping generals so much, he went back for another one.

  Six weeks after delivering General Kreipe to Cairo, Billy returned to Crete to snatch Kreipe’s replacement. This time, the plan was a little messier. There was no chance of another roadside abduction, since all German officers were now traveling with heavily armed escorts—so Billy’s scheme was to creep right into the general’s bedroom and pull him out by force. Billy and a small band of Cretans managed to sneak up to the edges of Ano Arkhanais, a remote village that the new general had fortified into his stronghold, but at the last moment they received a warning that eight hundred troops were speeding their way. The local Communists, unhappy with Britain’s influence in Greece, had tipped off the enemy to Billy’s plot.

  Billy escaped and decided to give up bedeviling generals in order to focus his attention on, basically, every other German he could find. He masterminded ambushes across the island, at one point crawling through the middle of a firefight to blow up a tank by chucking a grenade down the hatch. Billy returned to Egypt at the end of the war to enjoy what should have been a hero’s reward: he married Countess Sophie Tarnowska, the beautiful Polish refugee who ran the Cairo party house, and wrote two popular memoirs of his adventures on Crete. But danger and adventure continued to tempt him, and it wasn’t long before Billy abandoned his family to party and sail the Pacific. Drinking heavily, he died in Jamaica at just forty-four years old.