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

by Christopher McDougall

  —

  The mystery of Tom Dunbabin’s disappearance was solved only after Paddy and Billy arrived in Cairo with General Kreipe. A severe relapse of malaria, it turned out, had flattened Tom just when Paddy and Billy were moving into position by the side of the road in their German uniforms. It was a dire situation: Tom was growing too weak to escape a German manhunt, and he knew the names, locations, and support network of every British operative on the island. So rather than jeopardize the entire Resistance, Tom had to vanish. He dispatched his radio operator to help Paddy and then dragged himself off to a secret hiding place. He didn’t let anyone know where he was, or even what happened, for fear of being discovered.

  Tom later recovered and returned to the fight. While trekking across the mountains, he and Paddy’s loyal and extraordinarily courageous sidekick Andoni Zoidakis were locked in a gun battle with a German patrol. Tom shot his way out, but Andoni fell wounded. The Germans chained him by the feet, alive, to the back of a truck and gunned it, dragging him for miles across the rocky roads. His mangled corpse was dumped on the outskirts of a village as a Dark Ages warning to other rebels.

  “I tried to persuade Andoni to come with us; he wavered a moment and then decided against it,” a heartsick Paddy lamented. “I wish he had.”

  —

  George Psychoundakis also remained on Crete and was rewarded for his years of danger and self-sacrifice by being chucked in jail.

  George was awarded the British Empire Medal for gallantry, but in a cruel bit of irony, his work with clandestine forces meant the Greeks had no record of his military service. George was arrested as a deserter and “locked up in cells,” as he’d later tell Paddy, “with brigands and Communists and all the dregs of the mainland.” George began jotting down his recollections of the war while he was in prison and kept at it after his release, working by day as a road laborer and writing by candlelight at night in the cave where he slept. When Paddy returned to Crete years later, George had filled five student notebooks. Paddy was astonished to discover that this poor mountain shepherd who’d barely attended grade school had composed one of the finest accounts of the Resistance ever written. Paddy translated it himself, then persuaded his publisher to bring it out in English as The Cretan Runner.

  George was at home in Asi Gonia, sitting with his wife beneath the grape trellis, when he received a message from Paddy about the publication. He ran inside, grabbed his gun, and began firing joyfully into the air. Then he buckled back down to his next work: translating the Iliad and the Odyssey into Cretan rhyming couplets. “It was a brilliant and almost unbelievable achievement,” Paddy marveled.

  George shrugged and said he mostly had a feel for the Cyclopes. “I am a shepherd, too, like Polyphemus, so I knew all about it.”

  —

  Xan Fielding hated missing out on the kidnapping, but he had other things to deal with—namely, a firing squad.

  Instead of returning to Crete, Xan was parachuted into France in 1944 on a sabotage mission ahead of the Allied invasion of Normandy. On his first drive through enemy-occupied countryside, he and two seasoned Resistance operators were stopped by the Gestapo at a roadblock. Xan wasn’t all that worried: his French was excellent, his fake identity card was impeccable, and he was with Francis Cammaerts, the legendary master of mayhem who was already famous in Britain for seemingly impossible escapes. Xan also had a nifty cover story; he was searching for a new home for his elderly parents, and the other two gents were strangers who’d picked him up hitchhiking.

  “You say you don’t know these men?” the Gestapo agent asked.

  “I’ve never seen them before in my life,” Xan replied.

  “Then can you explain how these bank notes, which each of you was carrying individually, happen to be all in the same series?”

  Xan and Cammaerts had been lucky for too long and they’d gotten sloppy. They’d made the rookie mistake of divvying up one stack of cash for pocket money, all of it in sequential numbers. No amount of slick talking could convince the Gestapo that a straight run of serial numbers in the wallets of three complete strangers was a coincidence. Xan and his two fellow spies were hauled off to Digne prison and slated for execution. On the day they were to die, the three men were led into the prison courtyard—and out the other side. A staff car was waiting, and the three were ordered inside. The doors slammed shut and the car roared off. Christine Glanville, the Polish countess turned freedom fighter, had gotten word of the pending execution and raced to the rescue. Through some exquisite combination of tearful pleading and gentle bribery, she persuaded the Vichy guards who were keeping an eye on the prisoners that the Gestapo was about to make a horrible mistake. She got the spies out the door three hours before they were to be shot.

  “Characteristically, Christine never told us exactly what methods she used to secure our release,” a still bewildered Xan would say. But one thing was certain: “She had voluntarily risked her life in the hope of saving ours.” Xan went on to further clandestine adventures in Cambodia before settling down to write. He found a kindred spirit in Pierre Boulle, the French secret agent who’d survived a hard-labor camp in Vietnam, and translated two of Boulle’s most famous works into English—The Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes. Like Billy Moss, Xan remained close to Paddy until the end of his life and penned two stirring accounts of his time on Crete. When Xan died, in 1991, Paddy summed him up with four words: “He was altogether outstanding.”

  —

  The Butcher also got to tell his side of the story. General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller was transferred late in the war to the Russian front and there was taken prisoner by the Soviets. He and one of his fellow Crete commanders, General Bruno Bräuer, were remanded to Greece to stand trial for war atrocities. Paddy visited the Butcher in prison and found him in a surprisingly receptive mood; when Paddy revealed that he was the one who’d kidnapped Kreipe, Müller laughed.

  “Mich hätten Sie nicht so leicht geschnappt!” the Butcher retorted. “You wouldn’t have captured me so easily!” Soon after, he and Bräuer were taken out and shot.

  —

  For a long, long time, Paddy kept Crete to himself.

  By the time he arrived in Egypt after the kidnapping, Paddy was burning with fever, and the paralysis that had locked his right arm had spread into his legs. “Within a week I was in hospital stiff as a plank,” he’d recall. Doctors were baffled. Was it polio? Rheumatic fever? Or post-traumatic stress, as one doctor speculated? “One is more anxious than one realizes,” he told Paddy, “and somehow, when the subconscious anxiety relaxes a bit, nature steps in indignantly.” Paddy spent three months in the hospital, sipping Moët & Chandon champagne from an ice bucket by his unfrozen left arm, until the ailment finally disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived.

  Back on his feet and with the war over, Paddy drifted in and out of romances and sponged off friends while trying to establish himself as a writer. He wangled an invitation to visit Somerset Maugham, who promptly kicked Paddy out of the house and called him “that middle-class gigolo for upper-class women.” Like Billy, Paddy struggled to find his bearings in a world that seemed so peculiarly normal; but unlike Billy, he refused to write about his two greatest adventures. No one else had ever kidnapped a general and witnessed Hitler’s rise while walking from the Netherlands to Constantinople, taking time out along the way to woo countesses, befriend gypsies, and sip old brandy with even older archdukes. Paddy was a truly magical storyteller, but the two stories he refused to tell were the ones everyone wanted to read.

  But how could he? How could Paddy make himself out to be a hero after Crete taught him what a hero really is? Paddy was supposed to be a protector, a true companion whose arete and paideia—strength and skill—never outstripped his xenía: his humility and humanity. Villages were burned after the general was kidnapped. Women and children were murdered. Paddy’s own good friend Yanni Tsangarakis died at the point of Paddy’s gun. An accident, yes—but it’s hard
to feel peace in your heart when the dead man’s nephew has sworn for thirty years to avenge his uncle’s death by putting a bullet in your head, and once even staked Paddy out with binoculars and a hunting rifle. Had Paddy truly been a protector on Crete, or just an adventurer? Heroes, after all, aren’t measured by the stories they tell—they’re measured by the stories told about them.

  So Paddy wrote a forgettable novel and a few respectable travel books, all the while struggling to turn the magic that flowed from his mouth into something that would stick to the page. He found and married his soul mate, and together they built a home on a lonely stretch of the Greek coast. And it was there, in the land of the heroes, that he was struck by a magnificent idea. Godlike skill comes only with a human connection. A hero, in other words, needs a sidekick….

  Paddy typed two words—“Dear Xan”—and memories came flooding back. Gypsies and boatmen. Hoofbeats and violins. Snatches of poems in forgotten languages. A beautiful girl at a Budapest ball, singing a song about birds so haunting that for the rest of his life Paddy would make it his signature: little scrawled wings of freedom and fantasy. He wasn’t behind a typewriter; he was back in a cave on Crete, sharing his adventures with a friend. Paddy shaped this letter to Xan into a literary marvel, a two-book series of adventure, history, and scholarship called A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

  But for forty years, Crete remained a dark spot in his heart. Then at age sixty, Paddy received an urgent phone message from George Psychoundakis: Get here. Fast!

  For decades, George had been pleading with Yorgo Tsangarakis to call off the vendetta and forgive Paddy for his uncle’s death. Yorgo finally gave his answer: My daughter needs a godfather, he told George. Paddy will be my god brother and choose her name. Paddy rushed to the airport, and soon after, was holding up baby Ioanna—named in honor of long-dead Yanni and Paddy’s wife, Joan. Amid the wild dancing and embracing that night, Yorgo pulled Paddy aside to make peace, Cretan style.

  I still have the binoculars and rifle, Yorgo said. Who do you want killed?

  “It was the end of a miserable saga.” Paddy glowed. “All wartime Crete rejoiced.”

  —

  In 2011, at age ninety-six, Paddy returned to England to die. At a memorial, his final words were read: “Love to all and kindness to all friends, and thank you all for a life of great happiness.”

  Chris White, of course, was there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I couldn’t choose between two different book ideas—one about Natural Movement, the other about a crazy wartime adventure on Crete—when conversations with my daughters about Rick Riordan’s magnificent Percy Jackson series suddenly made me realize the two concepts were the same thing: the art of the hero is the art of natural movement. So thank you, Sophie and Maya; without you, this book would have been weaker at least by half. While I was beginning research, I made one lucky decision: after I repeatedly wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor and never heard back, I was going to show up at his door and barge in for an interview. Instead, I first visited his lifelong friends, the husband and wife historians Artemis Cooper and Antony Beevor. Paddy was dying of cancer, so disturbing him would have been an awful mistake, but Artemis and Antony were warm and welcoming and astonishingly generous with their personal insights and unrivaled expertise (not to mention wine and pasta). I’m not the only one who feels that way; every Paddy enthusiast I’ve ever met has been overwhelmed by their graciousness. Chief among my Paddy guides, of course, are Chris and Pete White; I still don’t know why the wonderful White Brothers allowed me to bumble along in their footsteps, but man, am I glad they did. Alun Davies and Christopher Paul were kind enough not only to share their stories about Paddy but treat me to drinks in Paddy’s favorite club in London and show me, in its place of pride over the fireplace, Paddy’s hand-drawn map of his Great Walk, complete with his signature flying-birds doodle. Alun was even kinder not to complain when I stuck him with the dinner bill because I’d forgotten to change money; four years later, I’m still cringing. Anything that’s amiss in this book is probably something my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, tried mightily to get me to change. Why someone as patient as Edward is saddled with someone as stubborn as me is a mystery I’m sure he’s pondered often. Luckily, he’s assisted by fellow editor Emily Giglierano, whose deft touch brightened many passages. Normally I try to avoid any outside voices when I’m putting work together, which is why I’m so grateful for the dead-on comments from the one person I gave an advance look: Deb Newmyer, my friend and the head of Outlaw Productions. If this book becomes the next Guns of Navarone, we’ll be thanking Deb. Last time around, I was busy ruining an early draft of Born to Run when Maria Panaritis sped to my home and helped get me back on course by stuffing me with those two Greek cure-alls: food and confidence. It worked. What a hero.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  For a man who became famous for his amazing recall, Patrick Leigh Fermor could be oddly inaccurate at the most unexpected times. Sometimes he fudged on purpose—claiming to be galloping on horseback, for instance, to spice up a story about endless trudging—and sometimes he simply flubbed, losing track of details as adventures suddenly rose up and carried him along. That makes sense; you can’t live a life like Paddy’s and still be a slave to facts and plans and daily diary entries. And that’s why, of all the accounts of Paddy’s time on Crete, his own is the most poetic and perplexing. Decades later, Paddy could tell you exactly where he and George Psychoundakis were hiding at precise moments of the Kreipe kidnapping (Day 10: “The goat-fold of Zourbobasili”), yet he occasionally couldn’t keep straight if the island’s biggest mountain was ahead of him or behind, or whether the Butcher had been hot on his heels and leading the chase or already transferred off the island. But that was Paddy’s genius, and the reason he became the only man in modern history to successfully kidnap a commanding general. Paddy created excitement by always being open to it, instantly veering the second he sniffed something a bit more enticing than whatever he was supposed to be doing. It led him to bizarre plots, like his attempts to infiltrate a Haitian voodoo cult and his fortunately derailed scheme to break into a notorious German prison camp, and it set him apart even from fellow adventurers: in the midst of a grueling mountain expedition, as Artemis Cooper notes, “everyone began to dread the familiar sight of a solitary shepherd. Paddy would invariably hail the man and engage him in a long conversation, which left everyone else hanging about, kicking stones, for a good twenty minutes.” He surged along through the years without a compass, which meant facts and his journals were occasionally lost in the tumult. Luckily, there are reliable outside resources that can reorient Paddy’s memories. First and foremost are Paddy’s biographer, Artemis Cooper, and her husband, the military historian Antony Beevor. No one was closer to Paddy during the last decades of his life, and I’d be amazed if even Paddy could tell his stories any better than they can. When I first contacted Artemis and Antony, they immediately invited me out to their country home, answering every question I had and prompting many I hadn’t thought of. They were equally generous with their address book, putting me in touch with one of the last surviving members of Paddy’s circle, Xan Fielding’s ex-wife, Magouche. They told me tales that were beyond the body of this book but helped inform its spirit, like the way Paddy in his late eighties could still down twenty-six glasses of champagne without slurring a syllable, and the time Xan ran into a German officer years after the war and informed him they’d actually met before—the pretty girl the German had danced with in a Cretan tavern during the Occupation was actually Xan in disguise.

  When Artemis was working through Paddy’s long-withheld account of the kidnapping, she was aided by Chris White, whose boots-on-the-ground research uncovered elements that even Paddy didn’t know. Chris and his brother, Pete, tracked down the most obscure references, like the young Cretan bride who delivered food one night to the general and his abductors. Paddy and Billy Moss didn’t mention her name, only that she’d
been forced into marriage to settle a blood feud between two rival clans. Chris found her and showed her a copy of Billy Moss’s book, Ill Met By Moonlight. “She insisted that we mark the paragraph that features her and that we write her name—Despina Perros—next to it,” Chris was later able to pencil into Paddy’s account. “She was clearly very attached to her husband and mourning him as he is now deceased—so an arranged but happy marriage we assume!”

  Tim Todd, Chris Paul, and Alun Davies likewise shared their discoveries from retracing Paddy’s steps, and Alun in particular opened my eyes to details of the invasion and subsequent Resistance that only a military man would understand. They steered me toward so many written references that my backyard office finally looked like Chris White’s, with faded maps pinned to the walls and rows of out-of-print books squeezed together in tight rows covering every flat surface. Some of the most useful were the following:

  Chapter 1 (On the run)

  Ill Met By Moonlight, by W. Stanley Moss. London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1950.

  The best version of Billy Moss’s epic is the limited 2010 edition published in Philadelphia by Paul Dry Books, because it contains a brief afterword by Paddy with his first print comments on the abduction.

  Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation and SOE in Crete, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. London: John Murray, 2014.

  I only had access to the prepublication manuscript with embedded comments by Chris White. Since then, the book has been published with an excellent foreword by military historian and Resistance expert Roderick Bailey.