Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 19

SITUATION HERE UGLY

—PADDY’S FIRST MESSAGE TO HQ AFTER ARRIVING ON CRETE

“UGLY” barely cut it.

Paddy had been surprised to find guerrillas wading past him to escape the island while he was wading in. Satan and his family were eager to get aboard the British boat, while grumpy old Colonel Papadakis was stewing on the beach because he’d just been told there was no more room for him and his followers. A lot had changed since Xan’s moment of derring-do in the mayor’s office, Paddy would soon learn, none of it good and much of it due to the Russians and a murderous thug known as “the Turk.”

Xan filled Paddy in during their long night of drinking and storytelling in the cave outside Gerakari. The Germans had gotten off to a late start on Operation Barbarossa, exactly as Hitler feared, so instead of blitzing into Moscow they’d been socked by snow and were now stuck in a muddy, bloody, frozen-toed death slog. Hitler was facing a campaign that could last years, rather than months, so to rest some of his troops he’d begun rotating them with tours of duty on Crete. Frostbitten and battle-scarred, these frontline survivors showed up with a score to settle and zero patience for any shepherd shenanigans. Crete was now the biggest transit depot in the Mediterranean, and the Germans intended to lock it down once and for all.

“Better to shoot once too often than once too seldom” was their standing order, and their approach to bandits was even more vicious: If you can’t grab a ghost, grab his family. That’s why Satan and Colonel Papadakis had to get off the island until the heat died down; their children, parents, and neighbors were in danger of being seized. “Since it was the German practice to seize the relatives of a ‘wanted’ man as hostages,” Xan explained, “the Colonel’s family had taken the precaution of leaving their home in Kallikitri to join him in the mountains, and were now living as he was, like hunted refugees out in the open.”

Along Crete’s northern coast, the mysterious Gestapo sergeant Fritz Schubert was operating his own reign of terror. Born in Turkey, raised in Germany, fluent in English and Greek, a Nazi true believer, the Turk was a specter who haunted cafés and village squares. With so many refugees from burnt-down villages turning up in the cities, it was hard to tell the difference between a survivor and a spy, and the Turk’s walnut skin and Mediterranean savvy gave him natural camouflage. “The name Fritz Schubert became anathema to the people of Rethimnon, as he would be to all of Crete,” one war chronicler reported. “‘The Turk’ was now equated with barbarity.”

Terrible as he was, the Turk was still no rival to “the Butcher of Crete,” General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller.

The Butcher and Paddy arrived within weeks of each other in the summer of ’42, and that is where any similarity ended. Paddy’s assignment was to match wits with the Butcher and undermine his command of Crete, but frankly, they couldn’t be more mismatched. Müller was afraid of nothing, least of all war crimes: he starved civilians by burning their winter food, he torched their homes, he turned any village suspected of sheltering rebel fighters into a death camp, murdering everyone—infants, elderly, the disabled. Any survivors who returned to bury the dead were shot on sight.

Paddy, on the other hand, had quickly established himself from the start as a cheerfully useless soldier. The dirty-tricks squad wasn’t his first choice; like Xan, he’d washed up in the unit only because he was so inept everywhere else. He’d originally volunteered for the Irish Guards, because he liked the snazzy cap and tunic—“I thought I might as well die in a nice uniform,” he explained—but army life, according to Artemis Cooper, “came as a severe shock to his system.” Paddy managed only one month of training before spending the next three in the hospital. His official assessment ranked him as “below average.”

Once again, some combination of failure, death, and disgrace loomed in Paddy’s future, so he decided to try a fresh path before it was too late. The regular army wasn’t for him, but the irregular might be a different story. Thanks to his flair for foreign languages, he managed to follow in the footsteps of other misfits and get a transfer to the Firm. Now, finally, he was in a situation perfectly suited for his natural gifts, a place where imagination and resourcefulness mattered more than blind obedience. All he had to do was focus a little and learn exciting stuff like forgery, demolition, and knife fighting.

Except not even that could hold Paddy’s attention. On the day France fell, Paddy’s fellow trainees were in turmoil, wondering how their country would survive without its staunchest ally. Paddy, meanwhile, was working on a poem about a fishpond he’d seen in the Carpathians. He only heard the news later that night.

Xan liked Paddy immediately. Sure, Paddy was a show-off and a chatterbox, but that’s because he was addicted to drama; if there wasn’t any at hand, Paddy would whip some together himself. Paddy lived for romance, which meant he was up for anything.

“This charm of his was still apparent beneath his shabby disguise,” Xan explained. “Though we all wore patched breeches, tattered coats, and down-at-heel boots, on him these looked as frivolous as fancy dress. His fair hair, eyebrows and moustache were dyed black, which only added to his carnivalesque appearance, and his conversation was appropriately as gay and as witty as though we had just met each other, not in a sordid little Cretan shack, but at some splendid ball in Paris or London.”

During that boozy, all-night debriefing, Xan told Paddy how they’d take on the Butcher. They’d split the island between them, with Xan in the west and Paddy in the east. Whenever the Butcher was hot on Paddy’s trail, Xan and his men would erupt from hiding and draw them off in the other direction. They’d keep the Butcher’s forces zigzagging back and forth through the mountains, which meant German fortifications along the coast would be underprotected and ripe for spying eyes and Cretan hit-and-run attacks. Any German troops in transit to Africa or any convoys refueling for the East would be detected by Xan’s operatives and become sitting ducks for Allied attack planes.

Xan and Paddy hoisted their cigarette-tin cups in a toast. “By the time the raki was finished,” Xan would recall, “and as I fell asleep on my narrow ledge of twigs I could not be sure whether it was the strong spirit, Paddy’s company or the prospect of Egyptian fleshpots that was responsible for the happiest night I had so far spent on Crete.”

A few nights later, Paddy was burrowed into a tiny cave for the night when he heard a faint crackling in the brush. He yanked his pistol and took aim at the entrance, but before he could shoot, something scuttled in beneath his line of fire. In the dim light, Paddy glimpsed a sweat-streaked face and black eyes glinting with, as he put it, “embers of mischief.” He drew down.

George Psychoundakis had just trotted fifty-some miles over the mountains in old boots held together with baling wire. His clothes were as ragged as his shoes and stuffed with secret messages he’d brought for Paddy from other Resistance fighters. As George began to dig out the tiny slips of paper, Paddy burst out laughing; George kept putting a finger to his lips and glancing mock-fearfully over his shoulder, living up to his code name—Bertódolous, or “the Clown,” from an Italian comedy—because he was brave enough to make fun of how scared he was. George had survived plenty of close shaves, including being stopped by a German sentry for questioning while his boots were stuffed with secret maps. That’s why, besides “the Clown,” George was also called “the Changebug”: he’d shown a magical ability to spirit himself out of impossible jams. So far.

Cramped by the low, dripping ceiling, Paddy and George and two local partisans stretched out to have a drink of raki and munch some almonds while George waited for the sun to set for his return trip. Paddy marveled at George’s stamina and ingenuity, his ability to run for hours at eagle’s height and consistently outthink, outmaneuver, and out-endure German manhunts. George didn’t shrug it off—he knew the value of what he knew.

“I felt as if I were flying,” he liked to say. “Running all the way from the top of the White Mountains to Mount Ida. So light and easy—just like drinking a cup of coffee.”

George kept Paddy amused, sharing the only complete sentence he knew in English: “I steal grapes every day.” As it got dark, George rolled Paddy’s replies into tight little twists and hid them in his clothes. By day, Crete belonged to the Butcher; by night, George and the shepherds ran free again. “When the moon rose he got up and threw a last swig of raki down his throat with the words ‘Another drop of petrol for the engine,’” Paddy recalled. Then he raised a finger, whispered “The Intelligence Service!” and was gone.

“A few minutes later,” Paddy continued, “we could see his small figure a mile away moving across the next moonlit fold of the foothills of the White Mountains, bound for another fifty-mile journey.”