Natural Born Heroes

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.”

Now there was one last thing to do: exterminate the rats in their holes.

Shortly after New Year’s Day, George Psychoundakis was hiking toward the village of Alones when he heard the thump of gunfire. “I crept behind a rock, and looking down, saw that the village was full of Germans. Just below me, about ten were climbing up the slope towards my vantage-point,” George recounts. “I hid like lightning.” Fading into the trees, George circled around Alones until he found someone who could fill him in. The news chilled him.

The Germans went straight to the priest’s house and began tearing it apart, a villager told him. They knew.

The Germans discovered a British radio battery buried in the priest’s garden, and a note to the British radio operator in his son’s pocket. If they’d arrived a little sooner, they’d have found the radio operator himself. Luckily, and unbeknownst to the stool pigeon who’d led the Germans there, the Brits had abandoned Alones right after Christmas. But the Germans knew they couldn’t be far, and they got right to work. The priest’s son, his face battered and bloody, was dragged off to be tortured for information while troops surrounded the valley and began marching uphill in an ever-tightening noose.

Typically, that meant a remarkable number of locals would suddenly be welcoming family. Our in-laws are arriving, they’d call out. Others were vexed by livestock problems. Watch out for your black sheep! They’re in the wheatfield again, they’d complain—loudly and repeatedly.

The alert spread until it reached Paddy, a few miles away. He and four of George’s cousins put together a team to spirit away the bulky wireless radio set, hoisting it on their backs along with the big batteries and that brute of a charging engine. “Shifting our base had now become a feat of endurance,” Xan explained, since any reasonably walkable trail had to be avoided. Paddy and his gang “had to carry the cumbersome gear piecemeal on their backs over trackless slopes at dead of night.”

Freezing rain fell all night, slickening the snowy mountainside and doubling the weight of their packs. It took twelve hours, but by daybreak they’d climbed high enough to stash the radio and cut back to the rendezvous spot with Xan. Paddy’s gang was ready to sink down and rest, but first they climbed a nearby peak for a last look around—and spotted dozens of dark helmets trudging through snow straight toward them. “As though they had got wind of our movements,” Xan would exclaim, “the Germans had transferred their attention from Alones.” Whoever was feeding the Germans information was becoming deadly accurate.

The morning mist gave Paddy’s gang just enough of a head start to vanish before being spotted. By the time the sun burned through, most of the Cretans had bolted into slit caves in the cliffs. Xan hid in an old stone hut, while Paddy scrambled into the branches of a big cypress. Tromping boots soon approached … paused … faded away … and then returned, over and over again, as searchers crisscrossed the grove. Paddy was soaked and shivering; he’d barely eaten and hadn’t slept, his body was stiff and aching from the all-night radio portage. He forced his body to freeze as the Germans passed back and forth beneath his feet.

And by the time the sun was setting and it was finally safe for him to slide down, one thing was clear: the playboy who’d shown up six months ago could now run and crawl and think and persevere like a Cretan. Maybe he couldn’t pass for one just yet—but for what he had in mind, he might just be close enough.