Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 4

When Hitler came to power Churchill didn’t use judgement but one of his deep insights…. That was what we needed.

—C.P. SNOW,

scientist and wartime spymaster, in his 1961 Harvard lecture

“Science and Government”

FOUR YEARS EARLIER, England was doomed. That’s the reality Winston Churchill faced when he took over as prime minister in 1940.

“We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles,” Churchill announced. At that very moment, in fact, tank commander Erwin Rommel was bearing down on the Channel with his fabled “Ghost Division,” so known because it blasted through enemy territory with such supernatural speed—once thrusting nearly two hundred miles in a single day—that Rommel could be storming into London within twenty-four hours of rumbling up on British shores.

Clearly, surrender was England’s only hope. For every British plane, Hitler had three; for every British soldier, Hitler had two. U-boat wolf packs and magnetic mines had turned the Channel into a death trap, crippling all but eleven of the Royal Navy’s forty destroyers. British soldiers were bloodied and barely armed; tens of thousands had been captured or killed, and the survivors had ditched their guns and gear in the rush to escape. German troops, by contrast, were so disciplined, ferocious, and euphoric, Hitler actually wanted them to ease up and not overextend themselves by advancing so fast.

“Gentlemen, you have seen for yourself what criminal folly it was to try to defend this city,” Hitler said while touring the smoking remains of Warsaw, which had been bombed into a nightmare landscape of rubble and rotting corpses as its mayor was dragged off to Dachau. “I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all of Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war.”

But Churchill knew the real meaning of Hitler. During the chaotic early months of the Nazi onslaught, few were as quick as Churchill to pierce the Third Reich’s gun smoke and pageantry and see into the heart of the man behind it all. If you think you’re dealing with a fellow statesman, Churchill warned Parliament, or an empire builder, or even a run-of-the-mill megalomaniac, you’re making a terrible mistake. War wasn’t Hitler’s means to something greater; it was the greatest thing he knew.

“Nazi power,” Churchill said, “derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution.” Fear and pain were an erotic thrill for “these most sinister men.” By Hitler’s own telling, the most wonderful day of his young life was one of the darkest in history: he was “overcome with rapturous enthusiasm” when he heard that World War I had broken out. “I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven from an over-flowing heart.” As a soldier, Corporal Hitler adored the ghoulish world of frontline fighting; he resisted evacuation from the trenches when his thigh was torn up with shrapnel, and on his first night back after recovering, he was too excited to sleep and stalked around with a flashlight, spearing rats with his bayonet, until someone hit him with a boot and told him to knock it off.

“When we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays,” Churchill warned, “we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver.”

So Churchill came up with a novel maneuver of his own. This was a new kind of fight, so Churchill wanted a new kind of fighter: lone phantoms with the inventiveness and self-reliance to test “the unwritten laws of war,” as Churchill put it, and execute whatever havoc they could dream up. The British Army was outgunned and outnumbered, but maybe this way they could even the odds by tying up entire German regiments in pursuit of a single man. Or a single woman. Or a single woman who, in one recruit’s case, was actually a man. Anytime a German soldier tried to close his eyes and sleep, Churchill wanted him plagued—and trailed—by lethal shadows.

He couldn’t use seasoned soldiers for an operation like that; anyone fit enough to fight was needed on the battlefield. Instead, Churchill’s new operation began recruiting poets, professors, archeologists—anyone who’d traveled a bit and knew his or her way around foreign countries. Two middle-aged professors were so electrified when they got wind of Churchill’s scheme that they reversed their conscientious objector status and decided to fight instead. For British academics, this was their fantasy world come to life. The classics were their comic books; they’d grown up on Plutarch’s Lives—“the bible for heroes,” as Emerson declared—and came of age with their heads buried in the adventures of Odysseus and Richard the Lionheart and Sigurd the Dragonslayer. They understood that in ancient Greece, entire wars could pivot on the performance of one or two extraordinary individuals.

Hold on. British high command was appalled. Was Churchill really going to pit these oddballs against the most ruthless killers on the planet? The Nazis had just ripped apart the armies of nine European nations, and Churchill’s counterpunch was … this? They’re not commandos, Churchill’s general argued; they’re calamities. If their fake passports and ludicrous accents don’t betray them, the villagers will; as soon as these misfits are dropped behind enemy lines, they’ll have to depend for food and hideouts on the very people most likely to give them away. Why wouldn’t a farmer with a storm trooper’s gun in his face trade a British life for his own? Churchill’s adventurers will have no escape if pursued and no hope if they’re caught: by the code of combat, no uniform means no mercy. They won’t be marched into camps and visited by the Red Cross, like other prisoners of war; they’ll be beaten and tortured till they scream out every secret they know, then executed on the spot.

But Churchill was undeterred. Few knew that in his early life, Churchill had been one of those calamities himself. He was “hardly the stuff of which gladiators are made,” The Last Lion biographer William Manchester would note. “Sickly, an uncoordinated weakling with the pale fragile hands of a girl, speaking with a lisp and a slight stutter, he had been at the mercy of bullies. They beat him, ridiculed him, and pelted him with cricket balls. Trembling and humiliated, he hid in a nearby woods.” Young Winston was so far from rugged, he could only tolerate silk underwear and even in winter had to sleep naked beneath silk sheets. “I am cursed with so feeble a body,” he’d complain, “that I can hardly support the fatigues of the day.” But over time, Churchill managed to transform himself from that bullied wisp into the dashing war correspondent and army officer who’d become Great Britain’s cigar-chomping, bulldog-tough defender of freedom. If he could do it, Churchill was certain, so could his fellow misfits.

And his misfits believed him—because some of them had already seen a real superhero in the flesh. All they had to do was look out the window and wait for Thomas Edward Lawrence—winner of dagger fights, conqueror of evildoers, chieftain of desert bandits—to come roaring across the Dorset countryside on his big Brough Superior motorcycle. Lawrence of Arabia was more than their idol; he was their evolutionary road map, a guide to the transformation he’d followed from them into him. Back at the start of World War I, T. E. Lawrence had been just as bookish and inept as they were now; as an Oxford scholar with the build of a preteen girl and an aversion to rough sports, let alone brawls, Lawrence was originally assigned to draw maps and military postage stamps and was so out of place on the battlefield that one superior dismissed him as “a bumptious young ass” who “wants a kicking and kicking hard.”

Then something happened. Lawrence rode into the desert, and someone else rode back out. Gone was the “little silk-shirted man,” as Lawrence described himself; in his place was a turbaned warrior with a scimitar on his hip, bullet scars on his chest, and a battered infantry rifle notched with kills slung across his back. No one expected him to still be alive, let alone commanding a band of Arab raiders. Lawrence had managed to marshal these nomadic tribesmen into a camel-mounted attack squad, leading them on hit-and-run raids against the forces of the Ottoman Empire. The Oxford graduate student could now leap astride a fleeing camel, throw burning sticks of dynamite at pursuers, and vanish into a sandstorm, only to reappear a thousand miles away as he galloped from the twisted wreckage of another sabotaged train. The same colonel who’d wanted to boot Lawrence’s bumptious behind was now amazed by his “gallantry and grit,” while Lawrence’s enemies paid him an even greater compliment: the Turks put a dead-or-alive bounty on his head of fifteen thousand pounds, the equivalent today of more than half a million dollars.

Out there in the wilderness, Lawrence had learned a secret. He’d gone back in time, to a place where heroes weren’t a different breed—they just had different breeding. They were ordinary people who’d mastered extraordinary skills, who’d found that by tapping into a certain body of primal knowledge, they could perform with remarkable amounts of stamina, strength, nerve, and cunning. The ancient Greeks knew this; their entire culture was built on the premise that everyone is tinged with a touch of the godly. To be a hero, you had to learn how to think, run, fight, and talk—even eat, sleep, and crawl—like a hero.

Which was excellent news if you were a one-eyed archeologist like John Pendlebury, or a penniless young artist like Xan Fielding, or a wandering playboy-poet like Patrick Leigh Fermor—three men whose fates would become intertwined on Crete. Churchill might have been offering misfits like them a death sentence—and to many, he was—but he was also offering a new way to live. If Lawrence of Arabia could learn the art of the hero, so could they.

This was their chance.