Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 7

FRANCE FELL IN FIVE DAYS,

WHY IS CRETE STILL RESISTING?

—ADOLF HITLER, in a message to General Kurt Student

TOO LATE, General Student was discovering that on Crete heroes aren’t an accident.

For more than a thousand years, in both fact and fable, the island has been a battleground between tyrants and rebels, gods and monsters. Crete was the birthplace of Zeus, the home of the Minotaur, the launch site of Daedalus and Icarus, and the homeland of canny backwoodsmen who, for generations, refused to bow to Turkish or Venetian warlords. From those myths and struggles emerged not only the heroic ideal but the means to achieve it—a folk science of mind and body that’s ancient, alive, and very teachable.

“They are good archers, every one with his bowe and arrowes, a sword and dagger, with long haire and bootes that reach up to their grine, and a shirt of male,” noted a British trader in the 1500s, who was just as intimidated by the festivals as the fighting: “They would drink wine out of all measure.”

Jack Smith-Hughes learned firsthand about the Cretan art of the hero during the German invasion, and it kept him breathing long after he should have been dead. Jack had pink cheeks and a bit of a belly—no surprise, since his greatest contribution for much of the war was running a field bakery and supplying bread to the front lines. Jack didn’t want to lose his supply trucks to enemy ambush, so he decided to reroute by water—and it was then, while dispatching a boatload of food to troops farther up the coast, that he found himself standing next to the Allied commander.

General Freyberg had gotten word that an Australian detachment was under fire without a working radio, so he’d sent a messenger by boat with orders to retreat. Instead of pivoting to other emergencies, Freyberg began pacing the waterfront. It was as if the fighting that raged elsewhere across the island had melted away and the only thing that mattered was one small pocket of beleaguered Australians. The baker wasn’t sure what to do and found himself pacing the jetty alongside his brooding commander. Was Freyberg cracking under the pressure? He was famous for keeping his cool during Gallipoli and the Somme, two of the most horrific bloodbaths of World War I, but now that he was on the verge of a stunning victory, he looked distracted and defeated.

We’re about to defeat Hitler’s best fighters, Jack thought. Aren’t we?

Freyberg’s underdog troops had rallied magnificently once the shock of the air attack had worn off. Many of the New Zealanders were country boys, and their confidence grew as they realized this was their kind of fight. A Hunter dropping from the sky wasn’t much different from a wild boar blasting from the bush back home in Kaikoura, so Kippenberger’s Petrol Company quickly adjusted their fire to the paratroopers’ four-meters-per-second drop speed, aiming for their feet to make kill shots to the chest.

So sharp was their marksmanship, one Fallschirmjäger battalion was convinced it had dropped into a den of supersoldiers. “It was particularly noticeable that a very large proportion of our casualties had been shot in the head,” a Fallschirmjäger sergeant-major would report. “The controlled fire and discipline of the enemy led us to believe that we were up against a specialist force of picked snipers.” Two of the New Zealanders held down the entire western side of a hill on their own—for six days.

Springtime on Crete is hot and dry, and German uniforms were wool. So it wasn’t long before the Cretan shepherds faded from the fray, settling in behind stone walls with sight lines on cool springs. “The only well where we could get water,” paratrooper Sebastian Krug would recall, “was being shot at all the time.” The New Zealanders caught onto the idea and set ambushes of their own, lying in wait near the paratroopers’ supply boxes. From the olive groves, the same cry began to ring out over and over:

“GOT THE BASTARD!”

This isn’t warfare. This is ritual suicide. Long past midnight, General Student was still at a table in his command room, stubbing cigarettes into an overflowing ashtray as he read the battle dispatches. His Luger remained ready by his hand.

Because of him, the Third Reich’s finest fighters were being slaughtered by shepherds and pig hunters. More than half of Student’s ten-thousand-man invasion force was dead, wounded, or captured. Many of the rest were lost or hiding for their lives. All three Blücher brothers, from the fabled fighting family whose patriarch led the Prussian army against Napoleon, were gone. Max Schmeling’s photo op nearly did him in; he’d parachuted through machine-gun fire, passed out after landing hard and injuring his back, then hid till nightfall and eventually crawled back to his unit. If there was a way out of this fiasco, Student didn’t see it.

Then something caught his eye. Amid the bad news, one thing should have been worse. Why hadn’t the Brits blown up Maleme, the small airfield on Crete’s northwest coast? That’s the first thing Student would have done if he were defending Crete: he’d have packed Maleme with dynamite and blasted it into a moon crater the second he saw a parachute pop open.

Crete is basically a rectangle, with two good-sized airfields along its northern coast. Master the airfields and you master the island. The Brits could get in and out by sea, thanks to its Royal Navy, but the Germans weren’t as strong in the water. With no place to land their planes, the Hunters would be stranded.

The airfield was well defended at Heraklion, in the center, but Maleme, in the west, was a different story. That’s where Student had thrown his biggest punch, swarming Maleme with fifty gliders full of Storm Regiment commandos and three companies of Fallschirmjäger. It was a gruesome operation: both gliders and paratroopers dropped right into a hail of burning flak that tore through flesh and parachute silk. By the time the survivors hit the ground, the trees were littered with their comrades’ bodies. “All over the place you could see dead and wounded Fallschirmjäger, some still hanging from their parachutes,” a Fallschirmjäger survivor named Helmut Wenzel later jotted in his diary. “There had been a lot of bloodshed and you could hear the crying and shouting of the wounded and dying.”

That’s when the Hunters showed what they were made of. Gathering and advancing through that nightmare of moaning men, attacking only with handguns and grenades, they managed to grab their heavy weapons from the drop boxes. Wenzel, with two severe wounds and just a pistol, staggered to his feet to join them. One force headed for high ground overlooking the airfield while the other charged the antiaircraft battery. By late afternoon the Germans had knocked out the big guns and captured the hill, but at a brutal cost: their officers were dead, their ammo was low, and only fifty-seven men were still alive. Most were so hurt and weak, they could barely stand. They prepared themselves to die. They had no hope against the Allied counterattack that was about to come storming up the hill.

Except … it never came.

The Allied commanders on Crete were so braced for defeat, they didn’t realize they’d already won. Without Maleme, the Germans had no lifeline back to the mainland. It was only a matter of days—hours, even—until the invaders ran out of food and bullets. But with phone lines down and radios failing, with Allied officers in the rear out of contact with fighters on the front, assumptions took over for action. When the colonel defending Maleme didn’t see the reinforcements he requested, he assumed headquarters wanted him to pull back; when headquarters learned he was pulling back, it assumed Maleme was a lost cause and diverted the reinforcements.

You don’t beat Kurt Student by giving him a second chance.

Before dawn of Day 2, German troop planes were taking to the sky, one after the other, roaring toward Maleme. Student had decided to “stake everything on one card.” He committed the 5th Mountain Division and the last of his Fallschirmjäger reserves to a final, all-or-nothing assault on the airfield.

Only a few New Zealand troops were still within firing range of the eastern end of the runway when they heard the first Junker approach. They blazed away, riddling the plane with bullets as it skidded down just long enough to drop off forty Mountain Division soldiers and then disappeared back over the Mediterranean. The New Zealanders shifted their aim toward the Germans sprinting for cover, gunning many of them down before they got a few steps across the runway. But a few reached the trenches and returned fire, creating cover for the next Junkers screeching down. More Germans tumbled off, scrambling into the gullies as a third plane approached, then a fourth….

The New Zealanders were stunned. Ten minutes ago, they were in a nice holding position against an exhausted enemy, waiting for orders to either mop up or march off. Now, suddenly, they were burning through the last of their ammunition, shooting helplessly against an enemy that was doubling, tripling, by the minute. Time was still on their side, but not for long. They had to attack immediately and put an end to the job they should have finished yesterday. They had to storm the hill before the Germans landed any more troops and fortified their hold on the airfield. This was their chance.

Bayonets were fixed. Grenades were handed around. And then the order came from the rear: Stand down.

Back at headquarters, Freyberg was still convinced that the real invasion was coming by sea. All these planes and paratroopers? Just a feint to lure Allied troops into the hills and leave the coasts undefended. Absolutely correct, agreed Brigadier James Hargest. Like Freyberg, the beefy old brigadier was a survivor of the Great War and thought he was still fighting it. Hargest spent the boat trip over to Crete reading War and Peace, and from the old Russians he took his cue. “In war,” Hargest preached, “steadiness and endurance are more important than any amount of strategic flair.” The key to Crete, he urged Freyberg, was caution and the coastline.

Which could explain why, days later and long after the golden opportunity was gone, Freyberg was walking the waterfront alongside a bewildered young bakery manager, watching for an enemy armada that would never appear.

“They were brave men, but no longer bold,” lamented Antony Beevor, the British military historian who wrote the definitive account of the invasion. “The Battle of Crete, a revolutionary development in warfare, was to be a contest in which fast reactions, clear thinking and ruthless decisions counted most.” Freyberg still had his boots sunk in the mud of the Somme, while Student—so feverishly inventive that he could use German parts to rebuild a shot-down French plane and fly it straight back into action—had no interest in refighting a war his country had already lost.

But still, there was a moment when the past might have prevailed, when trench-style tactics could have choked the Germans into submission. And that’s the moment when Freyberg flinched. “A single platoon, even a single Bren gun left in place on the airfield,” Beevor concludes, “could have swung the course of the whole battle.”

As waves of German troops fanned out from Maleme, Jack Smith-Hughes was soon scrambling to stay one step ahead of his friends and two steps ahead of the enemy. The Royal Navy couldn’t risk many ships on yet another Dunkirk, so anyone who didn’t reach southern Crete quickly wasn’t leaving. “Orders are every man for himself!” a sergeant shouted. Thousands of Allied soldiers scrambled frantically up and over the White Mountains, clinging to a crumbling trail that skirted “a near vertical wall of the road on one side and a drop fall of hundreds and hundreds of feet on the other,” as British infantryman Edward Frederic Telling would recall. “All with no lights.”

Jack Smith-Hughes was footsore and starving when he limped into the port at Sfakiá, and surprised when he was told he didn’t need to line up right away. More evacuations were planned for the next day, an officer promised, before climbing into a skiff himself. The next morning, Jack Smith-Hughes was staring into the barrel of a German rifle. Along with thousands of other Allied troops abandoned on Crete, Jack was forced at gunpoint to hobble back over the mountains he’d just crossed. When the prison gate closed behind him, Jack knew he had two choices: he could escape and get shot, or stay behind the wires and waste away. Already, men all around him were dying of wounds and disease.

Well, better a quick bullet than a slow death. One night, Jack followed a Cretan prisoner through the wire, and together they escaped into the hills. Before sentries could track them, they were grabbed by villagers and pulled out of sight. Jack was hidden and fed, nursed back to health on a Cretan villager’s diet of wild greens, dark bread so hard it had to be soaked in wine before biting, and fasolakia me katsiki—beans simmered with goat.

Jack was still too weak to hide out in the mountains, so his new friends came up with a Plan B: turn the pudgy blond Brit into a Cretan. The villagers renamed him Yanni and drilled him on the peculiarities of their dialect. Like the word for “adult”: on Crete, a grown-up is known as a dromeus, or “runner.” To be considered a full Cretan, you had to be strong and resourceful enough to run to someone’s aid. Until then, young Cretans are just apodromos—“not quite a runner”—and the ritual passage into adulthood was celebrated with the festival of Dromaia—“the Running.”

Gradually, Jack’s strength returned. By his standards, at least; keeping pace with a geriatric dromeus was a different story. Jack was taken under the wing of a bald and blue-eyed Cretan in his fifties who was so buoyantly unkillable that the Brits would code-name him Beowulf. Beowulf was once shot between the lungs but “suffered no visible ill effects.” Beowulf guided Jack to fresh hiding places, keeping him a jump ahead of German search parties and subjecting him to the ego-crushing experience of following an old Cretan into the mountains. Instead of struggling, they seemed to fall upward, bouncing from rock to rock for hours with an odd, effortless-looking elasticity. It wasn’t just the men; Cretan women could likewise carry heftier packs, cover longer distances, navigate through snow and dark, and thrive on a diet plucked from the ground as they passed.

Strength didn’t explain it—it was as if the Cretans were drawing on something else, a martial art of energy mastery. Under any kind of pressure, physical or mental, they seemed to become more pliable. Near Jack’s hiding place, for instance, a teenage boy who’d blown up a German plane by sticking a burning rag into the gas tank turned himself in when the Germans threatened to murder his family. George Vernadakis was beaten and starved, then dragged naked into the village square to be executed. Dazed and weak, he had a last request: could he please wet his lips with a glass of wine and sing a farewell song? The wine was produced, and George’s hands were unchained. He drank it down and took off, darting naked from lane to lane through the village. George not only got away but kept on fighting; the next time his family saw him, he was in an air force uniform.

After five months in hiding, Jack was introduced to George Psychoundakis, a young shepherd with frenzied hair and impish eyes. George thought he knew a way to get Jack off the island and to safety in Egypt. It was risky, but if Jack was willing to trust him, they could give it a try. Jack figured they’d slink invisibly through the backcountry and rendezvous with some patriotic fisherman in a hidden cove. Instead he found himself the main attraction of a bizarre parade. The two men were escorted by fifteen armed shepherds, and every time they passed through a village, more eager rebels rushed out to join them.

“Wherever we went, the villagers, seeing us carrying arms, almost exploded with joy,” George would later recall. “Everyone thought something important was afoot and prepared to take up their guns and follow us. We calmed them down and told them they would be warned in time when the moment came.”

Despite nearly inciting insurrection, Jack and his gang managed to dodge German patrols and make it to the Preveli monastery, a stone sanctuary on a cliff tended by monks since the Middle Ages. A few weeks earlier, the monks were in the middle of High Mass when a British submarine commander with a pirate’s gold hoop in his ear burst through the door. He’d been prowling the coast for stranded soldiers, and when he spotted an SOS beacon flashing from a bluff near the monastery, he came ashore personally to check it out. Word soon spread along the Cretan whisper network: any Brit on the run who could make it to Preveli—fast—had a chance of escape.

A few nights later, Jack Smith-Hughes was being paddled out toward the sub in a rubber raft. Watching from the beach were George Psychoundakis and other descendants of the world’s first heroes, waiting for Jack—and any other Brits who dared to join them—to return.