Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 13

The name of Crete is for me—the man who conquered it—a bitter memory.

—LUFTWAFFE GENERAL KURT STUDENT

CRETE was the perfect test. The mountains were honeycombed with caves, and with all those German supply planes transiting through on their way to Russia, the targets were ripe. But the Firm couldn’t go in blind; someone first had to find out whether George Psychoundakis and the rest of the Cretans really wanted to take a bunch of amateurs under their wings. If not, the Brits wouldn’t last a week.

So within days of his escape from Crete, Jack Smith-Hughes was asked to head back. Returning a man to the same island he’d spent seven months trying to get off was harsh, but what choice was there? The Battle of Crete had lasted ten days, but the battle for Crete was just getting started. Hitler needed to lock the Cretans down, but he couldn’t … quite … stop them. The Russian attack was already months behind schedule, but instead of speeding every available man to the Eastern Front, five entire divisions were still chasing shepherds around that gottverdammten island.

Brilliant. This was exactly what Churchill had been hoping for: that somewhere, a band of irregulars would catch the giant off guard and make it stumble. Before the British even had a chance to get the Firm off the ground and spread its own Resistance operation, one had suddenly burst into existence by itself. “The Cretan Resistance, unlike those underground movements in the rest of Europe which did not start to develop until a year or so after the German occupation, began literally in the first hour of the invasion,” noted Antony Beevor, who would write the definitive history of the Battle of Crete. As if they’d been rehearsing it for years, the Cretans quickly assembled armed militias, mountain-running messengers, and a folk-song emergency alert system: anytime a German patrol was spotted, a warbling tune would pass from villager to villager across the valley and up to where their men were hiding in the hills.

But realistically, how long could the Cretans withstand the fury of General Kurt Student, who for once was even more enraged than Hitler? The Führer had ordered his troops to terrorize the upstarts, but Student wanted more than just fear; he wanted blood. The Germans had lost more troops in the Battle of Crete than in France, Yugoslavia, and Poland combined. Student himself had almost committed suicide and all because of those savages. The Cretans were “beasts and assassins,” Student decreed, who should be treated like all dangerous animals. Anywhere a hint of rebellion was detected, Student ordered “extermination of the male population of the territory in question” and “total destruction of villages by burning.” There wouldn’t even be the pretense of a trial. “All these measures,” Student commanded, “must be taken rapidly and omitting formalities.”

Freed from any restraint, the Germans on Crete erupted in a rampage of revenge. In the town of Kastelli Kissamou, two hundred men were selected at random and slaughtered. In tiny Fournés, 140 more. Entire villages were surrounded by tanks and put to the torch, with women and children running for their lives into the mountains. Not that every woman escaped; many had their dresses torn down, and if a shoulder bruise was spotted that could have come from a rifle recoil, they joined their brothers and husbands in the death pit. The manhunt was pitiless and relentless; German foot soldiers ransacked farms and towns while recon planes growled low over the mountains, machine-gunning anyone who looked suspicious and snapping aerial photos of every visible cave and goat trail.

So one night in October, Jack boarded a camouflaged trawler and returned to Crete with a promise. He slipped into a black blouse and pantaloons to disguise himself as a shepherd—well, sort of. “Anyone could pick him out as an Englishman from a mile away, especially when he was dressed in those clothes!” grimaced George Psychoundakis, who once again stepped in to sneak Jack past German patrols. Together they trekked up the cliff to see Abbot Lagouvardos, the three-hundred-pound, fire-breathing, Friar Tuck–like head of the Preveli monastery. From there, they visited the hideouts of local Resistance fighters Beowulf and old Uncle Petrakas and “Satan” Grigorakis, so nicknamed because only the devil could have survived all the bullets in him.

If the Cretan fighters could hang on a little longer, Jack told them, they wouldn’t be alone. Britain’s new masters of mayhem were just about ready for action.

Jack had just returned from this recon mission to Crete when a penniless young painter named Alexander Fielding was brought to meet him. Call me Xan, the fellow said, pronouncing it “Chan.” Xan’s father was a major in the 50th Sikh Regiment, so as the son of a career soldier, Xan had known exactly what to do when the war broke out:

Run and hide.

“My first reaction,” Xan would admit, “was flight.” He’d done a pretty good job of it, too. Before the war, he’d tried making a living by sketching diners in fancy London cafés, then he pushed east to study German classics and take up painting. When Hitler invaded Poland and most of Xan’s university friends stepped forward to enlist, Xan stayed put in Cyprus, where he’d landed a nice gig as a bar manager. “I was not afraid of fighting,” Xan recalled, “but I was appalled by the prospect of the army.” Did anyone seriously expect him to shove into an officers’ mess three times a day and make small talk with a guest list not of his choosing? “I could not bear the idea of an enforced and artificial relationship with a set of strangers chosen to be my comrades not by myself but by chance,” he complained. Call me a coward; just don’t call me “Sir.”

German subs were about to close the sea-lanes, so Xan hopped a boat to a tiny island off the coast of Greece owned by his old friend Francis Turville-Petre—the world-famous archeologist, sexual adventurer, and, of late, wild-haired recluse. Francis made history when he was fresh out of Oxford by uncovering “Galilee Man,” one of the first Neanderthal skulls to be discovered outside of Europe. But Francis was soon spending more time partying than digging (one fellow archeologist wrote home in disgust about “the empty whiskey bottles that were tossed out of Francis’s tent and the Arab boys who crawled into it”), and when a bout of syphilis sent him to Germany for treatment, he decided to abandon the deserts of Palestine and switch his specialty to “sexual ethnology.” “Der Fronny,” as he was known, became such a legend in the Berlin boy bars that he inspired both the musical Cabaret (by way of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories) and W. H. Auden’s play The Fronny. Then, abruptly, Francis vanished. Word got around that he was in seclusion on a Greek island, sleeping till dark, wandering by night, and surviving on a diet of brandy and bread fortified by a weekly cup of Bovril.

By the time Xan arrived, in 1939, the once bright star of British archeology looked like a shipwreck survivor. “Long straight Red-Indian hair framed a sad sallow face so lined that it was impossible to guess its owner’s age,” Xan would recall. “Below it an emaciated body, always clothed in bright colors, stretched six feet down to an almost freakishly small pair of sandaled feet.” But Fronny’s mind was as keen as ever, and during their long moonlit hikes together, he shared the secret of how he beat the world to the Galilee skull.

Early in his career, Francis realized that when it came to archeological knowledge and geological mastery, it would take him decades before he could compete with senior scientists. He needed a short cut, so he began hanging around the villages, sipping tea and trading chit-chat, soaking up scandals and dialects and ghost stories. Legends have long tendrils, Francis believed, that eventually twine back to solid earth. If kids believe a patch of woods is haunted, they may really have seen spooky shadows … which, with a little investigating, could turn out to be goatherds taking shelter for the night in a cliffside crevice with an invisible entrance and terrific campfire ventilation. A warm snug today could have been just as cozy in the Stone Age, which means that in a vast desert with thousands of caves, an afternoon spent listening to old wives’ tales could help you eliminate false leads and point you straight to the find of a lifetime. Francis’s nose for gossip eventually led him to some chatty Bedouin traders who tipped him off to the cave where the Skull would be found.

“The companionship and conversation of a man like Francis did much to dispel my increasing sense of guilt, so that the report of the evacuation from Dunkirk and the account of the Battle of Britain caused me no more than a passing twinge of conscience,” recalled Xan, who wasn’t gay but regarded Francis as “one of the most stimulating and rewarding companions” he had ever known.

Xan spent his days painting landscapes and practicing Greek with Fronny’s six servants, waiting for his night-stalker host to awake at dusk. Together they’d huddle around the radio and listen to evening war news from the BBC.

Shouldn’t we be ashamed? Xan wondered. Maybe it’s time to do our duty.

Francis snorted. “What good do you think you could possibly be?”

Hitler took the choice out of their hands. Xan and Fronny got off the island ahead of the German invasion and reluctantly went their separate ways. Fronny opted for Egypt; he had a taste for erotic adventure, and wartime Cairo was sizzling with sexual intrigue. Fronny soon reclaimed his throne as master of back-alley revels, but collapsed within a few months. By age forty—“bored with love, with sex, with travel, with friendship, even with food,” as one friend recalled—the man who’d inspired Xan with his genius for learning secrets from the past was dead.

Xan returned to Cyprus, where he found an even better way to hide from the war: he joined the army. Xan got a commission as a junior officer in the 1st Cyprus Battalion, the biggest joke in the Mediterranean Theater. “The Cypriots had never had a military tradition, and it soon became clear that they were not going to break a habit formed before the first century by taking kindly to soldiering in the twentieth,” he observed. Many of Xan’s fellow officers were disciplinary problems who’d been chucked out of other details, or pacifists and shirkers desperate to avoid action. “Our unit, then, was understandably free from any sense of regimental pride.”

Since neither officers nor enlisted men had any interest in engaging one another, let alone the enemy, they agreed to stay out of one another’s way: the troops spent their time in Nicosia’s brothels, while the officers lingered in the casinos. Within a few weeks, new recruits were less combat ready than the day they arrived. “The incidence of venereal disease among the men rose to a height that was only surpassed by the officers’ drunkenness,” Xan admitted.

Xan’s official assignment was to visit fake platoons. The Cypriots figured their best defense was trickery, so they built a bunch of phony barracks to make it appear as if the island were jammed with troops. “All those phantom units,” Xan would recall, “were represented only by myself.” He roared around all day on a motorcycle delivering messages to these invisible brigades in the hope that, somehow, Hitler would believe Cyprus was too heavily fortified to attack. What a delightful surprise war turned out to be! Military service on Cyprus, Xan would later acknowledge, was “one of the most carefree periods of my life.”

Until refugees from Crete began to arrive. “The island was expected to surrender in a day,” Xan noted, but when it didn’t—when reports came through of shepherds and farmwives and village priests defending their island with barn tools and rabbit guns and, in one case, an old man’s walking stick, when these peasants and a battered rank of British troops somehow held off Germany’s fiercest fighters until the sun had set on Hitler’s deadline and rose again on another day—Xan began feeling a strange sensation: envy.

“I felt that if I had to fight, the least ignoble purpose and the most personally satisfying method would be the purpose and method of the Cretans,” he’d recall. The Cretans weren’t taking orders and wearing uniforms; they were thinking and fighting for themselves, using their own skill and ingenuity and natural weapons to defend their homes and families. No one had to train them or tell them what to do; their own traditions had prepared them all their lives for this moment. “My own position as a member of an organized army,” Xan recalled, “became increasingly galling.”

Xan began haunting the Cyprus waterfront, greeting refugees from Crete as soon as they arrived so he could get firsthand news about the Resistance. Word of his interest must have spread, because one morning a stranger came looking for him. He gave Xan directions to a building in Cairo and said if he was serious about Crete, he should go to Egypt at once. Xan would find out more—maybe—once he got there. Soon, Xan was touching down in Cairo and hailing a taxi.

“Ah,” the driver responded when Xan gave him the address. “You mean ‘the secret house.’” The Firm might be invisible to the rest of the world, but not to Cairo cabbies; whatever the organization was up to, it was attracting so many mysterious visitors that the cab ranks had marked the address as an eerie but profitable fare. Xan found the building, and was shown into a back room. There he met Jack Smith-Hughes, who was already in charge of finding recruits for the Firm to send to Crete.

“Have you any personal objection to murder?” Jack began.

Xan had to admit the only time he had come close to acting like a hero—the only time he’d come close to a fight—was when he tried to stop a gang of drunk Australians from bullying a Jewish family. One of the Aussies grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him off his feet, snarling, “Whose side are you on, Galahad?” That did it for Xan’s chivalry.

To be honest, Jack was okay with that. The army didn’t make him a hero; the army made him a baker. It was only when Jack was abandoned, when he was on the run and in the hands of the Cretans, that he turned into a force to be reckoned with. And that gave Jack an idea….

In Scotland, Fairbairn and Sykes were trying to reconstruct the art of the hero and pass it along to their students. But on Crete, Xan could skip the middlemen and learn the same ancient skills directly from the source. If Xan put himself in the hands of Beowulf and that canny young shepherd George Psychoundakis, maybe he would learn more in action than he would at any school. He’d get pankration from the source. He’d discover how shepherds climbed mountains all night on a starvation diet, and learn instinctive shooting from shepherds and bandits who could split a man’s skull from a quarter-mile away without any sights on the rifle.

Jack knew it could be done, because one man had already done it. John Pendlebury was a British archeologist who’d come to Crete well before the war. Pendlebury was missing an eye, had never served in the military, and was nearly twice Xan’s age, so of course he had to get off the island as soon as Hitler pivoted toward the Mediterranean. Except Pendlebury stayed put. “It required more resolution in an Englishman to stay behind voluntarily and be submerged by the German tide than to return later,” reflected Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge archeologist and one of Pendlebury’s friends. “But for John the choice did not exist.” Before long, the Oxford academic had been transformed into a legend whose name would send Hitler into a rage.

That’s because strange things can happen on that island, Jack discovered—fierce, audacious, brilliant things that no one should be expected to pull off, least of all a baker and a one-eyed archeologist. That tiny rock in the sea had made Hitler bleed, and it changed the Third Reich’s military strategy forever: never again would the Hunters from the Sky lead an invasion. “Crete has always been a theatre for strange and splendid events,” Paddy would later agree, marveling at Crete’s “indestructible old men” and their “extremely handsome” sons, the way “their eyes kindle and their grins widen at the suggestion of any rash scheme.”

“Especially,” he added, “if the scheme involves danger.”

Two weeks later, Xan poked his head out of a submarine hatch and into a howling gale. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. “The shriek of the wind,” he realized, “drowned every other sound.” Waves smashed against the side of the sub, shattering and sinking a collapsible canoe—the canoe Xan was supposed to be in.

Instead of four months of round-the-clock training at SOE school, Xan had spent three days blowing up abandoned trains. “The knowledge that no railway existed in Crete did not dampen my immediate ardour for demolition work,” he’d comment. “Those daily explosions in the sand represented all the training I received before being recalled to Cairo a few days after Christmas.”

As soon as Xan got back from his bomb-blasting holiday, he was told to pack a duffel and get to the waterfront. First they set off toward Crete in a camouflaged navy trawler, but twice fierce seas forced them to turn around and return to Egypt. Finally, sub commander Anthony “Crap” Miers offered to bring them in beneath the waves. They got within sight of the island, but just as they launched the first man in his canoe, a storm blew in and swirled him off into the darkness.

After that … nothing. For half an hour they scanned the churn, hoping for a sign he was still alive and afloat.

Crap couldn’t linger any longer. Bad business, he finally said. Your man is either dead, adrift, or surrounded by Ger—

A pinprick of light flashed. Good old Guy! He and his canoe had made it. Guy Delaney was an Australian staff sergeant in his fifties with bushy eyebrows and bristling whiskers, a survivor of the Fallschirmjäger invasion who, like Jack Smith-Hughes, had managed to hide for months in the mountains and escape by way of the Preveli monastery. If a battered piece of army surplus like Guy Delaney could survive that surf, Xan figured, so could he. The sailors quickly readied another canoe, but the waves crushed it, then the next one. Xan and his partner had one last chance of making it to shore, Crap told them: a rubber raft would swamp if they sat inside, but they might be able to straddle it like a rodeo bronco, clutching it between their thighs as they thrashed like hell with their paddles.

Three sailors fought to hold the raft as it lunged alongside the sub like “a grey monster-fish cavorting in and out of the surf,” as Xan put it. “Not courage, I think, but fear prompted the decision,” Xan continued; he dreaded the thought of cramming himself back inside the stifling sub. He threw himself onto the raft, followed by a man he’d recently met and already hated. Captain Guy Turrall was even older than Delaney; he was a World War I vet who’d spent the years since then pip-pipping around the British tropics in a pith helmet. Turrall was driving Xan nuts, trying to speak to Greek crewmen in his colonial français and constantly repeating, “You see, I’ve lived so long in the bush …” and “offering advice that was more applicable to a peace-time safari than a clandestine naval operation.” True to form, Turrall had shown up for the undercover mission with a pack stuffed with pajamas and an enamel washbasin. He was also in full military uniform and his pith helmet, which Xan chucked overboard as soon as Turrall wasn’t looking.

The sailors released the rope, and the current sucked the raft away and began spinning it in circles. And at that moment, as the raft twirled “like a buoyant saucer trapped in a whirlpool,” Xan and Turrall achieved a kind of perfection: the two novice secret agents were the perfect expression of everything that Churchill’s generals told him was foolish about his plan. This was going to stop Hitler—Capt. Right-Ho splashing around the Mediterranean with some smart-ass slacker, an obnoxious little “artist” whose first order of business as a member of an ultrasecret force behind enemy lines was to prank the only man who could cover his back? Face it; Turrall might be handy with explosives and had a drawerful of dusty medals, but how was he going to infiltrate hostile territory when he kept forgetting that in Greece they don’t speak French?

Xan and Turrall chopped at the water with their paddles and finally managed to stop spinning. Crap’s sub submerged behind them and disappeared, leaving them adrift on a squishy raft in a sea as dark as the sky. Guy Delaney, bless his bristly Aussie mug, was still flicking his flashlight on the beach. Xan and Turrall spotted him through the waves and began digging toward shore. For half an hour they paddled through the surf, slowly getting closer to Delaney’s light—until suddenly it went black.

Was that a pistol shot they heard? A shout? Impossible to tell. Xan and Turrall waited, floating … but the light never reappeared. With no other choice, they pushed on toward the beach.