Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

by Christopher McDougall

  But for everyone else, pankration became “the most exciting and worthiest of all sports in ancient Olympia,” as the Greek chronicler Philostratus put it, even though some bouts didn’t last much longer than a sneeze. There were no points or pins; you won as soon as you put the other guy into unbearable agony. One champion won three Olympic titles by getting really good at snatching his opponent’s fingers and bending them back. Matches could end only in death, submission, or—as in one epic contest—both: the great champion Arrhachion was in a choke hold when he managed to grab his opponent’s foot. Ankle breaking is a classic pankration move, and so effective that thousands of years later it would be the reason the Twins protected their feet by never risking anything higher than a crotch kick. But Arrhachion locked on too late. His opponent begged for mercy, forfeiting the match, but not before Arrhachion suffocated. Victory went to the dead man.

  Pankration’s creation myth is peculiar, and not just because it has two. Storytellers couldn’t agree on the original event: was it Theseus against the Minotaur, or Hercules versus the Nemean Lion? But they were unanimous on one key quirk: while boxing and wrestling were fruits of the gods passed down from Apollo and Hermes, pankration was born from human weakness. Theseus was just a boy out to prove himself when he went to Crete, and Hercules wasn’t exactly the hulking He-Man we’ve come to assume. Hercules was never the strongest guy in the fight; in fact, Pindar even went hard the other way and chalked Hercules’s achievements up to little-man syndrome: Hercules was “of short stature with an unbending will.” The heroes were still plenty powerful, but muscle alone would never get them out of a jam. Their real strength was their ears: Theseus and Hercules were lifelong learners and equal-opportunity students, always seeking advice and just as happy to get it from women. That was the mark of a hero and the signature of pankration: total power and knowledge.

  And that knowledge has been around a long time. History actually has a dog in the fight in the Battle of the Pankration Myths. When archeologists cracked open sealed caves on Crete—the site of Theseus’s showdown with the Minotaur—they discovered pottery and wall paintings from 1700 B.C. with the earliest depictions of pankration. King Minos really did rule Crete, and his ships often returned from Egypt with hot new discoveries—like the peculiar Hittite religious rituals of bull leaping, boxing, and grappling. On Crete, these rites were honed into martial arts, then exported to mainland Greece. Naturally, anything involving total power and knowledge was irresistible to a combat scientist like Alexander the Great, who still slept with the Iliad under his head. Alexander became a true believer as soon as he saw his best Macedonian warrior defeated by Dioxippus, a pankration fighter from Athens. Alexander’s armies learned pankration, and as they marched east into Persia and India, it’s believed pankration spread toward Asia and became the inspiration for all modern martial arts.

  So—no Ng Mui? No Five Elders, no cat-whomping crane?

  Nope.

  There’s no evidence that the origin myth of Wing Chun is any more real than the Minotaur. But just because it’s make-believe doesn’t mean it’s not true. Wing Chun took the crucial elements of pankration and improved the backstory: if you’re really out to prove that natural movement and elasticity can make anyone a fearsome fighter, don’t use a couple of monster-killing heroes to make your case; use a fightin’ nun on the run from an evil dynasty. Ng Mui wasn’t dreamed up just to repackage Greek fashion for a Chinese audience; rather, it took pankration off the battlefield and away from the oiled-and-naked manly Games and steered it back to its original message: that when it comes to real strength and self-defense, muscle power isn’t the path.

  Despite the revamp, the art that could help everyone was taught to almost no one. Dynasty warfare and clan secrecy kept it underground in China, while for everyone else it was ruined by the Romans. Under the Caesars, pankration was degraded into a gladiatorial spectacle and became so savage it was eventually banned by the Christian emperors. No one really had the stomach after that to revive something so closely associated with the blood-crazed Colosseum. “It may be suggested that the Pancratium is too terrible to serve any useful purpose in these modern times,” conceded a British sportsman who failed to bring pankration back to life in 1898.

  And so the greatest Olympic sport faded away and vanished….

  Except on the island where it was born. In the mountains of Crete, pankration was passed down between generations of rebels who never forgot what it could do and why it was created. After the German invasion, an odd photo made its way back to British Intelligence: it showed three German soldiers being ambushed by a trio of Cretan freedom fighters, one of whom has his legs scissored around a German’s back. It’s classic pankration, and exactly the message the Twins were trying to get across to their students back in the dirty-trickster training camps:

  All the strength, speed, and suppleness you need, you already have. You just need to release it.

  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 no
ted, 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.