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

by Christopher McDougall

  —

  John Pendlebury was running into the same tough old birds all over Crete.

  The more he wandered the island after he took over as curator of Knossos, the more of these ageless, bounding, Odyssean mountain men he ran into. He couldn’t swear any were as strong as Eumastas; on the other hand, he kept coming across cheese huts high in the hills stacked from head-scratchingly huge stones. The great messenger Pheidippides was said to be Cretan; so were many of the other all-day runners, including Alexander the Great’s special courier, Philonides. And Pheidippides was certainly no youngster; he held the rank of “master hemerodromos,” so his heroic effort during the Battle of Marathon would have come during the twilight of his career.

  So why should it be any different for Pendlebury? Now that he was living in an open-air performance lab, he had another way to test his theory that myths were based on real men and women: he could experiment on himself. Like Lawrence, Pendlebury loved role playing, so total immersion came naturally. He also shared Lawrence’s trick for getting inside someone else’s skin: first, get inside their clothes.

  “Have just got a Cretan costume—perfectly gorgeous, a great show,” Pendlebury was soon writing his father. For a Cambridge academic, it was quite the makeover, even outdoing Pendlebury’s previous phase of wearing a white cape to high-jump competitions. Cretan shepherds dress more like buccaneers than farmhands, so Pendlebury kitted himself out almost Halloweenishly, in an embroidered black waistcoat, black breeches with a knee-length crotch, knee-high boots, a black headkerchief, a wide sash wrapped around his waist, and a black cloak with red-silk lining.

  Every morning before breakfast, he did a fifteen-minute skipping drill that mimicked the light, skittering shepherd’s stride. “I find it quickens the muscles which walking is apt to increase but slow down,” he commented. To uncramp his body after long hours hunched over potsherds, he had masks and foils shipped to Crete and began fencing so he could stretch into full-length lunges and sharpen his balance, enlisting his plucky wife as a sparring partner. He even began high-jumping again, and gradually found he could sail higher than ever. As a university athlete, he’d barely cleared six feet, but that now looked easy. “Very fit and all the spring in the world,” he wrote to his father. “I think I shall have a good chance at the Greek record, it is only 6 ft or just under.”

  Every afternoon, he stopped work and pushed into the hills for a ten- or twelve-mile hike. His range and curiosity were impressive—until they became astonishing. During one season alone, Pendlebury hiked more than a thousand miles across the island. One afternoon, he scrambled all the way over Mount Ida and still made it back to Knossos before sundown: “26 miles over filthy country in 6 hrs 25 m,” he jotted, always exact about his journeys. Cretan highlanders who at first didn’t know what to make of this eager, one-eyed stranger got used to having him ramble into their villages at night—famished, exhausted, and half-lost, yet ready to lift a wineglass and learn some new songs.

  “He was making friends everywhere,” recalled Dilys Powell, who met the Pendleburys and became their occasional expedition companion when her husband took over as head of the British School in Athens. “By now he had travelled on foot from one end of the island to the other. It was only natural that its people should feel affection and respect for this tireless young Englishman, his fair skin burned dark, his hair the color of stubble, who turned up everywhere, slept anywhere, drank with them, talked with them, spoke their own kind of language.”

  Pendlebury felt the same way about the Cretans, and he was ready to prove it. By the time Hitler had driven English forces out of Europe and was threatening London, Pendlebury had spent ten years on Crete and decided to make his stand where he was. He was pushing forty, but a decade of learning from tough old birds had left him lean and fit as a teenager. “Record time to the summit,” he noted with satisfaction after speed-climbing Mount Ida. “And a resultant waist measurement, pulled in a bit, of 22½ inches.”

  But the War Office wasn’t in the market for middle-aged, half-blind academics, regardless of trouser size. Pendlebury was convinced his Mediterranean expertise could be invaluable to naval intelligence, but they brushed him off. He tried the military attaché in Athens, then army intelligence, before finally volunteering for the job of last resort: stretcher bearer. Before he was to start duty, however, word spread along the Cambridge-Oxford old boys’ network that certain, um…characters were needed for a new “special services” operation. No fighting know-how required.

  “Seems tough and generally desirable” was the shrugging appraisal after Pendlebury finally got his interview, and he was soon heading back to Crete. His cover story: he was vice-consul, a midlevel, do-little diplomat. But to get a whiff of what he was really up to, Pendlebury’s friends learned to check his bedside table. “On his more nefarious expeditions,” Dilys Powell was told by one Pendlebury confidant, “he used to take out his glass eye and wear a black eye-patch. He would leave the eye on the table by his bed—if you found it there you knew he was away on some excursion or other.”

  Pendlebury regularly slipped away from the Villa Ariadne and climbed into the mountains to scout hideouts and organize rebel bands. As a student of ancient warfare, he knew Crete was critical, and his own eye for the island’s defenses told him two things: the attack would have to come by air, and the real battle would be high in the hills. The Germans had crushed every ground force they’d faced, but they had yet to run into anything as elusive and unrelenting as a Cretan bandit. If Pendlebury could get ten thousand rifles into the hands of the highlanders, he was sure the Germans would have a fight on their hands.

  So Pendlebury strolled about, pretending to be a diplomat while carrying an innocent-looking walking stick with a sword inside, which he judged perfect for skewering paratroopers. No matter what happened, he decided, he wasn’t leaving. “He felt himself a Cretan and in Crete he would stay until victory was won,” recalled Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge don who’d been one of Pendlebury’s archeology students and came to Crete to join his special operations force. For extra secrecy, but mostly to show off, Pendlebury and Hammond encoded their conversations by speaking to each other in their specialty dialects, Cretan versus Epirotic.

  Hammond and Pendlebury teamed up with a swashbuckling boat captain, the gold-earringed Mike Cumberlege, who growled into Crete at the wheel of a combat-ready fishing boat called the Dolphin. Together, the three men hatched a scheme to glide by night out to the Italian-held island of Kasos and kidnap some Italian soldiers they could haul back to Crete and sweat for information about the looming German invasion. Just to be safe, Cumberlege decided to take Hammond with him on a last recon trip across the channel to Kasos. They tucked in beside an offshore island to hide until dark…and then the engine refused to start. While Cumberlege struggled to fix it, German warplanes suddenly began thundering overhead. Bomb bursts flashed across the water from Crete, followed by mushroom puffs of parachutes.

  While his gang was marooned offshore during the invasion, Pendlebury threw off his diplomat’s disguise and joined the street fighting alongside Satan, the Cretan guerrilla leader. When it became clear that Allied forces had given up and were ready to abandon the island, he and Satan strode into the British command cave and volunteered to cover the retreat. “I was enormously impressed by that splendid figure,” recalled Paddy Leigh Fermor, who’d been deployed to Crete just before the invasion. “He had a Cretan fighter with him, festooned with bandoliers, and John Pendlebury himself made a wonderfully buccaneer and rakish impression.”

  Paddy was in awe, not least because, as every other Allied soldier was scrambling toward the evacuation beach, “the one-eyed giant,” as Paddy called him, refused to follow. “His single sparkling eye, his slung guerrilla’s rifle and bandolier and his famous swordstick brought a stimulating flash of romance and fun into the khaki gloom.” Paddy managed to escape Crete, and he was still hearing about Pendlebury’s adventures long after he made it back to
Cairo. “The German SS got to know of Pendlebury,” Paddy would say. “They called him ‘der kretische Lawrence’—the Cretan Lawrence—and rumours spread amongst Pendlebury’s hillmen that Hitler could not rest until he had Pendlebury’s glass eye on his desk in Berlin.”

  Two days into the invasion, the Dolphin fired back to life, and Cumberlege steered stealthily into a hidden cove near Heraklion. Hammond and Cumberlege’s cousin, Cle, each grabbed a Mauser rifle and crept ashore. Dead and dying soldiers were tumbled together in the streets of Heraklion, while bullets whizzed from house-to-house firefights. Hammond and Cle realized they had no chance of finding Pendlebury, so they slunk back to the boat and pushed off toward safety in North Africa.

  The Dolphin never made it. Cle was killed by fighter-plane fire, and Mike Cumberlege was wounded, surviving only because another captain came to his rescue. Three weeks later, Cumberlege was recovering in Egypt when he tuned in to a radio broadcast from Berlin. “The bandit Pendlebury,” Cumberlege heard, “will be caught and he can expect short shrift when he is found.”

  Thank goodness! That still left Cumberlege a chance to find him first. As soon he could get to his feet, he secured another boat and was off, threading his way through German patrol ships to search for his friend. The trouble was, Pendlebury could be anywhere. During his thousands of miles of archeological hikes, he’d learned the mountains “stone by stone,” as he liked to say. He’d been a whirlwind of preparation before the invasion, setting up weapons stashes and hideouts in places only he and the canniest old shepherds could ever find. He’d even made a mountain more mountainous, persuading a small army of Cretan volunteers to trek to Mount Ida and, “with Herculean efforts,” as Antony Beevor reports, “they shifted boulders down to its smooth areas to prevent aircraft landings.”

  So where was he now?

  “There were persistent tales of an Englishman who had been seen at Hagia Galini, a village on the south coast near Tymbaki,” Dilys Powell would learn. “What was more, it was an officer who had lost an eye.” Three months after the evacuation of Crete, Britain’s chief of military intelligence in Cairo personally told Churchill, “We also tried to drop a wireless set by parachute to Pendlebury, who at the moment is largely controlling guerrilla activities in the Cretan hills.”

  But if anyone knew how to actually find Pendlebury and his Thugs, they weren’t talking. No matter where Cumberlege looked, Pendlebury always seemed tantalizingly close, yet nowhere to be found. The champion of heroic myths was turning into one himself.

  CHAPTER 17

  David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

  —MALCOLM GLADWELL, “How David Beats Goliath”

  THE LAST, BEST SIGHTING had Pendlebury heading toward Mount Ida—bandit country. Hard to get in, easy to get lost. Same place where, after sleeping under wet bushes all day after his long night hike through the rain with Costa, Xan Fielding was waking up to a double dose of good news.

  The German search parties had moved on, so he and Delaney could crawl out of hiding for a while and stretch their aching bodies. And instead of having to scrabble another eighty miles to the radio operator’s mountain hideout, word arrived that the radio operator was coming down to them. Xan was thrilled, since he could finally kick back for a night after three hectic days on the move since splashing ashore from the sub, but then he grew apprehensive. Why was the radioman suddenly out of his hole and on the move after he’d been safely hidden for months?

  Soon enough, Ralph Hedley Stockbridge hiked into camp in the worst Cretan costume Xan had ever seen. The only thing more British than his overcoat—seriously, an overcoat?—were his horn-rimmed glasses. Unlike every Cretan male past puberty, he had no mustache, and instead of shepherd’s boots, he was still in shoes. “In no way did he look like a peasant,” Xan thought. And that, it gradually dawned on him, was Ralph’s sly genius: Ralph looked exactly like a Greek trying not to look Greek. It was a stunt right out of The Man Who Was Thursday, and it worked brilliantly. Once, Ralph strolled right through a German checkpoint while the real Cretan beside him was grabbed and questioned. “They must have been blind not to see me trembling,” Ralph would recall. During another close encounter, he blurted, “Gosh, sorry!”—in English—after bumping into a German soldier, and he still didn’t attract a second look.

  But the audacity of Ralph’s no-disguise disguise was brutal on his nerves. Like Xan, Ralph wasn’t much of a soldier. He was notorious in the War Office for making a fuss about having to wear puttees—wool wraps that twine up from the ankle and tuck in at the knee—and then quitting the Officers’ Training Corps because he felt his superior officers were acting too superior. Despite or maybe due to this obsessive contrariness, Ralph was recruited by “Mike”—MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. Mike was James Bond’s outfit, but unlike 007, real MI6 agents kept their flies zipped and gadgets holstered. Their job was to live in the shadows, eavesdropping in cafés and building webs of civilian spies. That often put them at odds with the dirty tricksters of Xan’s unit, the Firm, because the last thing any Mike agent wanted was a bar of soap blowing up in a brothel they had under surveillance.

  But on Crete, where the tiny band of Brits depended on one another for survival, the rival spies split the work and got along like brothers. Which, biology aside, they basically were. Like Xan and Monty, Ralph was another of Geoffrey Household’s Class X “rogue males”; he’d fight for his country, think for himself, and try not to hurt anyone in the process. Ralph was brainy and bookwormish, and more than a little bewildered that he’d ended up fiddling with a wireless radio set up in a Mediterranean cave. He’d studied classics at Cambridge, which meant his ability to chat with Cretans was hampered by his two-thousand-year-old vocabulary. And if you can’t have a good natter, he warned Xan, undercover life was torture.

  To be honest, that’s why he was rambling the mountains instead of staying put at his station. He could handle hiding in the dark for days at a time, getting his drinking water from stalactite drips and eating nothing but tough seedling potatoes washed down with gulps of boiled orange-peel tea. But the conversation—that’s what finally broke him. Ralph was holed up with Colonel Andreas Papadakis, the old ex-army officer who’d helped Jack Smith-Hughes during his escape and put Jack in the expert hands of George Psychoundakis, the young shepherd turned super-messenger. Since then, Colonel Papadakis had gone mad with imaginary power; with Ralph as his captive audience, he spent his days yammering about how he and his “Supreme Committee of Cretan Struggle” would clean house once he figured out how to get rid of the Germans. Finally, Ralph couldn’t take it anymore. He threw his radio set onto a mule and took to the hills.

  After a few days, Ralph discovered he hadn’t calculated one thing: Papadakis’s wind-battered hilltop turned out to be the only place he could get decent transmission strength. When Ralph heard Xan had arrived and needed a safe house, he figured he’d save his pride by using Xan as an excuse to return.

  “Ah, so you’re back again,” Papadakis sneered when Xan and Ralph approached the door. Xan knew the old colonel had risked his life and shared his own meager food to aid the Resistance, but he couldn’t help being repelled by a voice that “oscillated between arrogance and plaintiveness” or noticing the way “his hard black eyes glittered with peasant cunning and his general expression could best be described by the American term of ‘sour puss.’ ” Between the three of them, the atmosphere in Papadakis’s little hut was primed for an explosion—and it only got worse when Guy Turrall arrived.

  Turrall’s talent for making himself swiftly and universally disliked as he wor
ked his way across the island was as remarkable as Guy Delaney’s knack for spontaneous adoration. On the long trek up to Papadakis’s home, the Cretan guide who offered to carry Turrall’s pack couldn’t figure out why it kept getting heavier—until he discovered that Turrall, an amateur geologist, was loading it with rock samples. Another Cretan guide got so fed up with Turrall that he violated his xenía duties by storming off and abandoning Turrall when they were still a half-mile outside a village. Turrall marched in alone and got lucky: the villagers only ignored him, instead of beating the tar out of him and turning him over to the Germans. Many islanders had been executed after being tricked by Germans masquerading as Allied fugitives, so in retaliation, they’d come up with a wickedly clever response whenever they smelled a rat: they’d play dumb and attack the “Brit,” getting their boots into him good before innocently dragging him off to the nearest German outpost. To a wary Cretan, nothing would look more German than a bossy stranger wearing a British captain’s uniform and speaking French. Turrall never knew how close he came to a beating and a bullet.

  Once in Papadakis’s hut, Turrall immediately set everyone’s teeth on edge. He kept up the French and bustled about every hour heating water for another pot of boiled orange-peel tea. He argued bitterly with Papadakis about how and when they should set off to plant bombs on German ships in the harbor, even though neither he nor Papadakis had any clue what the other was saying.

  “This madman wants to destroy us all!” Papadakis complained. Ralph and Xan were trapped between them; with snow threatening and bitter winds blowing, it was too risky to attempt further recon in the mountains, so they were stuck inside playing endless games of gin rummy.