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

by Christopher McDougall

  Now there was one last thing to do: exterminate the rats in their holes.

  —

  Shortly after New Year’s Day, George Psychoundakis was hiking toward the village of Alones when he heard the thump of gunfire. “I crept behind a rock, and looking down, saw that the village was full of Germans. Just below me, about ten were climbing up the slope towards my vantage-point,” George recounts. “I hid like lightning.” Fading into the trees, George circled around Alones until he found someone who could fill him in. The news chilled him.

  The Germans went straight to the priest’s house and began tearing it apart, a villager told him. They knew.

  The Germans discovered a British radio battery buried in the priest’s garden, and a note to the British radio operator in his son’s pocket. If they’d arrived a little sooner, they’d have found the radio operator himself. Luckily, and unbeknownst to the stool pigeon who’d led the Germans there, the Brits had abandoned Alones right after Christmas. But the Germans knew they couldn’t be far, and they got right to work. The priest’s son, his face battered and bloody, was dragged off to be tortured for information while troops surrounded the valley and began marching uphill in an ever-tightening noose.

  Typically, that meant a remarkable number of locals would suddenly be welcoming family. Our in-laws are arriving, they’d call out. Others were vexed by livestock problems. Watch out for your black sheep! They’re in the wheat field again, they’d complain—loudly and repeatedly.

  The alert spread until it reached Paddy, a few miles away. He and four of George’s cousins put together a team to spirit away the bulky wireless radio set, hoisting it on their backs along with the big batteries and that brute of a charging engine. “Shifting our base had now become a feat of endurance,” Xan explained, since any reasonably walkable trail had to be avoided. Paddy and his gang “had to carry the cumbersome gear piecemeal on their backs over trackless slopes at dead of night.”

  Freezing rain fell all night, slickening the snowy mountainside and doubling the weight of their packs. It took twelve hours, but by daybreak they’d climbed high enough to stash the radio and cut back to the rendezvous spot with Xan. Paddy’s gang was ready to sink down and rest, but first they climbed a nearby peak for a last look around—and spotted dozens of dark helmets trudging through snow straight toward them. “As though they had got wind of our movements,” Xan would exclaim, “the Germans had transferred their attention from Alones.” Whoever was feeding the Germans information was becoming deadly accurate.

  The morning mist gave Paddy’s gang just enough of a head start to vanish before being spotted. By the time the sun burned through, most of the Cretans had bolted into slit caves in the cliffs. Xan hid in an old stone hut, while Paddy scrambled into the branches of a big cypress. Tromping boots soon approached…paused…faded away…and then returned, over and over again, as searchers crisscrossed the grove. Paddy was soaked and shivering; he’d barely eaten and hadn’t slept, his body was stiff and aching from the all-night radio portage. He forced his body to freeze as the Germans passed back and forth beneath his feet.

  And by the time the sun was setting and it was finally safe for him to slide down, one thing was clear: the playboy who’d shown up six months ago could now run and crawl and think and persevere like a Cretan. Maybe he couldn’t pass for one just yet—but for what he had in mind, he might just be close enough.

  CHAPTER 23

  Suddenly the firing stopped, brought to an end not by a Cease Fire order but by a sound far more blood curdling….

  —XAN FIELDING

  “BLACK SHEEP!”

  A few months after their near miss with the radio, Paddy and his gang were just settling down for the night when they heard a lookout calling out a secret warning. Germans were on the move, three hundred or more, still a good way off but coming fast. Paddy grabbed his rifle and was stunned when it suddenly fired. A few feet away, Yanni Tsangarakis—Paddy’s closest Cretan friend—dropped to the ground, bleeding. Paddy’s bullet had smashed through Yanni’s hip and ricocheted up through his guts. Paddy and the others desperately shoved their hands down on the wounds, but it was no use. Yanni whispered his farewells and died.

  Paddy was horrified. He knew what he had to do: as soon as they were clear of the Germans, he’d go to Yanni’s family and put himself at their mercy.

  Terrible idea, Yanni’s friend argued. What good are two corpses? Some fool will say you did it on purpose, and someone will believe him. Yanni didn’t blame you, but his family will. We’ve got to say the Germans shot him. It’s the best thing for Yanni. He’ll be remembered as a patriot. You’ll get the chance to die like one.

  Paddy churned over his dilemma as they slipped Yanni’s body off to safety and buried him in the shade of two holly oaks. His gang was right about one thing: island chatter was notorious. “No news? Then tell me a lie” was a favorite Cretan joke. Okay, then—Paddy agreed to lie and pretend Yanni had been killed in a firefight. “I want to say that I did not agree to this hateful fiction out of a wish to shirk my responsibilities, but for the sake of Yanni and his family, and our work on Crete,” a miserable Paddy would explain. But whether Yanni’s clan would believe it was another story. They’d be aching for details; they’d want to know who else was injured, and why was Yanni cornered when he’d escaped so many times. Tell us again, how many Germans were killed in this fight that killed our Yanni? The second they smelled something fishy, they’d come looking for answers.

  Paddy was still in the dumps over that disaster when he was tapped to perform a bit of street magic. The Allies had invaded Sicily, and the Italians, fed up with Mussolini, had tossed him out of office. Hitler would soon toss Mussolini right back in again, but in the meantime, German command was giving Italian forces two ugly options: they could be folded into the German army or locked up in a German labor gang.

  But General Angelo Carta, the Italian commander, was secretly offered a back door. Word was passed by the underground that if he was willing to cooperate with Allied forces, a British operative would find a way to spirit him off the island. Carta agreed, and Paddy got the assignment. Just before setting off, however, Paddy received a strange warning: a band of Cretan Communists threatened to betray Paddy if he got up to any funny business with the Italians. The Communists weren’t battling the Germans just so the British could take over, so they wanted Paddy to steer clear of the Italian zone. They were supposed to be fighting the same enemy, but the Communists weren’t above a little treachery if they suspected the British and the non-Communist Resistance fighters were gaining too much power.

  Paddy’s friends, meanwhile, were causing even more trouble than his rivals. Manoli Bandouvas, Crete’s most ferocious guerrilla chieftain, was ecstatic when he got news of the Italian pullback and decided it was the time to go for the Germans’ throats. Without making sure his allies had his back, Bandouvas and his three-hundred-strong band called for a mass uprising and went on the attack. They wiped out two garrisons and killed more than thirty Germans, which was just enough to infuriate General Müller but not enough to convince Bandouvas that he had a prayer of actually winning. The Butcher lashed out with a spree of retaliation, murdering five hundred civilians and incinerating six entire villages. More than two thousand troops stormed into the mountains with one order: bring back the head of Bandouvas. Somehow, the rebel chief slipped away and showed up at Tom Dunbabin’s hideout looking for help. As long as Paddy was taking the Italian general off the island, couldn’t he take Bandouvas as well? Just till the heat died down?

  Wonderful. Paddy’s getaway route was now swarming with fire teams. Instead of one hot target to transport he had two, and instead of one blood enemy, he might be running from three: the Germans, the Communists, and the revenge-seeking clan of poor Yanni. Paddy forged ahead anyway, and emerged from the shadows on September 16 for his rendezvous with General Carta. Just before they left, Paddy was hissed to one side by Lieutenant Franco Tavana, Carta’s chief of intelligen
ce.

  Don’t lose this, Tavana whispered, pushing a satchel into Paddy’s hands. And don’t let the general know you have it. Tavana had stuffed it with classified documents. Now everything we know about German operations, you know. Tavana had already won a reputation among his enemies as honorable, brave, and apparently on their side. He had never pulled his trigger on a Cretan; whenever he caught a guerrilla, Tavana would just order him to move along into the German zone. Tavana despised the situation the Germans had gotten him into, and he was about to prove it: given the chance to escape with Carta, he decided to stay and join the Resistance.

  Tavana learned very quickly how dangerous that would be. The Butcher was shrewd, and it didn’t take him long to connect the dots. Bandouvas wouldn’t suddenly go wild on his own; no, he must have spotted an opportunity because he knew the Italians were up to something. The Butcher and an armored security squad raced toward Carta’s base but arrived a few hours too late; Paddy and the general had already disappeared into the piney snarls of the snow-capped Dikti Mountains, while Tavana was climbing toward the Resistance’s caves with a load of Italian weapons.

  No mercy, the Butcher fumed: he wanted Carta dead or alive. To entice the Cretans to turn him in, the Butcher offered a thirty-million-drachma reward, a fortune for a starving farm family. Spotter planes buzzed the mountains, searching for the missing general and scattering reward notices. One leaflet fluttered down at Carta’s feet as he and Paddy were slinking through the woods. “Thirty pieces of silver,” Carta mused. “A contract of Judas.” If he made it to Egypt, he decided, he’d have to send the Butcher a nice letter in return.

  Bandouvas and Tom Dunbabin caught up with Paddy during the final push toward the coast, and together they crept down to a hidden cove. A week earlier, General Carta and the rebel chieftain would have shot each other on sight; now, they took a seat on the beach, shuffled a deck, and dealt cards while Paddy and Tom scanned the dark horizon. Long after midnight, a rubber dinghy purred to shore. Tom was going to accompany Bandouvas to Cairo and take some long overdue leave, but first Paddy wanted to ferry Carta out so he could personally put the secret-documents satchel in the skipper’s hand. Before Tom could point out that he was just as capable of carrying the bag, Paddy was off.

  That’ll have to do, the skipper said when Paddy and Carta reached the boat. Time to go. The sea was rough and threatening to throw them up on the rocks. Tom and Bandouvas watched in dismay from shore as Paddy—the only one of the four who wasn’t supposed to leave—remained onboard as the rescue boat faded into the night and headed back to Egypt. Carta settled in for the journey and must have already been composing his reply to the Germans, because shortly after he docked, Crete was hit with a new wave of leaflets wafting down from the sky.

  “I am in Egypt,” Carta wrote back to the Butcher. “Be sure that there are a great many Cretans who would only be too happy to kill you for no reward at all!”

  —

  Once in Cairo, Paddy returned to “Tara,” the vacation house nicknamed after the stronghold of ancient Irish kings, that Paddy shared with Xan Fielding and a few other secret agents. Paddy was greeted by Countess Zofia “Sophie” Tarnowksa, a twenty-six-year-old Polish heiress in exile who’d arrived in Egypt with little more than an evening gown, a swimsuit, and two pet mongooses. Sophie became Tara’s live-in hostess, a job that demanded rare skills: at various times, Sophie was called upon to replace chandeliers blown apart as sharpshooting targets; use the bathtub to brew prune-and-vodka liqueurs; repair furniture smashed during an indoor bullfight; and find a place for the piano stolen from the Egyptian Officers’ Club. Tara became such a notorious hot spot, it even attracted royalty: one night, Sophie opened the door to find King Farouk waiting with a case of champagne and an eye for action.

  Paddy’s nickname at Tara was “Lord Rakehell,” and he wasted no time living up to it after his unexpected return from Crete. He found himself in a nightclub with Billy Moss, a Coldstream Guardsman who’d been so eager to enlist at the beginning of the war that he hunted up a private yacht to bring him home from Sweden, across the squally and U-boat-infested North Sea.

  Nice work getting Carta off Crete, Billy said when Paddy told him about his scheme to snatch the Butcher. But could you pull it off with a general who doesn’t want to go?

  Paddy had two answers. “It could be done,” he liked to say, “with stealth and timing in such a way that both bloodshed, and thus reprisals, would be avoided.”

  Then there was the truth: “I had only a vague idea how.”

  But in Tara’s bathroom, a rough plan began forming. Paddy and Billy ended up there one bleary morning after a long night out, and as they lounged and chatted, a couple of Tara housemates wandered in to find out what was going on. Billy McLean and David Smiley had just pulled off some cracking operations in Albania, so Paddy sketched a map of Crete on the steamy bathroom tiles, and the four men were soon diagramming ambush spots.

  Next up: toy shopping. Paddy and Billy Moss went to visit the War Magician in his secret Cairo lab. “He was Jasper Maskelyne, the famous conjurer whose magical transformations, in his theatre in Regent Street, had enchanted me as a child,” Paddy would explain. Jasper was a third-generation magician whose father had trained sleight-of-hand spies for Lawrence of Arabia and whose grandfather founded the legendary Magic Circle society. During one of Jasper’s shows, he was in the midst of drinking a glass of razor blades when he spotted an army captain working his way down the aisle. Suspecting something was up, Jasper turned a red flower into a puff of smoke, took his bows, and exited to find the officer waiting backstage with a question: Could Jasper work his magic on the battlefield and bewilder enemy soldiers?

  Soon, Jasper was head of “The Magic Gang,” a band of tricksters who dreamed up everything from button-sized spy gadgets to battalion-strength optical illusions. One of their first triumphs was adapting one of Jasper’s grandfather’s routines to make an entire harbor disappear. “In a burst of smoke, he’d appear to fly off the stage right up to the great chandelier, where he’d perch and answer questions from the audience,” Jasper explained when he first unfolded his scheme. His grandfather’s secret, Jasper said, was substitution: a dummy dressed exactly alike was hoisted by wire under cover of the smoke cloud. “I think we can adapt that principle to this situation,” Jasper proposed.

  The Magic Gang built a replica of Alexandria Harbor in a useless bay a few miles away, then rigged it with gunpowder-packed shacks and floats that would explode like fuel depots and cargo ships. With klieg lights, they cast false moonlight shadows, which threw off the bomber pilots’ depth perception and made small-scale models look like full-size warships. As a final touch, the Magic Gang decorated the real Alexandria Harbor with artificial rubble and phony ship wreckage so German recon planes the following day would believe the harbor had really been hit.

  Billy and Paddy prowled around Jasper’s lab, loading up on exploding goat droppings and fountain-pen guns. “The air of sorcery,” Billy marveled, “emanated from every shelf in that dim cell.” Even though Jasper was now an army major, he still looked more mystical than military, with his showman’s sleeked-back hair and lady-killer’s mustache. “Do you want some more toys?” he’d offer, before adding, “I’m terribly glad I’m not going with you.”

  —

  “GO!” the jump commander shouted.

  Paddy was first out of the plane, tumbling into the dark. “The snow-covered ranges of Crete were glittering in the moonlight below, looking aloof, beautiful and dangerous,” he noted. It was insanity: this was Paddy’s first real parachute drop, and he was attempting to (a) thread a needle between mountaintops, (b) at night, (c) in fierce winds, (d) between German gun posts. But at least he’d taken some lessons. Billy hadn’t bothered, figuring he’d wing it rather than risk injury during training. “I’ll be all right on the night,” Billy had shrugged.

  Paddy pinwheeled toward the ground, “like somersaulting into a very fast stream.” Somehow
he got his feet under him and yanked the rip cord, hoping for the best. Miraculously, the gusts blew him in perfectly, gliding Paddy between the cliffs and right down toward the target fires in a sheep pasture. Guerrillas came tearing out of their hiding places, helping Paddy yank off his chute and bury it. Then they got ready for Billy. They looked up and…

  Kept on looking. The plane passed once, twice, then veered over the mountains and disappeared. Nerves? Paddy had to wonder. Or weather? German patrols must be scrambling by then, so Paddy and the guerrillas slunk off to hide. They returned to the forbidden zone the next night, and the next, but even though a plane buzzed each time, no olive-drab puff ever mushroomed down. Damn! What was going on up there? That was Billy’s last chance to jump; enemy patrols were now so thick in the mountains, they’d begun popping each other. The guerrillas only got away one night because gunfire erupted ahead of them on the trail: a German squad had walked into a German ambush, killing two in the friendly-fire shooting.

  No Billy, no kidnapping. Paddy couldn’t see any other way around it. Paddy needed a real fighting man by his side, someone who could be counted on to kill in a pinch and knew soldierly stuff like Morse code; once, Paddy almost botched an escape-boat rendezvous because he couldn’t figure out how to signal it in from shore. Billy looked kind of phony in a German uniform—too much like a Brit pretending to be German, Paddy thought—but he was way better than Xan. Put short, wiry, sun-browned Xan in a dress, cassock, or shepherd’s pantaloons and he was invisible. Put him in anything cut from Wehrmacht field gray and he was begging for a bullet. Xan was back in Cairo at the moment, taking a breather at Tara after a furious few months of sabotage missions, seventy-two-hour escape hikes, and a shootout that killed six Germans and left Xan with a bullet graze across his forehead. But even if he were immediately available, Paddy didn’t want him anywhere near the general’s headlights. Xan could help the escape, but for the grab, Paddy wanted tall and blond.