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

by Christopher McDougall

  “Ja, ja.”

  Paddy could just make out a jutting chin, gold braid, a black Iron Cross. Kreipe was in the front passenger seat.

  “Papier, bitte schön,” Paddy demanded. Papers, please.

  Before the general could snap at these idiot soldiers to get out of his way, Paddy jammed his pistol into his chest.

  “Hände hoch!” Paddy shouted. Hands up!

  Paddy heard the general gasp. The chauffeur’s eyes were terrified but his right hand, Billy noticed, was sliding toward his automatic. Billy quickly cracked him across the head with his blackjack. A gang of Cretans burst from the brush alongside the road and yanked open the doors. The backseat was empty; instead of traveling with bodyguards, the general and his driver were alone. Billy and the Cretans pulled the stunned chauffeur into the road, but the general came out swinging, staggering Paddy with a sharp kick and a sock in the face. The Cretans quickly nixed that nonsense; one jammed a dagger under Kreipe’s chin while another snapped handcuffs on his wrists.

  “Was wollen Sie in Kreta?” one of the Cretans screamed in Kreipe’s face. What are you doing in Crete?

  Paddy pleaded with him to shush. Fury right then would get them killed.

  “This was the critical moment,” Billy realized. “If any other traffic had come along the road we could have been caught.” Paddy could barely drive, so Billy slid behind the wheel, hoping he could figure out how to start the unfamiliar German sedan and get it into gear. Good news: “The engine of the car was still ticking over, the handbrake was on, everything was perfect.” There was even a full tank of gas. Three Cretans shoved the general into the backseat and climbed in beside him while Paddy, straightening the general’s hat upon his own head, slipped into the front. Two Cretans dragged the slumped and bloody chauffeur off with them into the brush.

  Let’s go, Paddy said.

  Headlights blasted their eyes. “A convoy was bearing down on us,” Paddy realized. “Two trucks full of soldiers sitting with their rifles between their knees, some in steel helmets, some in field caps.” A minute earlier and it would have been game over. But the truck squads rumbled past, oblivious, and Billy hit the gas.

  “Where is my hat?” the General kept asking. My hat. Where is it?

  Keep quiet, the Cretans in the backseat hissed. Then to Paddy: What’s he saying?

  The chatter! Paddy had to snip it, quick. They were fast approaching the Villa Ariadne. Two sentries had already spotted them and snapped to attention. A third was opening the striped crossbar blocking the Villa’s entrance. Any commotion now and the sentries would shoot the tires out from under them.

  I’ve got your hat, Paddy told General Kreipe. Paddy froze as they whizzed past the bewildered sentries, then wheeled around to face the general. If any of them were going to survive, including the general, he had to get something straight. “Herr General,” Paddy said. “I am a British major. Beside me is a British captain. The men beside you are Greek patriots. They are good men. I am in command of this unit, and you are an honorable prisoner of war. We are taking you away from Crete to Egypt. For you the war is over. I am sorry we had to be so rough. Do everything I say and all will be well.”

  “You are really a British major?” General Kreipe said.

  “Yes, really. You have nothing to fear.”

  Then can I have my hat back?

  “Checkpoint ahead,” Billy warned. Two German soldiers were in the road, waving a red stoplight.

  I need your hat right now, Paddy said. You’ll get it back later.

  Billy throttled back but kept driving straight at the soldiers. “HALT.!” one shouted. Suddenly they leaped back and saluted, apparently catching sight of the general’s flags. Billy accelerated and sped past.

  “This is marvelous,” Billy said, jamming his foot down on the gas.

  “Herr Major,” General Kreipe asked. “Where are you taking me?”

  Good Lord. Was he going to ask about the damned hat again, too? “To Cairo,” Paddy repeated.

  “No, but now?”

  “To Heraklion,” Paddy said.

  “To HERAKLION?”

  —

  Yes, that was actually Paddy’s plan: to drive the general away from the safety of the mountains and straight into a city bustling with Germans.

  A few weeks earlier, Paddy had ridden the bus into Heraklion, disguising himself as a farmer heading to market. Rather inconveniently, the best abduction route ran right from the general’s residence through the heart of Heraklion and into the hills beyond. But street access, Paddy discovered, was awful: every road was thicketed with checkpoints. There was only one way in and out, and all the side streets were dead-ended with razor wire and antitank blocks or guarded by troops. It was madness; no matter how well they forged their travel documents and drugged the general, driving directly past the front door of Gestapo headquarters with a conked-out German officer in the boot and standing up to the scrutiny of more than twenty-two armed control posts was far too risky.

  As he walked around town, Paddy found himself repeatedly passing the Gestapo building, morbidly attracted to the torture den, “which,” he reflected, “had meant the doom of many friends.” These were the stakes he was playing for: if the abduction went sour, those doors would shut behind him and he’d never come out. Paddy pulled himself away and made his way south, heading three miles down the road to the Villa Ariadne. By sheer luck, Paddy’s best Cretan spy lived right next door. Micky Akoumianakis was the son of Villa Ariadne’s former caretaker, and he was still allowed to live in his father’s old quarters. And it was there, while Paddy and Mickey were pretending to chat with a shepherd tending his flock by the side of the road but really scoping out the security, that Paddy and General Kreipe first locked eyes.

  The general’s sedan suddenly appeared, barreling toward them down the road. Through the windshield, Paddy spotted blue eyes and a chestful of medals. Without thinking, Paddy popped up his hand and gave the general a friendly wave. Startled, the general responded, gravely raising a gloved hand toward his…his…

  Paddy had a flash of inspiration. The general’s hat! It was the one thing that made sentries stand down and roadblocks disappear. Who would bother to check the face beneath it? Who even knew what that face looked like? General Kreipe had been on Crete for barely five weeks, after two years on the Russian front. Few of his troops would recognize him, but they would instantly recognize—and respect—the gold-braided oak cluster and rampant eagle.

  It was perfect. Rather than making the general vanish, they’d use him as their passport to a short cut right through the guts of German headquarters. “The results of a mishap in the town were too disastrous to contemplate,” Paddy knew, “but a plunge straight into the enemy stronghold with their captured commander would be the last idea to occur to them.”

  Three generations of Maskelynes would have applauded. If Jasper and his Magic Gang could impersonate an entire harbor, Paddy was sure he could impersonate one man. Especially at night.

  —

  Unless that night was Saturday.

  “It was truly unfortunate that we arrived in town at the moment,” Billy discovered. Billy tooted the horn, grinding through the mob clogging the street. The weekend movie had just gotten out, and Heraklion was jammed with idling troop buses and strolling soldiers. Paddy sank back into his seat while the three Cretans behind him pulled the general down on the floor. One clamped a hand over the General’s mouth and kept the dagger at his throat while the other two pointed their Marlin submachine guns up at the windows.

  Paddy had put together a superb team, all of them icy under pressure. Manoli Paterakis was a goatherd and high-mountain hunter who’d been mentoring Paddy for much of the past year. George Tyrakis was a younger version of Manoli who’d instantly bonded with Billy even though they could communicate only with “grins and gestures,” as Paddy put it. Paddy’s last recruit, Stratis Saviolakis, was born and bred for this kind of operation: in regular life, Stratis was a cop from t
he southern rebel enclave of Sphakia, so he knew how to keep peace and raise hell.

  German faces crowded around, passing just inches from the windows. Billy inched along, praying the car wouldn’t overheat or stall. “Tension,” Paddy noted dryly, “rose several degrees.” After what seemed like hours, they circled the central market roundabout and began the straight descent to the Canae Gate. Once past that thick stone arch, it was open road—but that’s when Billy knew they’d been discovered. Ahead of them, a sentry was standing fast in the middle of the road, red lantern held high. Behind him, extra manpower had massed. “There were not only the normal sentries and guards, but a large number of other soldiers in the gateway as well,” Paddy realized. “The one wielding the red torch failed to budge; it looked as though they were going to stop us.” Could they smash through? Doubtful; the passage had been narrowed with cement blocks and blocked with a thick wood barricade.

  Paddy readied himself to kick open the door and run for it. They were outgunned and outnumbered, true, but they’d also been trained in the Cretan mountains. “There was a maze of alleyways, walls one could jump, drainpipes to climb, skylights, flat roofs leading from one to another, cellars and drains and culverts,” Paddy was thinking, “of which the Germans knew nothing.” Billy cocked his automatic and put it in his lap. Paddy’s pistol was already in his hand. Three Marlin guns clicked back behind them. Billy crawled the car forward, waiting for the signal to floor it. Paddy rolled down his window.

  “Generals Wagen!” he shouted. No general would ever shout like that but, well…“GENERALS WAGEN!”

  Billy hit the gas. The sentry leaped out of the way. The soldiers scattered, barely dodging the Opel’s bumper. Billy braced for gunfire but instead heard Paddy. “Gute Nacht,” Paddy was hollering. Billy couldn’t resist a quick glance back. All the soldiers and sentries were saluting.

  They left Heraklion behind and drove on into the countryside, rolling up and down the dark coastal foothills. Billy lit a cigarette, “the best I had ever smoked in my life.” He handed the pack around to Paddy and the Cretans and—

  Wait, stop! Stratis blurted. Wrong way. Billy had veered off the road to Rethymno and was instead barreling along to Rogdia—a dead end with a German garrison in the middle. Billy wrenched the Opel around in a U-turn and began driving right back toward the city they’d just escaped, praying the alarm hadn’t been raised and a pursuit team wasn’t coming at them. After a few nail-biting minutes, Stratis spotted the cutoff and got them back on the right road.

  They hummed along in solitude, the snowcap of Mount Ida glowing above in the moonlight. Billy and Paddy burst into “The Party’s Over.” The three Cretans sang along, joyfully and nonsensically. The general got up off the floor. Paddy handed him back his hat.

  Twenty miles past Heraklion, Billy pulled over and got out. Manoli and Stratis pulled General Kreipe out of the backseat. Paddy and George remained in the car, Paddy at the wheel. Paddy fought with the hand brake and accidentally blew the horn instead of pressing the starter, but eventually he figured out how to grind the car into bottom gear. Paddy and George pulled away, swerving uncertainly down the road, while Billy and the Cretans began marching the general into the mountains.

  When Paddy reached the shoreline, he and George parked the car on the beach. They littered it with a British Raiding Forces beret, a handful of Player’s cigarette butts, and an Agatha Christie novel, then chucked a Cadbury milk chocolate wrapper on the ground, going a little overboard in their attempt to make it look like a solo operation by Great Britain’s messiest commandos.

  Paddy checked the time. Already past II P.M. Time to move.

  Off we go, George said. Anthropoi tou Skotous! Men of Darkness! German propaganda coined the term to blacken the name of the sneaky Cretans, not realizing the sneaky Cretans loved it and began singing it out as a rallying cry before night missions. Paddy had one thing left to do. The night before, he and Billy had written a letter and marked it in hot wax with their signet rings. Paddy pulled it out and pinned it to the front seat:

  To the German Authorities in Crete, April 23, 1944

  Gentlemen,

  Your Divisional Commander, General Kreipe, was captured a short time ago by a BRITISH Raiding Force under our command. By the time you read this both he and we will be on our way to Cairo. We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of CRETANS or CRETAN partisans and the only guides used were serving soldiers of HIS HELLENIC MAJESTY’S FORCES in the Middle East, who came with us.

  Your General is an honourable prisoner of war and will be treated with all the consideration owing to his rank. Any reprisals against the local population will thus be wholly unwarranted and unjust.

  Auf baldiges wiedersehen!

  P. M. Leigh Fermor

  Maj., O.C. Commando

  C. W. Stanley Moss

  Capt. 2/i.c.

  P.S. We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful motor car behind.

  Paddy and George yanked the general’s flags off the hood as souvenirs—“We couldn’t resist it,” Paddy would say—and together they began the lung-aching climb to catch up with the rest of their team. Maybe the Butcher would fall for it. Maybe he’d believe a sub had already come and gotten them and they were now long gone.

  Maybe. Because if not, at dawn all hell would break loose.

  CHAPTER 26

  We lost the general.

  —GERMAN RADIO TRANSMISSION, MAY 1944, intercepted by British intelligence

  CHRIS WHITE was true to his word: a few months after refusing to show me Paddy’s escape route, he agreed to show me Paddy’s escape route.

  “You think I can handle it?” I asked.

  “I’m sure Paddy wondered the same thing,” Chris replied, or something to that effect; I didn’t jot it down because I was already hurriedly clicking through the calendar to see how much prep time I had. On the one hand I was relieved; it meant I must have passed the White Brothers’ selection process during our first hike across the island three months earlier. On the other, I knew we’d be pushing into tougher and more remote terrain than anyplace they’d taken me before. That was Paddy’s game plan from the start; his only hope of pulling off the abduction was to run and hide through no-man’s-land, going places where German troops, even Alpine forces, wouldn’t think to follow.

  Chris was eager to get back on Paddy’s trail, because he was starting to believe he knew where Paddy went better than Paddy did. That actually made sense. Paddy and Billy were fleeing through the dark, led by outlaws to places only outlaws knew. It would have been tricky enough if the escape had gone well, but from the moment the general stepped out of his car, things began going wrong. From that point on, every day was an exercise in improvisation. Any route Paddy had in mind had to be scrapped and reinvented, instantly and on the fly, to dodge the Butcher’s pursuit. Paddy once got so turned around that later, when he described peeking out of a cave as sunrise lit a mountain, he named the wrong mountain. It wasn’t surprising; when you’re being chased by seventy thousand armed men and a war criminal nicknamed the Butcher, you’re more worried about who’s behind than what’s ahead.

  Chris had done an extraordinary job of connecting the lost dots, thanks in no small part to help from Tim Todd, the retired Oxford detective turned Sherlockian war historian, and two adventurers with a unique hobby: Christopher Paul, a London attorney, and Alun Davies, a retired Welsh Regiment major, who specialize in retracing wartime escapes. One winter, they churned across the North Sea to follow in the footsteps of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian commando of We Die Alone who swam through Arctic waters, cut off nine of his own gangrenous toes, and survived snowblindness, frostbite, and starvation to finally escape the Germans and make it to freedom in Sweden. In 2003, Christopher and Alun were on a similar re-creation in Iran when an avalanche swept them hundreds of meters down the mountain. Battered and freezing, they survived the night by breaking into a hut for shelter. The fol
lowing year they were hit by another avalanche, this time in Turkey on Mount Ararat. Alun and his climbing partner disappeared beneath tons of snow. Their teammates began frantically probing and digging. After twenty minutes, they managed to locate Alun and pull him out alive. His Scottish expedition mate, Alasdair Ross, wasn’t so lucky.

  “We decided that if we went anywhere else, it would have to be warm,” Alun told me when I met him and Christopher one evening in London. They took me to Paddy’s old club, the Travelers, and showed me the map over the fireplace of Paddy’s walk across Europe as a teenager, signed with Paddy’s trademark doodle of a flock of flying birds. Tracking Paddy across Crete, they said, turned out to be more than they’d reckoned on. “You look at the maps that are available. They’re not accurate at all,” Christopher said. “And even if you’re shown where to go, it’s quite hard to find your way. We went looking for a particular cave and were told we were right in front of it. For the life of us, we couldn’t find it.”

  They also learned to tread lightly around the Cretans: xenía still ruled, except when loyalty was at stake. “When the police went to arrest someone in Anogia while we were there, they were stopped on the edge of town by machine-gun fire and had to turn back,” Christopher Paul said. The entire village was ready to go to war—including the clergy—if the police tried arresting a local boy. “We met a Greek priest with a Glock under his cassock,” Christopher added. “He pulled it out of his sock.”

  Alun and Christopher had battled through plenty of rough stuff before, but they’d never dealt with the rocks that ripped the boots off one of their teammate’s feet in their first six hours on the ground. They arrived lean, fit, and well-provisioned (unlike Paddy and Xan, who survived on local forage), but still found themselves burning weight to the tune of nearly twenty pounds in two weeks. “Anytime you’re on an expedition like this, the unexpected will find you,” Alun advised. “That’s the question that’s always intrigued me: How strong does your character have to be to deal with disaster?”