The three men were positive the Germans would ease up for the holidays—well, pretty positive—so they threw themselves into the full onslaught of Cretan merrymaking. “We reeled happily from home to home eating and drinking with hosts who seemed as carefree as though no Germans had ever been heard of in Crete,” Xan recalled. “We found the same conditions in every village we passed during our slow three-day procession down the valley.”
Paddy knew the Germans weren’t having this kind of fun, because he’d heard them say so. Shortly before Xan’s return, the Firm sent Paddy on a mission to blow up German warships with some magnetic mines. Paddy infiltrated the port and quickly made his assessment: Not Bloody Likely. They wanted him to swim across the harbor between the searchlights with those big hunks of metal strapped to his back? The only way he wouldn’t get shot was if he drowned first. Which raised another tactical difficulty: the partner he’d been assigned couldn’t swim. Paddy decided to abort and beat it out of town. He holed up in a safe house to wait for dark, but suddenly heard German voices. Two German sergeants, he realized, were billeted next door. He tuned in to their conversation and heard something intriguing. “Weit von der Heimat …” he heard one say. Far from Mother Germany …
See? They’re homesick. That was the actionable intel Paddy had picked up while Xan was away. This is the fourth year in a row the Germans have missed Christmas with their families. They’re not out drinking and singing with friends like we are. They’re scratching lice and eating awful grub and wondering why they haven’t heard from their wives. They’re lonely and uncertain. We can use that.
Xan had to marvel at Paddy. Xan’s first winter on Crete had left him bony and ragged as a hobo, but this guy—magnificent! Somehow, six months of cave living and mountain scrambling had turned Paddy into a Hollywood pirate. “His moustache always had a dashing twist in it,” Xan noted. “His boots, which he wore out at the rate of one pair a month, were beautifully kept until they fell to pieces on his feet; to knot his black turban at the most becoming angle, he took infinite pains; and to complete his operational wardrobe he had just ordered a Cretan waistcoat of royal-blue broadcloth lined with scarlet shot-silk and embroidered with arabesques of black braid.” One way or the other, Paddy was coming out of this war in style.
Tom Dunbabin was just as handsome but less of a dandy; when it came to protective coloring, the worse he looked, the better he felt. He was a towering, farm-raised Tasmanian with a mind formidable enough to take him to Oxford and a professorship in Greek classics, so masquerading as a harmless mountain peasant took some serious stagecraft. Xan was quite impressed with the result. “In ragged breeches and black fringed turban, with his overgrown corkscrew moustache coiling and uncoiling in the breeze of his own breath, he looked like a successful local sheep-thief,” Xan observed. “He even managed to introduce a characteristic note of hysteria into his high-pitched voice.”
Crooks were Tom’s favorite mentors, and he recruited as many as he could find. “The best man you can have with you in the hills is a converted sheep thief,” Tom explained. “He knows all the paths and pathless ways, and where to lie up and spy out the land. He is a good mover over any country, day or night.” You couldn’t go wrong with a good murderer, either. “He has probably spent years in the hills avoiding the justice of the state and his victims’ kinsmen,” Tom pointed out, “and knows every crag and cave.” Tom learned so much from his bandit buddies that once, during a recon mission, he came face-to-face with an old acquaintance—a German archeologist turned Wehrmacht officer—who looked Tom dead in the eye without recognizing him inside the shepherd’s disguise.
While the outlaws were schooling Tom and Paddy in evasion, shepherds showed them how to forage for survival. “They knew the mountains, knew the paths and hiding places, and most of them had a rifle. If necessary, they could do without the villages and lowlands, and live on their own milk and meat,” Tom explained. “They were naturally in fine physical condition, could run up a hill-side most of us would find it hard to get up at all, and were wonderfully light on their feet.” Tom and Paddy crested so many mountains during their apprenticeship that they were left with only a single pair of decent boots between them. “I crippled myself over these boots,” Tom grimaced, “marching in a pair too small for me while Paddy borrowed the good pair.”
But despite all those miles, they were still wrestling with the final test of authenticity: the Cretan Bounce. Paddy once leaped to the top of a stone wall to demonstrate he had it, only to amuse the Clown by toppling back over again. “The quick eyes of the Cretans could generally pick us out by our walk,” Tom admitted. “Other details—dress, features, moustache—could pass, but none of us acquired the gait of a Cretan hillman, for all our practice.”
The three men had a wonderful Christmas. For four days they wandered about “slightly drunk and unescorted,” as Xan put it, calling on friends across the highlands. They sang and danced and feasted, forgetting for a time that they were living under a death sentence. No matter how glib their Greek or how convincing their farmer’s cloaks and women’s dresses, they knew they couldn’t get away with this game for long. Sooner or later they’d meet an ambush, a traitor, or a dark and icy cliff, and Crete would become—as it had for John Pendlebury—their Appointment in Samarra.
Because Paddy was right: down below in the barracks, the Germans weren’t having nearly as much fun. They were loading weapons, squeezing informants, and eyeing the weather in the mountains above. Hitler smelled trouble on the Sliver, and he wanted it taken care of now.
. . .
Defense wasn’t Hitler’s specialty. He knew how to knock you down; he had no plan for when you got back up. He liked sneak attacks and lightning strikes, the kind of shock tactics that were great when his troops were on the move but useless when they were pushed back and hunkered into trenches. But as Hitler looked at the giant map in his command room during the final weeks of 1942, his eye for a stab in the back came in handy: it told him exactly what Churchill would do next and where he would do it.
Crete had to be Churchill’s next target; by Christmas, it was already the sweet spot between Hitler’s shoulder blades. He’d pushed his troops deep into Africa and Russia, and now they were mired in exactly the nightmare he’d dreaded. Germany’s prize panzer corps was gasping for survival in Egypt, while Stalingrad was on the verge of becoming Hitler’s bloodiest defeat. The Soviets who’d been surrounded by the Third Reich’s Sixth Army had pulled off a miraculous reversal and surrounded them right back, trapping the Germans inside the city and exposing the Führer’s inability to counterattack. The German response to the Soviet push was sheer bedlam. Day by day, the German high command second-guessed and dithered while nearly a quarter-million German soldiers trapped in Stalingrad were wiped out by bombs, bullets, disease, and starvation.
The last thing Hitler needed now was to wheel around and discover Crete was ablaze. He’d already seen what kind of havoc those lunatic farmers could get up to with their ancient guns and homemade bayonets, and all it would take for them to erupt was the go-ahead from Great Britain that help was on the way. German soldiers were already said to be wary of venturing into the White Mountains because some phantom from New Zealand had taken over for John Pendlebury as the new Lion of Crete.
Rumor had it the Lion was haunting the highlands with his own band of Cretan killers, and the truth wasn’t far off. When the war broke out, Dudley Perkins was a university student following in his father’s footsteps toward the ministry. He was soon behind barbed wire in a German POW camp after the fall of Crete, but he escaped into the White Mountains and spent a long winter learning to live off the land. Cretan woodsmen taught Dudley to search the riverbanks for eels and snails and freshwater crabs, and how to boil olive-tree fungus and wild mushrooms into a hearty and surprisingly tasty stew. By the time he met Xan Fielding, the aspiring preacher was a new and much deadlier man. The Lion appeared “much like I imagined Lawrence of Arabia must have looked,” Xan would comment. “And in character, too, he closely resembled what I had read of the famous Arab leader.” After German troops incinerated one village in the high country, Dudley formed the survivors into a fighting force two hundred strong. Not long after, a German patrol entered the Lion’s territory; none of them made it out alive. The local German garrison sent eleven soldiers out to commandeer some food; their bodies were found at the bottom of a slot canyon.