They Spread Their Wings (26 page)

Jim Crampton (standing, right) and his crew in front of Wellington R1613, BU-G, in which he was shot down. (Crampton Family Collection)

Jim Crampton’s parachute landing in a cornfield just outside Bremen signalled the start of almost four years of captivity, first in Oflag (
Offizier-lager
) VII-C at Laufen Castle in Austria and then in Stalag Luft (
Stammlager Luft
) III near Sagan in Lower Silesia (now Zagen in Poland), about 100 miles south-east of Berlin, to where he was moved in April 1942. This is the camp made famous by the ‘Wooden Horse’ and the ‘Great Escape’, and Jim was one of those who day after day, in the guise of a PT enthusiast, steadied or vaulted the famous gymnastic wooden horse while a tunneller worked inside it. He recalled: ‘A German guard looked on placidly, smoking his pipe, little realising that just a few yards away someone was digging himself out of the camp.’

Often overshadowed by the later Great Escape, the Wooden Horse escape, which took place from inside the east compound, was the brainchild of Flt Lt Eric Williams and Lt Michael Codner who, when he helped with sand dispersal and the actual digging, invited Flt Lt Oliver Philpot to take part in the escape. Potential escapers in Stalag Luft III were faced with the problem of digging a very long tunnel because the accommodation huts, in which a tunnel entrance might be concealed, were not only raised off the ground but were a considerable distance from the perimeter fence. In addition, the subsoil was bright yellow sand, easy to detect and rendered tunnels liable to collapse. Williams and Codner came up with an ingenious way of digging their tunnel, whose entrance was located in the middle of an open area relatively close to the perimeter fence: they used a gymnastic vaulting horse to cover the opening. The horse was constructed from plywood used in Red Cross parcels.

Each day the horse, with one, and later two, diggers hidden inside, was carried out to the same spot and while a cohort of prisoners conducted gymnastic exercises above, a shaft and tunnel were dug beneath it. At the end of each digging session a wooden board was placed over the tunnel entrance about a foot below the surface and re-covered with the grey surface soil. Sand removed from the tunnel was stored in bags made from trouser legs hung inside the horse, which was then carried, complete with the digger, back to a hut by the gymnasts. This placed a great physical strain on those who carried the horse and they had to appear not to struggle with its weight. The gymnasts’ activity also kept the sound of digging from being detected by seismic microphones which were known to have been planted around the perimeter.

For 114 days the three diggers, in shifts of one or two at a time, dug over 100ft of tunnel, 30in square at a depth of 5ft, using bowls as shovels and metal rods to poke through the surface to create air holes. Shoring was only used for the first few feet of its length to counteract the impact of the vaulters above and the fetid conditions inside the tunnel took their toll on the health of all three men. During the evening of 29 October 1943 the three men made their escape. Two reached Stettin and one Danzig (Gdansk), from which ports they all travelled by ship to neutral Sweden from where they were flown back to England, having made the first successful escapes (‘home runs’) from Stalag Luft III.

At this point it should be noted that Jim Crampton talked little of his experiences as a prisoner of war, nor is he known to have written any notes about it. However, it is believed Jim remained in Stalag Luft III until the camp was forcibly vacated by the Germans on 27 January 1945, when Soviet forces broke through German lines and advanced from Breslau and Posnan towards the River Oder, east of Sagan. Upon his return to Spalding after his repatriation, the
Lincolnshire Free Press
carried a short article:

Flags and bunting were flying in Cley Hall Drive, Spalding throughout the weekend to welcome home Plt Off James Crampton after nearly four years as a prisoner of the Germans. Plt Off Crampton was in the camp where fifty servicemen who had escaped and had been recaptured were shot [a clear reference to Stalag Luft III]. He was also in a 100-mile [
sic
] march from Sagan to a camp near Berlin during which, but for Red Cross parcels, they would have had nothing to eat for five days. Released by the Russians, Plt Off Crampton was brought to this country by air.

From Jim’s remark about ‘doing gymnastics over the Wooden Horse’, this places him inside the east compound of the main Stalag during 1943, since the Wooden Horse project took place there during the three months preceding the escape date of 29 October 1943. There are further factors to suggest that, at the time of the evacuation of Stalag Luft III, Jim Crampton was held in a compound known as Belaria, just a mile or so away on the north-east side of the town of Sagan. It was located on a barren hill with six barrack blocks built up on small brick plinths so that all activities under the buildings could be observed by the guards. More barracks were constructed as the population increased.

As the size of the main camp grew, Belaria compound was opened up in February 1944, with 500 British and Commonwealth officers and airmen being transferred from the east and centre compounds of the main camp. It should be noted that all the compounds, including Belaria, are generally referred to collectively as Stalag Luft III. Some American airmen prisoners were also transferred to Belaria later. Hot water and bathing facilities at Belaria were very limited and the prisoners were regularly marched to and from the main Stalag for showers and de-lousing, which would no doubt have led them to still regard themselves as being in Stalag Luft III. After his return to England, while Jim made specific reference to his involvement with the Wooden Horse episode, which took place in the east compound of the main camp, he did not make mention of the Great Escape in the same terms. This seems to confirm that, since the Great Escape took place in March 1944 from the north compound, being in the east compound he would probably have been unaware of it, and in February 1944 he was even further removed from it by being transferred to Belaria as part of the first batch of prisoners to be housed in that new compound.

Although for several days the prisoners had been aware of the possibility of a rapid evacuation and began to make whatever simple preparations they could, it was not until 19.00 on Saturday 27 January 1945, with the advancing Russians only 12 miles away, that the German commandant gave the order for the camp to be evacuated immediately; the destination was Spremberg in Germany. Gathering up whatever meagre rations and clothing they could, the first to leave were the Americans from the south compound at 21.00 and the west compound at 23.00. The British began to leave the north compound at 01.00 on Sunday 28 January, with the last of their column clearing by 03.00. The British in the east compound started out at 06.00 and it, too, was clear by 07.00. Prisoners in the compound at Belaria did not leave until the following day. For reasons that will become apparent later, Jim is believed to have been among that final column from Belaria.

Dawn broke on a bleak, starkly black-and-white scene. Snowing heavily, with 6in already on the ground and bitterly cold in the sub-zero temperature, Belaria compound became the last part of Sagan POW camp to be evacuated at 06.00 on Monday 29 January 1945. The delay had allowed time to prepare makeshift backpacks, build a few sleds, distribute any excess clothing and consume as much of the food that had been hoarded that could not be carried on the march. One inmate wrote that he wore three jerseys, one pair of long underpants, a set of pyjamas, a balaclava, a pair of long trousers, battledress, overcoat, shoes and mittens – and was still dreadfully cold!

Although this final group also had Spremberg as its objective, the Belaria column took a more northern and direct route towards the intermediate town of Bad Muskau, where all columns stayed on the second night. The earlier columns marched on from Muskau, eventually reaching Spremberg at 15.00 on Friday 2 February after about five days on the road. Here 3,000 men were herded into overcrowded, filthy railway cattle trucks and transported for two more days, with scant food and water, to a POW camp 10 miles north of Bremen, several hundred miles away in north-west Germany. After a short time many were then marched from Bremen to a prison camp at Lübeck where they were eventually liberated by British forces.

When the Belaria column reached Spremberg, the Americans among them were separated and sent away to join several thousand other American POWs already hived off from the British and making their way to various other POW camps throughout the German homeland. The remaining British and Commonwealth prisoners from Belaria were piled into railway cattle trucks and transported to Stalag III-A, located at Luckenwalde, a town just 18 miles south of Berlin, where they arrived on Sunday 4 February. Jim said he was sent to ‘a camp near Berlin’ and this is the factor that seems to firmly place him with the Belaria group.

Records show that the long-established camp at Luckenwalde – reputed to have an extremely harsh and brutal regime – was liberated by the Russian army, which also supports Jim’s statement that (a) he was ‘at a camp near Berlin’ and (b) he was ‘released by the Russians’. The German guards melted away from Luckenwalde on 21 April and the first Russians arrived on the 22nd, liberating the prisoners, but it took a week or two for the prisoners to be moved out and handed over for processing at reception and transit centres set up by American forces in that area. Repatriated to England by air in mid–1945, Jim was sent on a long-term-prisoner rehabilitation course at Rugby, after which he elected to stay in the RAF. He was eventually posted to RAF Manby, where, now a flight lieutenant, he flew Lancasters until he left the service in 1947.

This was by no means the end of Jim Crampton’s flying career – in fact, quite the opposite. May 1947 saw the emergence of private aviation in the Spalding area when George Clifton, himself a former RAF pilot who flew Halifax bombers in the Second World War, established an air taxi company as part of his Spalding Travel Agency business, operating from a small grass field near Wykeham Abbey, 3 miles from Spalding. In January 1948 there was sufficient buoyancy in the air taxi market for George Clifton to invite Jim Crampton to join him in the business as a pilot. The sole aircraft owned by the company at that time was Auster J–1 Autocrat G-AJIU, which was flown on business and pleasure flights all over the UK and Europe; it was joined eventually by two more Autocrats, G-AJDZ and AIPU, Miles Messenger G-AJFF, Miles Gemini G-AKDK, Fairchild Argus G-AJPC and DH Dragon Rapide G-AEMH. It became necessary to employ more pilots and the operation moved to a larger, 60-acre field further down Spalding Marsh, where a blister hangar and a concrete-section office were erected. Jim became chief pilot and operations manager in 1949 and flew all these aircraft types at one time or another; one of his most notable trips, for example, was to take a Spalding couple on holiday to Florence in Italy in Auster G-AIPU and collect them a week later. Although Jim was quite used to long sortie times, this represented a marathon for the small aeroplane and indeed for the two passengers, Mr and Mrs George Bland.

Spalding Airways air taxi business. The Auster Autocrat G-AJDZ is being flown by Jim Crampton (right), with George Bland as a passenger, in 1949. (Ted Crampton)

In 1950 what had become known as Spalding Airways grew so much that George Clifton decided to move to new premises on the former RAF airfield at Westwood, Peterborough. Around this time Jim Crampton left Spalding Airways and set up his own private and business air taxi company in a field in Costessey on the outskirts of Norwich, using a caravan as his office. This field later became the venue for the Norfolk Show. Trading as Norfolk Airways, in addition to air taxi work he took on a variety of flying jobs such as pleasure flights, aerial-banner towing and aerial photography on a commercial scale. During the British winter periods in the early 1950s Jim turned his hand to bush flying in Africa: crop spraying, locust spraying and undertaking aerial surveys over jungle regions. He said:

We used to fly over the locust swarms in Kenya and spray them. I once got myself involved in a rebellion in the Sudan during one of the crop-spraying seasons. I had to fly over rebel strongholds with loud speakers fitted and a tape recorder telling them in Sudanese to disperse and go back to their homes. I don’t remember getting shot at and I don’t know if they ever went home.