Lockerbie

Expect some more of these kinds of posts here on PhotographWorks

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A series on TV a few months ago looked into the bombing of Pam Am flight 103.in 1988.

Lockerbie is a small town in the south west of Scotland, population of about 4,000.

It is home to the largest lamb market in Scotland. It is also on a flight path,

In 1988 Pam Am flight 103 fell on the town after a bomb exploded in the luggage bay. The bomb blew a hole in the side of the plane and the nose broke off.

The wreckage landed over an area 2,200 square kilometres (845 square miles) and all 243 passengers and 16 crew died.

Eleven people died in Lockerbie when wreckage landed on the town.

The TV series mentioned a Ukrainian chapel in the town that is still in use today..

That’s how I read about Hallmuir Prisoner of War Camp two km (a mile and a half) from Lockerbie.

The camp was built during World War II to hold German and Italian prisoners of war. After the war it held Ukrainian soldiers from the Galician Division of the Waffen SS.

The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) began service in 1943. with Ukrainian volunteers from Galicia. Later some Slovaks joined.

They fought on the Eastern Front, and in civilian ‘reprisal actions’.

There are services on the first Sunday of every alternate month in the Ukranian chapel. So it seems likely that there must be some Ukrainians who stayed on at the town after their release.

So now the next section of this post is me imagining what may have happened.

We start with a Ukrainian man who joined the Waffen SS. He saw action on the Eastern Front. He also took part in ‘reprisal actions’ against civilians.

He fought at the Battle of Brody, where four out of five of his fellow soldiers died.

He survived and retreated west and was captured. He. became a prisoner of war and was taken to Scotland at the end of the war. And he ended up in Hallmuir.

After his denazification and release, he married a Scottish woman and took up sheep farming. He sold his lambs in the Lockerbie lamb market. And every other Sunday he went to the chapel at Hallmuir to pray.

And in 1988 a piece of fuselage landed on him as he tended his flock.

How bizarre would that be?

In fact, the records show that none of the eleven dead from Lockerbie had a Ukrainian sounding name.

The Remains Of The Plane

Investigators put together the broken Pan Am plane. It is still locked away in a huge hanger at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) facility in Farnborough, Hampshire..

To see photos, google ‘Peter Macdiarmid flight 103’ in image search.

Two United States Army Air Corps officers started Pan Am in 1927. They started it because they didn’t like the influence of the Colombian air carrier SCADTA in Central America. They didn’t like it because was owned by Germans and they saw the coming conflict.

SCADTA ceased operations after Pearl Harbour and the Colombian government bought the assets for its national airline SACO. That became the Avianca, with more than 125 routes worldwide.

Meanwhile, Pan American lost a lot of business after Lockerbie because people didn’t trust the airline’s security.

Then the airline suffered along with all airlins during the first Gulf War. And PanAm filed for bankruptcy and ceased trading in December 1991.