Candy Bomber

by Michael O. Tunnell

  A new generation of children, the kids of the kids from 1948–49, scrambles after candy parachutes dropped by Halvorsen to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Air lift. (July 1969)

  Lt. Gail Halvorsen stands next to the landing gear of a Douglas C-54 Skymaster on the tarmac at Rhein-Main. He is holding one of the first three parachutes to be dropped to the children of West Berlin. (July 1948)

  Biographical Note

  Gail Halvorsen’s fame as the originator of Operation Little Vittles has followed him throughout his life. Now in his eighties Halvorsen continues to receive accolades for his candy bombing during the Berlin Airlift.

  Halvorsen has also participated in candy drops at schools and in other humanitarian airlift efforts around the world. These activities began the moment Halvorsen returned to the United States in 1949. His hometown, Garland, Utah, threw a two-day celebration to welcome him back, and the festivities included a candy drop from a C-47 flying over Main Street. “The only casualty was a little girl … [whose] lollipop came loose and gave her a scratch on the head,” Halvorsen remembers.

  Home on leave, Lt. Halvorsen flies over Garland, Utah, dropping candy parachutes to a crowd on Main Street. (February 26, 1949)

  Since his days as Base Commander at Tempelhof, he has returned to Germany for many Airlift-related events. In 1985 he was there when the grade school at Rhein-Main Air Force Base was christened with a new name: Gail S. Halvorsen Elementary School. Then Halvorsen was back in Berlin on September 30, 1989, for the fortieth anniversary of the Airlift’s final day. Two of his sons joined him in a large C-130 cargo plane as he dropped candy parachutes over the city. Among the children who chased after the treats were four of Mercedes Simon Wild’s children, three of Gail Halvorsen’s children, and seven of his grandchildren.

  Halvorsen’s first opportunity for another humanitarian airlift experience came in 1994. The Air Force allowed him to participate in Operation Provide Promise, a three-and-a-half-year relief mission to refugees in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbia (one of the former Yugoslavian republics) had ignited age-old ethnic hostilities that erupted into civil war in this region of Eastern Europe. Nearly two million homeless refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (also former Yugoslavian republics) had to flee the war-torn area.

  Gail Halvorsen prepares to drop a candy parachute from a US Army helicopter as part of the fortieth-anniversary celebration of the Berlin Airlift. (September 1989)

  A spry seventy-three-year-old Halvorsen joined the crew of a C-130 flying from Germany to Bosnia. Unlike in the Berlin Airlift, this plane didn’t land to unload. Instead, it parachuted several giant pallets, each holding 3,500 pounds (1,600 kilograms) of supplies. A cardboard box filled with candy parachutes was fastened to the last pallet, and they scattered as it dropped away from the plane.

  Since the Bosnia drop Gail Halvorsen has continued to be involved in a variety of events related to the Berlin Airlift. In 1995 NASA took a candy parachute from 1948 on the Space Shuttle. When the Shuttle docked with the Russian space station, Mir, an astronaut snapped a photograph of a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut holding the parachute between them.

  In 1994 the Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation completed restoration of a C-54 and dubbed it the Spirit of Freedom. The plane became a flying museum of the Berlin Airlift, which Halvorsen has flown to many locations for display. In 1998 he joined the crew to pilot the Spirit of Freedom to Berlin for the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Airlift.

  Timothy Chopp, founder of the Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation, and Gail Halvorsen serve as pilot and copilot of the Spirit of Freedom. (1998)

  On the way over, the plane stopped at Westover Air Force Base near Chicopee, Massachusetts, where it was met with band music and by a crowd of eight hundred school kids. Also in the gathering were a few people who had packed candy and tied up parachutes at the Center for Operation Little Vittles in 1948 and 1949.

  Once in Berlin, as residents toured the exhibits aboard the Spirit of Freedom, Halvorsen received yet another reminder of the ties that bind him to the children of fifty years earlier. A man approached him and held out an old handkerchief with the German words “‘Little Vittles’ for the children of Lt. Halvorsen. Please return this parachute to a Military Policeman at Tempelhof Airport.” “Please forgive me,” the fellow said. “I just couldn’t part with my parachute, my personal symbol of freedom.”

  The next year found Halvorsen heading back to Eastern Europe, where violence had erupted once again in Serbia, in the province of Kosovo. The Air Force invited him to fly on a C-130 making a supply run to a Kosovar refugee camp in Albania. With supplies of candy and gum—along with a large collection of donated stuffed animals and school supplies—he reported for duty. This time he was able to deliver his treats in person, flying into the refugee camp in a helicopter. “What a reception,” he recalls. “These children had the same bright faces, appreciation, and optimism exhibited by the Berlin kids at the barbed wire fence in 1948…. They had hope because of people in America who … knew they were in trouble and promised to stand by them. Hope is still the name of the game.”

  Halvorsen with Kosovar refugee children at Camp Hope in Albania. (1999)

  Hope was what Halvorsen’s Christmas drops to the people of the Micronesian Islands were all about. In 2000 and 2002 Gail joined a flight crew parachuting Christmas boxes onto seven remote islands. The containers were filled with Christmas treats, toys, and other surprises for the children—as well as much needed supplies, such as machetes, fishing gear, and clothing.

  In his late-eighties Gail Halvorsen is still qualified to fly C-54s, and he can be seen from time to time copiloting the Spirit of Freedom to air shows and celebrations. He also flies his own single-engine plane around Utah and its neighboring states.

  Halvorsen still makes the occasional candy drop over schools, and he continues to be honored in one fashion or another for his legacy. In 1999 he was inducted into the Air Tanker Association Hall of Fame. In 2001 the military named its new twenty-five-thousand-pound (eleven-thousand-kilogram) aircraft loader the Halvorsen Loader. And on October 10, 2005, Gail Halvorsen attended, as an honored guest, closure ceremonies at Rhein-Main Air Force Base. “Rhein-Main has been a pretty big part of my life,” he said, as the United States turned the base back over to Germany. Later that month Halvorsen was involved in candy drops to Mississippi children living with the terrible destruction of Hurricane Katrina. He noted that the homes in south Mississippi looked familiar. “You can look right through the buildings…. It was the same way in Berlin.”

  In 2008 Gail Halvorsen returned to Germany to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift. Though he was eighty-seven, his schedule of appearances around the country and the globe had not diminished, and neither had his enthusiasm for keeping alive the spirit of Operation Vittles and Operation Little Vittles. If you were to ask how he feels about the honors and opportunities that have come over the years as a result of his candy drops, Halvorsen would likely shake his head and give his standard, unassuming answer: “All this for two sticks of gum!”

  Historical Note

  Adolf Hitler launched World War II by attacking Poland in September of 1939. In the early days of a war that lasted six years, Hitler and the leaders of his ruling political party, the Nazis, made an alliance with Russia, known at that time as the Soviet Union (USSR). But the Nazis and Soviets had never liked one another, so the alliance was shaky at best. As it turned out, Hitler had never planned to keep his agreement with the Soviet Union, and on June 22, 1941, the German armies attacked Russia.

  The Soviets were forced to change their allegiances in order to survive the rapid onslaught of Hitler’s blitzkrieg (lightning war). The Allies—a coalition of several countries, including Great Britain and the United States—also needed help against Germany, so they agreed to join forces with the Russians. The Soviets were finally able to drive back the Nazis, but the German armies exacted a ter
rible toll on the Russian people, twenty million of whom died during the war.

  The Brandenburg Gate, one of Berlin’s most recognized landmarks, was damaged by Russian artillery.

  By the end of 1944 the tide of conflict in Europe clearly had changed. The Allies were driving German forces out of occupied countries and back behind the borders of their own land. The Soviets attacked Germany from the east, the other Allies from the west.

  The Allied powers decided that the Soviets would be the ones to take Berlin, Germany’s capital city. Seeking revenge for the twenty million Russian war deaths, the Soviet army was merciless as it marched through Germany. Berlin, the symbol of Nazi power, paid a heavy price. Already bombed into crumbling piles of rubble by the United States and Britain, Berlin soon surrendered to the Soviets. Hitler, refusing to be taken alive, shot himself.

  The Western Allies had already fought and beaten Germany once before—in World War I (1914–1918). From that experience they learned that further punishing a conquered people creates resentment. The crushing war debt they placed on Germany after the first World War not only added to the people’s pain but also destroyed their pride. Soon the country began hoping for a national “savior”—someone to restore Germany to its former glory. The “savior” who surfaced, Adolf Hitler, was instead a destroying angel for both Germany and the Allies.

  The United States, in particular, did not want to make the same mistake again and proposed the Marshall Plan, a program to rebuild a free and prosperous Germany. The Soviets protested this policy, and the Western Allies soon realized there was little hope for Russian cooperation. Before the United States, Britain, and France arrived to take control of their respective sectors of Berlin, the Soviets dismantled and removed from those areas such facilities as power stations, factories, and telephone-switching stations. They hoped to keep their former friends from meddling in their affairs by forcing them to abandon Berlin.

  As tensions grew, the Russians decided a blockade of the city would at last force the Western Allies to leave. The Berlin Airlift was the surprising answer to a plan they thought foolproof. The Soviets made some attempts to stop the Airlift by practicing anti-aircraft fire near the air corridors into Berlin and by “buzzing” American cargo planes—flying past at top speed and narrowly missing them. They even bribed West Berliners by offering fresh vegetables, coal, and other necessities to those who agreed to sign up for East Berlin ration cards. Very few West Berliners—perhaps four percent—participated in the Soviets’ ploy to win them over.

  In the end the Berlin Airlift proved successful, but the United States and Soviet Union’s mistrust and fear of one another had already engendered the Cold War—a period of tension that began with the Berlin blockade and continued with the threat of nuclear conflict. Much of the world was alarmed by the Soviets’ iron-fisted rule of Eastern Europe. Countries behind the USSR’s “Iron Curtain” became so isolated from the rest of the planet that little was known about what was happening within their borders. In 1961 the Soviet Union built a concrete and barbed-wire wall to separate East and West Berlin. Guards with machine guns manned the towers and stopped any who tried to cross.

  The burned-out shell of the Reichstag sits at the center of what is left of Berlin.

  It took four decades before things in the Soviet Union changed. In 1989, as a more liberal brand of leadership took hold in Russia, the Berlin Wall came down, and Soviet control of Eastern Europe ended. Today Germany is once again a unified country, and East and West Berlin have come together as a single city.

  Gail Halvorsen looks out over his land in a Rocky Mountain valley in Utah.

  Author’s Note

  I had long been familiar with the Berlin Airlift, or “Operation Vittles,” which I had learned about in school. However, I knew nothing about “Operation Little Vittles” until a dignified older gentleman dressed in an Air Force uniform came to speak to the youth group at our church. This was my introduction to Gail Halvorsen, the Berlin Candy Bomber. His story captivated me that day and eventually led me to write this book. But first I spent months mulling over what retired Colonel Halvorsen had said. Finally I decided to write a picture book about his amazing candy drops. I completed the manuscript only to discover that Margot Theis Raven had beaten me to the punch. Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot (Sleeping Bear Press, 2002) had just hit the bookstore shelves.

  I dumped my plans for a picture book about Halvorsen. Instead, I realized I’d really rather write a longer book, one with photographs documenting the Candy Bomber’s exploits. I soon discovered that Halvorsen had written his own book for adults about his experiences during the Berlin Airlift (The Berlin Candy Bomber, Horizon, 2002). It was replete with photographs and other images, many of which would be perfect for the book I envisioned.

  I found a phone number for the Halvorsen residence in a nearby Utah town and gave it a try. Gail’s cordial voice greeted me on the other end of the line. The Halvorsens live in Utah during the warm months and in Arizona the rest of the time, so I was fortunate to have called during the right part of the year. I introduced myself and explained what I hoped to do with his story. To my delight, Gail invited me to come by the house to talk further about my plans. A week later I found myself chatting with him in his living room and looking at his photograph collection.

  The most rewarding aspect of writing this book was getting to know Gail Halvorsen. He helped me every step of the way to make this project a success. He allowed me to carry home an enormous box filled with pictures, newspaper clippings, letters and drawings from German children, and more—the very sorts of images you see within these pages. I scanned well over three hundred items and placed the images on a compact disc for Gail. He was ecstatic to have his memories digitized—so much so that he guarded them for my use. I couldn’t believe it when I received a call from Gail asking if someone else could use a few photos from the CD. Of course, I told Gail that they were his to give, not mine, but I was impressed and humbled by the respect he afforded me. That is simply the kind of person Gail Halvorsen is. It is not difficult to understand why, after sixty years, so many people in Germany and around the world hold him in such high esteem.

  The author stands with Gail Halvorsen, the Wasatch Mountains in the background. (June 25, 2009)

  I began this project because I wanted to share a compelling and important story with a young audience. I ended the endeavor thankful for the privilege and honor it provided me. I discovered in Gail Halvorsen and the other men of “Operation Little Vittles” true American heroes—heroes as much for their compassion as for their bravery and moral strength. Their example has uplifted me, and I hope that my recounting of their exploits will do the same for my readers.

  Selected References

  All quotations come from the author’s personal interviews with Gail Halvorsen or from the references listed below.

  Center for Balkan Development.

  http://www.friendsofbosnia.org/edu_bos.html

  Cherny, Andrei. The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour. New York: Putnam, 2008.

  Halvorsen, Gail S. Speech to National Geographic Society (tape recording). Washington, DC, February 18, 1949.

  Halvorsen, Gail S. The Berlin Candy Bomber. 3rd ed. Bountiful, UT: Horizon, 2002.

  Huschke, Wolfgang J. The Candy Bombers: The Berlin Airlift 1948/49. Berlin: Metropol, 1999.

  Irvin, David W. Highway to Freedom. Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing, 2002.

  Launius, Roger D., and John W. Leland. Military Airlift Command Oral History Program, Interview No. 1: Colonel Gail S. Halvorsen, USAF-Retired, May 13, 1988. Scott Air Force Base, IL: November 1988.

  Pennacchio, Charles F. “The East German Communists and the Origins of the Berlin Blockade Crisis.” East European Quarterly 29, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 293–314.

  Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950.

  Symposium: Final Status f
or Kosovo: Untying the Gordian Knot. http://pbosnia.kentlaw.edu/symposium/the-map-final-copy-with-proof-corr.doc

  For Further Reading

  Ayer, Eleanor H. Berlin. Cities at War. Toronto: New Discovery/Maxwell Macmillan, 1992.

  Raven, Margot Theis. Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot. Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear Press, 2002.

  Westerfield, Scott. The Berlin Airlift. Turning Points in American History. Manitowoc, WI: Silver Burdett, 1989.

  Photo Credits

  Front cover

  US Air Force (top)

  Front matter

  US Air Force, pp. i, ii–iii, vi, viii, x

  Chapter 1

  National Archives, p. 2; US Air Force, pp. 3, 8–9, 11; © Cartesia Software, p. 5

  Chapter 2

  US Air Force, pp. 14, 18, 24–25, 27, 29; US Air Force or US Army, p. 19

  Chapter 3

  US Air Force, pp. 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39

  Chapter 4

  US Air Force, pp. 42, 49

  Chapter 5

  Picture Alliance/DPA, © DPA-Fotoreport, p. 52; US Air Force, p. 63, 65

  Chapter 6