Passing of the Candy Bomber
Yesterday a remarkable and touching chapter of immediate post WW2 history closed with the passing of former US Airforce Colonel Gail Halvorson at aged 101. Halvorson was better known as the Candy Bomber or Uncle Wiggly Wings during the infamous Berlin Airlift.
In June 1948, as relations between the US (and its European allies) and the Soviet Union dramatically soured, one of the most poignant manifestation of what came to be called the Cold War was the sudden Soviet blockade of West Berlin. Just as all of post war Germany had been parceled into four zones administered by the victorious Allied powers (the US, UK, France and the Soviet Union) so too was Berlin similarly partitioned into four administrative zones administered by the same four powers. Berlin however was ensconced inside the Soviet Zone of Germany (that later became East Germany) and thus was surrounded by the Soviets. To ramp up the pressure on President Truman and to impose Soviet power in the region, Stalin ordered the blockade of all road and rail links into West Berlin from West Germany in an attempt to starve the citizens of West Berlin into submission thus enabling the Soviets to seize control of the whole city.
The western allies, led by the US, mounted an ambitious campaign of air lifts to fly in needed food, fuel and other supplies to keep the citizens of West Berlin alive. At the peak of the Berlin Air Lift, allied supply planes (mostly Douglas C47 Dakotas and C54 Skymasters) were landing at Berlin – Templehof Airport at the rate of 1 plane every 90 seconds. Over the 15-month period of the airlift, over 278,000 landings were completed, and 2.3 million tons of supplies airlifted in before the Soviets backed down and lifted the blockade.
A heartwarming chapter of the Berlin Airlift occurred in July 1948 when then Lieutenant Halvorson happened to spend a few spare hours of time off inside West Berlin. Given the short amount of time he was granted, he and his friend could not do much sightseeing. As they approached the airport along a road that bordered the perimeter fence of Templehof, Gail stopped to film the airlift with his home cine-camera. He noticed about 30 skinny German kids aged 6 to 15 crowding the perimeter fence and watching the landing and taking off of the planes and the unloading of the lifesaving supplies. Many of these kids wore rags for clothes and being it was summer, many of the boys were shirtless and had no shoes. Gail and his friend stopped and watched these impoverished local children play and he approached the perimeter fence. The children quickly crowded around the fence to talk to the American pilots.
The older children who spoke some English asked what he did, and he told them that he was one of the pilots who was part of the airlift. What happened next changed Gail’s world forever. These children profusely thanked him for what he and the Americans and British were doing to save them. They said that in July it’s easy to fly in here but in the winter, when it is cold and rainy it will be hard to keep flying in so please don’t give up on us when it gets tough. Realising that more was at stake than just food to keep them alive, one boy said, “We can get by on a little food, but if we lose our freedom, we may never get it back”. Having lived under the tyranny of Nazism, even these children knew that if the airlift failed, they would live under the tyranny of Soviet communism. Gail was gob smacked by the clarity and simplicity of what he was actually doing and its clear impact on these young hungry children who had survived the awful privations of the Allied bombings, the Battle of Berlin and the aftermath of the war.
Despite their deprivation, not one of these kids begged or asked for food until Gail realised that none of them would’ve had anything like candy in months even years and he dug into his pockets to see what he had to give and all he had was two sticks of chewing gum. What happened next transfixed Gail. The children to whom he gave the sticks of gum to broke the gum up into small pieces so that as many of the children could have but a tiny piece. Then those who could not have any gum took the foil gum wrapper and were content to merely smell the scent of the American gum, passing the wrapper from child to child until all who were gathered had shared. He knew that the citizens of Berlin were suffering and that he was part of a superhuman effort to save these people, but he saw a real-life consequence of the starvation of the people and its effect on these innocent children.
Wanting to support these young children in any small way possible, he pledged to get them some chocolate and other candy. The excited children begged to know when he would return with what to them would’ve been pure gold and something they had likely not seen in a long time. Gail knew that a short leave inside Berlin like he had been granted was likely never going to be granted again such was the enormous pressure of time on the pilots who flew these missions around the clock. He said to the children, I will drop the candy from the window of the plane when I am landing. To which the children responded, how will we know it is your plane for thousands of flights land every day. He said that as I am approaching the runway, I will wiggle my plane’s wings and then we will make the drop.
Gail and his friend returned to the airport and when back at the supply depot in West Germany, he got all his friends to give over their entitlement of chocolate and candy bars and he and his fellow crew members used their handkerchiefs to make miniature parachutes because to throw even small chocolate bars at 110mph might injure the children. Sure enough on his next flight into Berlin, as he approached the runway, he wiggled the wings of his plane and made the drop of the Hershey’s chocolate bars down to the now hundreds of eager children waiting in the vacant land on the approach to the runway.
Such was the popularity of the drop that Gail began casting around for spare candy and chocolate and handkerchiefs amongst the various pilots, crew and ground crew at the air force base and pretty soon the candy drops became a regular feature. Needless to say, the crowds of children swelled to thousands as the prospect of American chocolate dropped from a plane was on offer. After a few weeks, Gail was reported to his superior officers who at first reprimanded him for not asking permission first but eventually they relented and soon US chocolate and candy manufacturers came on board and thousands of people across the US made the mini parachutes and the candy drops became regular and widespread even across Berlin enabling tens of thousands of children to have a little treat above the mundane tightly rationed food they were forced to subsist on in what came to be dubbed as Operation Little Vittles eventually dropping over 20 tons of confectionary in 9 months!
Gail Halvorson became a hero to the people of Berlin. After the end of the airlift, he was showered with awards of gratitude by the Mayor of Berlin and the leaders of the nascent republic of West Germany. Gail maintained strong ties to Berlin for decades after and he made regular appearances at ceremonies held to honour the anniversaries of the lifting of the blockade. In 1970 he was appointed the senior US Airforce commander at Templehof Airport in Berlin in recognition of his strong connection to the city. When a retirement ceremony was held at the airport when his service in Berlin was up, thousands of the then children of Berlin in 1948 came now as elderly adults to meet the man who had brought a ray of hope and happiness during one of the darkest times of their young lives.
Gail Halvorson was a humble farm boy from southern Utah and Idaho and never sought fame or glory, merely to honour a promise to get some chocolate for a handful of blond haired disheveled German kids at the fence of Templehof airport. This small act of kindness mushroomed to a potent symbol of freedom and became emblematic of the efforts the allies went to to rebuild the country that they had shattered to defeat the horrors of Hitler’s regime.
PBS made a documentary about Gail Halvorson and his role as the Candy Bomber. A 5 minute summary is here when he talks about his first meeting with the kids https://youtu.be/5iaWzIX4mp0 and here is a link to the entire show https://youtu.be/jGc4vY_GwSc
Gail Seymour Halvorson – October 20, 1920 to February 16, 2022 – may he Rest in Peace.