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Gail Halvorsen, ‘Candy Bomber’ in Berlin Airlift, Dies at 101
From New York Times:
“ Lt. Gail S. Halvorsen, an Air Force transport pilot, was on the grounds of West Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield on a mid-July day in 1948, taking part in a historic confrontation of the early Cold War years, when he spotted some 30 German children in ragged clothing outside a fence.
He reached into his back pocket, extracted a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint and handed out the last two sticks of gum in the pack.
“The look in their eyes, I could see their appreciation for something so small,” he recalled long afterward. “I wanted to do something more, so I told them to come back later.”
He promised to drop candy to the youngsters on his flight the next day from Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, carrying food and other vital supplies in a massive relief mission known as the Berlin airlift.
“They asked how they would know it was me,” he said. “I told them I’ll wiggle the wings.”
In the months to come, an act of kindness by this American airman — the boys and girls of West Berlin would come to call him Uncle Wiggly Wings — grew into a storied good-will operation within a Great Powers drama.
Lieutenant Halvorsen and his two crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop a total of 23 tons of candies, chocolate and chewing gum wrapped in tiny parachutes from their planes while preparing to touch down at Tempelhof airfield with vast quantities of other supplies in an effort to break a Soviet land blockade of Berlin’s Allied-occupied western sectors.
When Mr. Halvorsen died on Wednesday at 101, he was remembered as the original “Candy Bomber” of the airlift, a defiance of Soviet power by the United States, Britain and France that also symbolized reconciliation between the German people and the Allies in the wake of World War II.
His death, in a hospital in Provo, Utah, was announced by the Gail S. Halvorsen Aviation Education Foundation.
The airlift began after the Soviet Union cut off the Allied powers’ land access to West Berlin, situated deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany, in June 1948. The people of West Berlin were faced with near starvation and an impending winter without fuel.
The airlift, which continued for 15 months, claimed the lives of 31 American airmen and 39 British fliers in accidents, but it thwarted the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s attempts to drive the West from the city. By the time it ended in September 1949 (the Soviet blockade had been lifted the previous May), Allied pilots had flown more than 277,000 missions, sometimes buzzed by Soviet fighters, to supply the city’s western sectors with 2.3 million tons of food, flour, coal, medicine and construction equipment.
Lieutenant Halvorsen, a native of Utah, flew 126 Berlin airlift missions, joined by his co-pilot, Capt. John Pickering, and his navigator, Sgt. Herschel Elkins.
When early press reports on the candy drops identified Lieutenant Halvorsen as the source of the sweets, he was summoned by Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, the airlift commander. He feared he would be court-martialed, since Air Force regulations prohibited any deviation from the airlift procedures.
But General Tunner was impressed by the good feelings Lieutenant Halvorsen had engendered for the United States only a few years after its bombers had left Germany in ruin. He encouraged the candy drops, from Douglas C-47s and later the more advanced C-54 transport planes, in what Lieutenant Halvorsen called Operation Little Vittles.
In September 1948, the Air Force sent Lieutenant Halvorsen back to the United States to publicize his efforts, and he appeared on the CBS-TV program “We the People.” American candy manufacturers began donating sweets, and schoolchildren volunteered to wrap them in simulated parachutes, made from handkerchiefs and twine, for shipment to Allied-occupied West Germany.
At least two dozen pilots from Lieutenant Halvorsen’s squadron were among those who took part in the candy drops. They all became known as Candy Bombers.
Lieutenant Halvorsen received many letters from German children during the airlift.
A 9-year-old named Peter Zimmerman sent him a homemade parachute and a map providing directions to his home for a candy drop. Lieutenant Halvorsen searched for the house on his next flight but couldn’t find it. As recounted in Andrei Cherny’s book “The Candy Bombers” (2008), Peter sent another note reading: “No chocolate yet. … You’re a pilot. … I gave you a map. … How did you guys win the war anyway?”
Lieutenant Halvorsen sent Peter a chocolate bar in the mail.
“Gail Halvorsen enchanted the children of Berlin,” recalled Ursula Yunger, who had been one of those children and later settled in the United States. “It wasn’t the candy,” she told The Tucson Citizen in 2004. “It was his profound gesture, showing us that somebody cared.”
Ms. Yunger had met Mr. Halvorsen for the first time at a reunion of airlift veterans in Tucson in September 2003. “I was just shaking,” she said. He hugged her and handed her a Hershey bar.
Gail Seymour Halvorsen was born on Oct. 10, 1920, in Salt Lake City, one of four children of Basil and Luella (Spencer) Halvorsen, who had a small farm in Rigby, Idaho, and later farmed sugar beets in Garland, Utah. He earned a private pilot’s license in 1941, briefly attended Utah State University, became an aviation cadet in the Army Air Forces and earned his wings in 1944.
He hoped to see combat in World War II, but he was assigned to ferry bombers and transport planes across the South Atlantic for the European and North African campaigns.
Remaining in military service after the war, he was stationed in Alabama when he was selected as a Berlin airlift pilot.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Halvorsen earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering from the University of Florida in a program devised by the Air Force Institute of Technology. He was later assigned to an Air Force command in California that pursued research and development for space projects.
He was commander of the Air Force base at Tempelhof from 1970 to 1974, when he retired as a colonel. He was later assistant dean of student life at Brigham Young University in Provo.
Mr. Halvorsen, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, served with his first wife, Alta Jolley Halvorsen, on missions the church sponsored to England and Russia. She died in 1999.
His survivors include his second wife, Lorraine (Pace) Halvorsen; his sons Brad, Robert and Michael and his daughters Denise Williams and Marilyn Sorenson, all from his first marriage; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In 1980, Mr. Halvorsen helped inaugurate Airlift of Understanding, an exchange program involving high school students from Berlin and Utah, and he made some 35 good-will trips to Berlin over the years. He wrote of his experiences in a memoir, “The Berlin Candy Bomber.”
On the 50th anniversary of the airlift, Mr. Halvorsen flew to Berlin in a restored cargo plane that had been used in the mission and was introduced by President Bill Clinton at commemorative ceremonies. In May 2009, he was honored at the Pentagon when it unveiled a display telling of humanitarian efforts by the armed forces. He attended a ceremony in Frankfurt in 2013 marking the 65th anniversary of the Berlin airlift’s beginning, and he was also present that year for the naming of a school for him in Berlin.
In the summer of 2014, Air Force crews who dropped food and water to Iraqi civilians besieged by Islamic State militants reprised Mr. Halvorsen’s thoughtfulness of generations past by packing sweets they had received from home or had purchased to supplement the necessities of life.
“We are definitely not at the level of the Candy Bomber, but I’d give us an ‘almost’ for our modern version of it,” said Sgt. Emily Edmunds, loadmaster superintendent for the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron.
Mr. Halvorsen took part in candy airdrops around the United States into his 90s in connection with programs emphasizing a spirit of giving among young people. When he celebrated his 100th birthday at a party in Provo, outside the home of his daughter Denise, with whom he was living, a helicopter from the Halvorsen foundation dropped candy to the gathering. The president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, sent a message to Mr. Halvorsen stating that he had “built a bridge of humanity and compassion between Americans and Berliners.”
“The airlift reminded me that the only way to fulfillment in life, real fulfillment, is to serve others,” Mr. Halvorsen told CNN on the Berlin airlift’s 40th anniversary. “I was taught that as a youth in my church, and I found when I flew day and night to serve a former enemy that my feelings of fulfillment and being worthwhile were the strongest that I’ve felt.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.“
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