In the summer of 1948, a group of children gathered at a barbed-wire fence near Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin. They watched the American transport planes come in low, one after another, bringing food and coal to a city that the Soviet Union had sealed off from the outside world. When a young Utah pilot named Gail Halvorsen walked over to speak with them, he expected to hear requests. What he got instead was a kind of quiet declaration. The children, most of them around ten or twelve years old, told him not to give up on them. They said that freedom was worth fighting for. Halvorsen had exactly two sticks of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum in his pocket. He broke each stick in half and passed the four pieces through the wire. The children who didn’t get a piece tore off strips of the foil wrapper and smelled them. Nobody complained. Nobody asked for more. Halvorsen later said the children’s restraint struck him more than anything else about that encounter. He walked back to his C-54 Skymaster carrying a promise he had made on the spot: he would drop candy from his plane the next day. He said they would know it was him because he would wiggle his wings.
That roadside gesture, unplanned and entirely unauthorized, would eventually grow into an operation involving American candy companies, university students, and thousands of donated handkerchiefs. It would produce a figure that West Berliners would remember for generations and that Halvorsen himself would spend the rest of a very long life explaining, re-enacting, and marveling at. He died in February 2022, at age 101, having returned to Berlin more than thirty times. The candy drops he carried out in the summer and fall of 1948 were themselves a footnote to the larger Berlin Airlift, an extraordinary logistical effort that kept roughly two million people alive over eleven months. But they carried a symbolic weight that the tonnage figures could not. In a city that had been bombed into rubble, divided by great powers, and was now being strangled economically, a pilot dropping handkerchief parachutes loaded with chocolate bars said something that the official communiques did not.