The handkerchief problem also found a solution. A college student named Mary C. Connors, from Chicopee, Massachusetts, took on the task of coordinating donations of handkerchiefs to be used as parachutes. Under her organization, Connors and her network gathered handkerchiefs from donors across the country and shipped them to the airlift operation. The donated handkerchiefs ranged from the small and plain to the large and embroidered, and they made improbable parachutes: square pieces of fabric tied at the corners around small bags of candy, knotted at the top and tossed through the flare chute as the aircraft descended toward Tempelhof.
Halvorsen himself returned to the United States in January 1949 and handed over operational leadership to Captain Lawrence Caskey, who continued the drops under the same framework. The operation continued until May 13, 1949, slightly after the Soviet lifting of the blockade on May 12.
By its end, Operation Little Vittles had dropped what was later calculated at more than 23 tons of candy from more than 250,000 parachutes. The figure in some sources is listed as approximately 21 tons; the variation reflects different methods of accounting for what counted as candy-only payload versus total drop package weight. The number is not in dispute as an order of magnitude: tens of tons of chocolate bars, gum, and candy fell on West Berlin over the operation’s course.
The relationship between this figure and the broader airlift tonnage is worth keeping clear. The Berlin Airlift delivered approximately 2.3 million tons of supplies to West Berlin over its roughly fifteen-month course. Operation Little Vittles contributed 23 tons. The candy drops were not a supply operation. They were something else: a signal, a gesture, a form of communication between people on the ground and a pilot in the sky that required no common language and carried no message that a blockade could intercept.