## The Children Who Wrote Letters
One of the most documentable aspects of Operation Little Vittles is the correspondence it generated. The children who received drops wrote letters. The letters arrived at Tempelhof addressed to “Onkel Wackelflügel,” “Uncle Wiggly Wings,” the name that had spread through the neighborhoods near the airport’s flight path.
The letters are a primary source. They are not filtered through Halvorsen’s later recollections or through the commemorative framework that developed over decades. They are direct accounts from Berlin children describing what happened when candy fell from the sky over their neighborhood.
Peter Zimmermann described his parachute in enough detail that Halvorsen could locate where it had landed. A child who signed a letter as “Mercedes Simon” described catching a parachute and sharing it with a sister. Other letters described the parachutes landing in gardens, on rooftops, and in the street, and the scrambles that followed as children and sometimes adults competed to reach them.
The letters also contained drawings, simple diagrams of the parachutes, expressions of thanks, and in some cases the kind of philosophical statements about freedom and hope that Halvorsen would later cite as formative. Whether or not the children who wrote these letters were fully articulating their own views or repeating things they had heard from adults is impossible to determine. What the letters do establish is that the drops were reaching their intended audience and that the children were paying close attention to the aircraft coming in overhead.
The name “Uncle Wiggly Wings” was not the only designation Halvorsen acquired. German Berliners called him “der Schokoladenonkel” (the chocolate uncle) and “der Schokoladenflieger” (the chocolate flier). The aircraft themselves had a collective nickname: “Rosinenbomber,” the raisin bombers. The raisin reference came from an early drop that included raisins among the candy, but the name expanded to cover all the airlift aircraft as a kind of affectionate rebuke to the word “bomber” itself. These had been, until a few years before, enemy bombers over Berlin. Now they were raisin bombers.