## The Public Reaction and the American Press
One reason Operation Little Vittles grew beyond one pilot’s candy ration was the coverage it received in the American press. The story was the kind that newspapers of the era were well equipped to tell: a young American serviceman, a simple gesture, children on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. It was not ideologically complicated. It did not require the reader to understand the nuances of four-power occupation arrangements or currency reform disputes. It required only that the reader register the image of candy falling from the sky over a blockaded city.
Coverage appeared in American newspapers throughout fall 1948. The story traveled fast enough that it reached Mary Connors in Chicopee, Massachusetts, who organized the handkerchief collection effort. It reached the National Confectioners’ Association, which offered its institutional support. It reached schools across the United States, where children assembled candy packages to be dropped over Berlin.
American schoolchildren writing letters to West German children, packing candy for pilots to drop from planes, were participating in something with no precise precedent. The charitable machinery was not elaborate. The scale was not large in absolute terms. But the participation was wide enough to give the operation a genuinely popular character: it was not just the U.S. military doing this. It was American civilians, on some level, also choosing to do it.
Halvorsen later described receiving letters from the United States as well as from Berlin during this period: letters from candy manufacturers, from schoolchildren, from people who had seen a newspaper story and wanted to contribute. The administrative challenge of managing this input fell partly on him and partly on the base operations staff at Tempelhof.