The donated handkerchiefs that Mary Connors organized represented an enormous variety of fabrics, sizes, and designs. Personal handkerchiefs from American households arrived in Chicopee and were forwarded to Germany. Some were embroidered. Some were monogrammed. Some were very small. Some were large cloth napkins. The variety gave each drop package a kind of individual character: children who caught a parachute might get a plain white cloth or a embroidered linen that had belonged to someone’s grandmother in Ohio.
The flare chute through which the packages were deployed was not designed for this purpose. It was a tube used for ejecting pyrotechnic flares for signaling or illumination. The candy-parachute packages fit through it, more or less, and the deployment method was simple enough to execute during an approach sequence without requiring the pilot to leave the cockpit.
The deployed packages fell along the aircraft’s flight path, which led from the western approach corridor to the Tempelhof runways. The neighborhoods under the approach path became the candy drop zone. Children in those neighborhoods learned to watch for the wing-wiggling aircraft and to run toward where the packages were expected to land. The distribution was irregular: some packages landed in gardens or on rooftops, some in the street, some in difficult-to-reach spots. The letters children wrote to Halvorsen often included precise descriptions of where specific packages had come down.
No one was seriously injured by a falling candy package during Operation Little Vittles. This was fortunate rather than inevitable: a small bag of candy descending from a low-flying aircraft has some impact velocity, and the parachutes were not guaranteed to deploy reliably. The absence of injuries was noted by participants as a matter of genuine relief.