The pilots who flew the airlift were professional enough to recognize that the operation they were part of was significant in ways beyond their individual missions. Some wrote home about it. Some gave interviews to journalists who were covering the airlift for American newspapers and newsreel services. The public interest in the airlift was high enough that press coverage was extensive, and the pilots who were doing the flying were aware of being watched.
Halvorsen fit this environment in some ways and was unusual in others. He was a competent professional pilot who flew his assigned missions reliably. What was unusual was the candy drops, which were not part of his professional role and which he carried out without authorization at personal risk of discipline. The courage involved in that decision was different in kind from the flying itself: it was the courage of doing something genuinely unauthorized because it seemed right.
## William Tunner and the Science of Supply
No account of the Berlin Airlift is complete without substantial attention to William H. Tunner, the general who organized it into something that could actually work.
Tunner was fifty-three years old when he took over the airlift in late July 1948. He had been born in Virginia and had attended West Point, graduating in 1928. His pre-war career was in Air Corps transport operations. During World War II, he commanded the India-China Wing of the Air Transport Command, the organization responsible for supplying China over the Himalayas after Japanese forces cut the land route in 1942. The Hump operation was one of the most demanding supply missions of the war: pilots flew over mountains reaching 15,000 feet or higher, in extreme weather, with limited navigational aids. It killed a great many people and delivered a great deal of cargo, and Tunner learned, through that experience, what a large-scale airlift operation required.