This was not a designation that Halvorsen chose. It was given to him by the children who received his drops and wrote his letters. The letters addressed to “Onkel Wackelflügel” arrived because children had decided that was what to call him. The name reached the base operations staff at Tempelhof and attracted the attention of Halvorsen’s superiors partly because the name on the letters was recognizably specific: not “the candy pilot” but a name, a designation, an identity that the children had assigned.
Halvorsen used the nickname throughout his later life and took evident pleasure in it. It was both more specific than “Candy Bomber” and more personal. “Candy Bomber” was what journalists and later historians used. “Uncle Wiggly Wings” was what the children at the fence and in the streets below the approach path had come up with themselves.
## Two Sticks of Gum, Measured Against Everything Else
It is tempting to end an account of Gail Halvorsen by placing the candy drops in the context of the Berlin Airlift’s larger history and finding them, by comparison, small. Twenty-three tons of candy against 2.3 million tons of supplies. One pilot’s unauthorized initiative against the organized effort of two nations and the sustained work of tens of thousands of people. A string of reunions against the geopolitical transformation that the airlift helped set in motion.
By any of these measures, Operation Little Vittles was small. It did not end the blockade. It did not by itself transform German-American relations. It did not deter Soviet aggression or strengthen NATO or cause the Wall to fall. All of those things happened for reasons that had nothing to do with candy parachutes.