The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour by Andrei Cherny (review)

Andrei Cherny presents a well-crafted, thoroughly researched, and artfully written book that delivers much more than its title, "The Candy Bombers," conveys. His subtitle, "America's Finest Hour," is truer to the book's fundamental point: "[this is] the story of when Americans learned—for the first time—how to act at the summit of world power . . . but it is by no means a simple story or a straight line" (p. 6).

Cherny fills 300-plus pages before arriving at the candy bombers. Using recently declassified materials, archived oral histories plus those he conducted, and a wide range of other archival sources, he covers the end of the war against Nazi Germany and the uncomfortable political structures put in place by the victors to govern Germany and Berlin. He sketches the political infighting in the United States that accompanied both parties' presidential election campaigns of 1948. He traces the debates around foreign policy strategies such as the Marshall Plan, identifying the movers and shakers who conceived and wielded these policies. He profiles Lucius Clay, James Forrestal, and Henry Wallace, all of whom shared a Wilsonian vision but each with very different emphases. He outlines the successive subversion of pluralistic governments in Eastern Europe by Communist operatives supported by the Soviet Union, culminating in the apparent assassination of Jan Masaryk in Prague in March 1948. Berlin itself makes an appearance as Cherny recounts the heyday of the Nazi party, the city's destruction by U.S. bombers, and the widespread rape and looting perpetrated by the troops of the conquering Soviet army.

All of this precedes the encounter of the young U.S. pilot, Gail (Hal) Halvorsen—a participant in the airlift only by chance—who in July 1948 gives up his between-flight rest to walk around Tempelhof Airfield, where he encounters a gaggle of Berlin's children watching the planes come and go. After an exchange stilted by the language barrier, Halvorsen spontaneously takes two pieces of gum from his pocket, breaks them in two, and gives them to children in the crowd.

Four children got pieces of gum; the rest passed around the wrapper, tearing off a sliver and sniffing it dreamily. "The expressions on their faces were incredulous, full of awe—as if they were entering a wonderland." Halvorsen watched their eyes grow big "like it was Christmas Day" (p. 299).

Seeing the reaction, Halvorsen spontaneously promised to drop candy for them from his plane the next day. Although his crew was initially reluctant, Halvorsen's insistence convinced them, and this simple act of human kindness began to grow beyond all imagining.

When the airlift began in late June 1948, it could not keep up with even the most rudimentary needs of Berlin's population. Faced with the likelihood of slow starvation, many Berliners were quite willing to trade freedom for bread. Between the summer of 1948 and the onset of winter, however, word of the candy bombers spread and gained support from other airlift pilots and eventually from Halvorsen's superiors. Major General William Tunner, who systematized the airlift to a level of precision that gave it at least a chance of success, gave Halvorsen not just permission to continue but public exposure. "Tunner—like Truman and Clay, but unlike LeMay, Bradley, Marshall, Vandenberg, and the rest—understood instinctively that the airlift's psychological dimension was as important as any other aspect" (p. 341). The campaign captured the imagination of the U.S. public, and contributions and support expanded, including from candy manufacturers.

The psychological climate in Berlin began to change. The kindness shown by the candy bombers contrasted sharply with the brutality of the Soviet conquest of Berlin and with Communist repression in the eastern sectors of the city. Berliners in the Western sectors began "to see they had a chance . . . that, in the airlift, they were joined together with...