Feel good story.
It was the summer of 1948 when U.S. Air Force pilot Gail “Hal” Halvorsen noticed children clustered around a barbed-wire fence watching military planes at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin.
World War II had ended, and Halvorsen was part of an air mission to deliver food and fuel to desperate Berliners after the Soviet Union had blocked land and water access to areas of the country, leaving millions without access to basic goods.
Halvorsen, then 27, decided to park his plane and say hello to the kids at the fence.
“I saw right away that they had nothing and they were hungry,” he recalled. “So I reached into my pocket and pulled out all that I had: two sticks of gum.”
Halvorsen tore the Wrigley’s Spearmint gum into small strips — one for each child, he said. Then he made the kids a promise: He would return the next day to drop a load of chocolate bars from the sky.
“I told them that I’d ‘wiggle’ my wings so they’d know which pilot had the goods,” he said. “Then I went back to the base and asked all the guys to pool their candy rations for the drop.”
Following his first sweet mission — hundreds of Hershey chocolate bars were wrapped in parachutes made of handkerchiefs — Halvorsen returned again and again during the 15-month humanitarian airlift.
The children of Berlin soon gave him a nickname: the “Candy Bomber.”
ht/ bobcat
Makes me smile!
He deserved the long and happy life he was rewarded with.
What a cool story. Thanks Bobcat
Halvorsen flew over my kids’ elementary school a decade ago in a piper cub and did a candy drop in a nearby field . Great history lesson for the kids. Thank you, sir.
I just watched “The Big Lift” last month. Very good contemporaneous film about life in Berlin during the airlift. I highly recommend it.
And yet Obama apologized for this?
God Bless America and its Brothers and Sisters in Arms!
Salute!
Free candy from a plane and you get thanked, free candy from a windowless van and you get horrified stares.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Halverson.
@Bobcat& BFH, thanks for this uplifting story. I needed a lift.
In Biden’s new Twitter ad he says “America is an idea we’ve never lived up to”. Maybe in Biden’s America, but not in the Candy Bomber’s America.
We need to get this story from a non-leftie site. This draws too many hits for them.
It made its rounds with WWII pilots.
I was 5 when my Dad instructed me to wait on the front yard in Monterey CA and watch for his plane at lunch time.
He did arrive and wiggled his wings above our house.
I shall never forget that. Quite a thrill that it was just for me!
I’m guessing candy was quite an improvement over the bombs being dropped onto Nazi Germany.