US ‘candy bomber’ back in Berlin after 70 years

BERLIN: When in 1948 US bombers started dropping tiny, improvised parachutes loaded with sweets into Berlin during the Soviet blockade, one little German girl wrote to complain. Mercedes Wild, now 78, recalled how she protested that the constant drone of airlift planes disturbed her chickens — and during the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, eggs were a valuable commodity.

Then Gail Halvorsen, the US pilot who dreamed up the candy drops, wrote back, enclosing sticks of chewing gum and a lollipop with his letter. His gesture sparked a long-lasting friendship between Halvorsen, Wild and their families which mirrored the post-World War II German-American relationship, she told AFP. “It wasn’t the sweets that impressed me, it was the letter,” she said. “I grew up fatherless, like a lot of (German) children at that time, so knowing that someone outside of Berlin was thinking of me gave me hope.” “Candy bomber” Halvorsen insists that the real heroes of the Berlin Airlift — the mammoth logistical operation to air-drop supplies into West Berlin after the Soviet Union blockaded it — were inside the city.

“The heroes of the Berlin Airlift were not the pilots, the heroes were the Germans — the parents and children on the ground,” said the 98-year-old American veteran, calling them “the stalwarts of the confrontation with the Soviet Union”. The frail ex-pilot was back at Berlin’s former Tempelhof airport, now a public park, for a commemoration of the daring aviation feat by western Allies in 1948-49, officially known as ‘Operation Vittles’. –

Tens of thousands of people flocked to the festivities to the 70th anniversary of the end of the 15-month Soviet blockade. The airlift was “the outstretched hand of the former war enemies to Germany,” Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen at a ceremony on the eve of the commemoration.