The “great man” theory of history has long fallen out of favor, a victim of a closer examination of the not-so-great aspects of these men as well as the pursuit of a broader view of the past. A study of history that focused on the deeds of presidents, prime ministers, generals, and emperors has given way to one preoccupied with the tectonic shifts in society, culture, economics, and technology. Yet if we measure “greatness” not by wielding power but by affecting the course of events, America just lost one of its truly great men.
Gail “Hal” Halvorsen died on Feb. 16, surrounded by many members of his large family, in the state where he had been born more than a century earlier. After a hardscrabble upbringing on his parents’ struggling Utah sugar beet farm, he, like so many men of his generation, stepped forward to serve during World War II. He learned to fly, but unlike the ace fighter pilots or bombardiers, he was tapped to be a transport pilot, a truck driver of the sky, far from the theaters of battle. Aimless after the war, he stayed in what became the U.S. Air Force and so was sent to Germany in 1948, where his aimlessness ended.
Beginning in 1947, the Soviet Union had swept west across Europe, systematically deposing the fledgling democracies that lay between it and Germany and replacing them with communist puppet regimes. The postwar division of Berlin left the allies in control of the city’s western half but encircled by Soviet-administered territory. In the summer of 1948, Moscow blockaded all food, fuel, and supplies being sent to the western half of Berlin. It was widely assumed that the United States, Britain, and France had three options: retreat from Berlin, which would have likely precipitated the fall of the rest of Germany and perhaps all of Western Europe to the communists; break the blockade by force, likely beginning a Third World War with the Soviets outnumbering the combined allied armed forces in Europe 62-1; or do nothing as the 21 days of stockpiled food steadily depleted and 2 1/4 million people, largely women and children, starved.
Rejecting all three, the Western powers started loading planes with supplies and flying them from allied-controlled parts of Germany to western Berlin. At first a ragtag improvisation, the airlift transformed into a carefully orchestrated operation. Though it never included flying more than a couple of hundred airplanes the size of modern-day school buses at a time, the Berlin airlift kept a city alive.
Yet the Berliners themselves were no mere pawns. They had a decision to make. They were residents of what had recently been the capital of the Third Reich, now already eking out a meager existence amid the ruins and rubble left behind by American bombers. Was the chance for democracy and freedom worth the risk of starvation and death?
One July day, wandering around the edges of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, then-27-year-old Hal Halvorsen impulsively promised a group of children standing on the other side of the barbed wire fence that he would return the next day and drop them candy from his plane. He did so, tying Hershey bars and Wrigley’s Doublemint gum to parachutes made from handkerchiefs. Word spread, and the couple dozen children standing by the fence grew to thousands as the summer progressed, and he secretly continued his “candy bombing” until he was discovered and given permission to enlist other pilots in his mission.
His legend grew among the children and their parents, and the very character of the airlift was transformed. That winter, when conditions were harshest, when heavy fogs slowed the stream of transports to a trickle, the West Berliners refused the Soviet offer to provide food and heat in exchange for capitulation. They stood their ground. It is no stretch to say that but for the inspiration of the “Candy Bomber,” they very likely would not have. It is no further stretch to say that had they backed down, the rest of the 20th century would have been very different, devoid of a democratic West Germany, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and perhaps even the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain.
It is said that America is great because America is good. A hundred years from now, the “Candy Bomber” will be another American legend like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, or Johnny Appleseed. It will be the story of one of history’s great men.
Andrei Cherny is the author of The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour.
