When in 1948 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, she said.
“It wasn’t the sweets that impressed me, it was the letter,” Ms. Wild recalled.
“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 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 American veteran.
15-month blockade
“They were the stalwarts of the confrontation with the Soviet Union, not the guys bringing in the food, it was the people (of West Berlin) standing up for themselves.”
Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of the end of the 15-month Soviet blockade.
The frail 98-year-old ex-pilot was back at Berlin’s former Tempelhof airport for the festivities to remember the operation by the western Allies in 1948-49.
Mr. Halvorsen was guest of honour at Sunday’s festival to mark 70 years since the lifting of the Soviet blockade which sparked ‘Operation Vittles’, as the Berlin Airlift was officially known.
It flew in supplies to West Berlin’s 2.5 million population amid cold war tensions in Germany’s ruined capital, still reeling from the Second World War.
Operating almost non-stop and through the harsh German winter, the Airlift carried more than two million tonnes of supplies on more than 2,77,000 flights, mainly into Tempelhof.
At least 78 U.S., British and German pilots and ground crew lost their lives in accidents in the air and on the ground, as the Allies delivered fuel and food to prevent Berlin’s population from starving.
