Gail Halvorsen

• 1. Introduction

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  Gail Halvorsen reached into his pocket one day in July 1948 and pulled out two sticks of gum. He had just met about thirty children standing behind a barbed-wire fence at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, and it was all he had to give them. The kids broke the sticks into tiny pieces and passed them around. The children who did not get any held the empty wrappers up to their noses and sniffed. That image stayed with Halvorsen for the rest of his life. He was a young Air Force pilot assigned to ferry supplies into a city that Soviet forces had blockaded from the ground. He had no authorization, no budget, and no plan. What he had was a handful of handkerchiefs and a willingness to wiggle his wings. From that quiet promise at a fence came one of the most improbable humanitarian operations of the Cold War era.

• 2. The Utah Boy Who Flew

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  Gail Seymour Halvorsen was born in Salt Lake City on the 10th of October 1920, to Basil K. and Luella Spencer Halvorsen. His paternal grandfather had come from Norway, and the family eventually settled on small farms, first in Rigby, Idaho, and then in Garland, Utah. He graduated from Bear River High School in 1939 and briefly attended Utah State University before the pull of aviation proved stronger than classrooms. Halvorsen earned his private pilot license in September 1941 under the non-college Civilian Pilot Training Program and joined the Civil Air Patrol at about the same time. When he entered the United States Army Air Forces in May 1942, he was twenty-two years old, and he was sent to train in Miami, Oklahoma, alongside twenty-five other USAAF Aviation cadets and seventy-seven Royal Air Force cadets in Course 19. That training took place at the No. 3 British Flying Training School, which the Spartan School of Aeronautics operated. He completed his training and was assigned to foreign transport operations in the South Atlantic Theater. His orders to Germany came on the 10th of July 1948, placing him at the center of one of the defining confrontations of the early Cold War.

• 3. Three Parachutes and a Promise

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  Halvorsen's official job during the Berlin Airlift was to pilot one of the many C-54 cargo planes flying supplies into a city that Soviet forces had cut off from the outside world. On his days off, he explored Berlin with a personal handheld movie camera. He was filming aircraft taking off and landing at Tempelhof when he spotted the thirty children gathered at the barbed-wire perimeter fence. One of those children told him: "When the weather gets so bad that you can't land, don't worry about us. We can get by on a little food, but if we lose our freedom, we may never get it back." That remark, from a child surrounded by rubble and rationing, moved him deeply. He told the children he would drop enough gum for all of them the next day, and that they would know his plane because he would wiggle his wings, the same gesture he had made for his parents in 1941 when he first got his license. That night, Halvorsen, his copilot, and his flight engineer pooled their candy rations. The collected candy was heavy enough to hurt a child if it fell directly, so Halvorsen fashioned three parachutes out of handkerchiefs and tied the rations to them. The drops ran once a week for three weeks, and each week the crowd of children waiting at the Tempelhof fence grew larger.

• 4. Operation Little Vittles

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  Word of the unofficial drops reached the airlift commander, Lieutenant General William H. Tunner, who chose to expand the effort rather than shut it down. Operation Little Vittles was formally launched on the 22nd of September 1948, named as a deliberate play on the airlift's official name, Operation Vittles. Support spread fast, first among Halvorsen's friends, then across the whole squadron, and then across the Atlantic. Children and candy makers throughout the United States began sending supplies. By November 1948, the volume of donated candy and handkerchiefs had grown beyond what Halvorsen could manage alone. A college student named Mary C. Connors from Chicopee, Massachusetts, stepped in and took charge, working with the National Confectioner's Association to package the goods and tie the handkerchiefs. Little Vittles pilots were eventually dropping candy every other day. The American bombers who once dropped ordnance on German cities were now known to Berliners as the Rosinenbomber, or Raisin Bombers, while Halvorsen himself collected a string of nicknames that included "Uncle Wiggly Wings", "The Chocolate Uncle", "The Gum Drop Kid", and "The Chocolate Flier." When Halvorsen returned home in January 1949, he handed leadership of the operation to his friend Captain Lawrence Caskey. The operation continued until the 13th of May 1949, by which point the pilots had dropped more than 23 tons of candy from more than 250,000 handkerchief parachutes. One of Halvorsen's biggest individual supporters was Dorothy Groeger, a homebound woman who organized friends and acquaintances to sew handkerchiefs and donate funds. The committee in Chicopee alone was responsible for preparing over 18 tons of candy and gum and shipping it to Germany.

• 5. A Career Beyond the Airlift

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  After returning home in January 1949, Halvorsen considered leaving the Air Force entirely. He stayed when the Air Force offered him a permanent commission and a promise of further education. In 1951 and 1952 he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Florida through the Air Force Institute of Technology. He went on to serve as a project engineer for cargo aircraft research and development at both Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Hill Air Force Base from 1952 to 1957. He later worked at the Air Force Space Systems Division in Inglewood, California, where he chaired the source selection committee for the Titan III launch vehicle program. From 1962 to 1965 he was stationed in Wiesbaden, West Germany, with the Foreign Technology division. He then moved to the Pentagon, where he worked on plans for an advanced manned reusable spacecraft and contributed to the Manned Orbital Laboratory Project. He later commanded the 6596th Instrumentation Squadron at Vandenberg AFB, a unit involved in both satellite launch and orbit operations. In February 1970, Halvorsen became commander of the 7350th Air Base Group at Tempelhof Central Airport in Berlin. It was the very airfield he had flown into daily during the airlift more than two decades earlier. He completed a master's degree in Guidance and Counseling from Wayne State University through an on-base program during that posting. He retired on the 31st of August 1974 after accumulating more than 8,000 flying hours and 31 years of military service. From 1976 to 1986 he served as Assistant Dean of Student Life at Brigham Young University.

• 6. Personal Life and the Long Road Home

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  Halvorsen had met Alta Jolley in 1942 at Utah State Agricultural College, and the two kept their relationship alive by mail while he was stationed in Germany. His work with Operation Little Vittles reportedly drew him two marriage proposals from other women, both of which he declined; he was waiting to see if Alta still had feelings for him. Gail Halvorsen and Alta Jolley married in Las Vegas, Nevada, on the 16th of April 1949. They raised five children across postings in the United States and Germany and eventually settled in Provo, Utah, after his 1974 retirement. Both were active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served as missionaries together, first in London, England, from 1986 to 1987, and then in St. Petersburg, Russia, from 1995 to 1997. Alta died on the 25th of January 1999; the couple had 24 grandchildren at the time of her death. Five years later, Halvorsen married again, this time to Lorraine Pace, his high school sweetheart. The couple lived on a farm in Spanish Fork, Utah, and spent winters in Arizona. Halvorsen died from respiratory failure in Provo on the 16th of February 2022 at the age of 101. His funeral included a flyover by a KC-135R from the Utah Air National Guard's 151st Air Refueling Wing and a firing party from Air Force ROTC units at BYU and Utah Valley University. He was buried at the Provo City Cemetery.

• 7. Legacy and Remembrance

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  Mercedes Wild, who had written to Halvorsen in 1948 asking for chocolate, reflected seventy-five years later that he "became a father to me at that young age." She noted that the children of postwar Berlin had largely grown up without fathers, and that the airlift pilots became role models in their absence. After Halvorsen's death in 2022, Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey stated: "Halvorsen's deeply human act has never been forgotten." His humanitarian work did not end with the Cold War. In 1994 he persuaded the Air Force to let him drop hundreds of candy bars over Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of Operation Provide Promise. He organized another drop over Kosovo in 1999 and advocated drops in Japan, Guam, Albania, and Iraq. His last flight was on the 17th of December 2019, piloting the Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation's C-54 Spirit of Freedom shortly after his 99th birthday. In 2014, Congress awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor it can bestow. In 2016, he and his daughter Denise Halvorsen Williams established the Gail S. Halvorsen Aviation Education Foundation, later renamed The Candy Bomber Foundation, a nonprofit registered in Utah to promote aviation and STEM education among young people. In 2008, tens of thousands of spectators on Fifth Avenue watched him serve as Grand Marshal of the German-American Steuben Parade in New York City. The Air Force eventually named its next-generation aircraft loading vehicle after him and created the Col. Gail Halvorsen Award for outstanding air transportation support. At the 70th anniversary celebrations on the 12th of May 2019, the former military baseball fields at the Tempelhof site were renamed Gail S. Halverson Park in his honor.