June 13, 2008
Friends Always: A Conversation with Andrei Cherny About His New Book Honoring the American Heroes of the Berlin Airlift
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| Heroes: Andrei Cherny's "The Candy Bombers". photos © courtesy of Andrei Cherny |
"The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour," by Andrei Cherny, was published in April 2008 - the 60th anniversary of the 1948/49 Berlin Airlift.
It is the story of the small group of Americans who, with few resources and against all expectations, fed half of one of the largest cities in the world by air for more than a year, thereby avoiding World War III, winning the hearts of the Germans, and inspiring people around the world to believe in America's fundamental goodness.
At the core of Cherny's research was his extensive interviews with Gail “Hal” Halvorsen, and his access to Halvorsen’s boxes of letters, diaries and documents that had sat for years untouched in his basement.
As a 27-year-old pilot Halvorsen, in violation of the Airlift’s strict rules, had started dropping presents of candy tied to homemade handkerchief parachutes to the children of Berlin, and became not only the nation’s first post-war military icon, but almost single handedly transformed how the citizens of Germany’s capital saw the United States. Sixty years later, every aging Berliner still remembers when he stopped fearing America’s “terror bombers” and instead looked to the sky for the next arrival of “the Candy Bombers.”
The following interview with Andrei Cherny about the book was provided to The Week in Germany for publication by the author. The views expressed therein are not necessarily those of the German government. In his own words, Cherny speaks about how he researched the book and the strong emotions he often felt in recalling this noble hour in human history.
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| Author: Andrei Cherny |
Why did you choose The Candy Bombers as the title of this book? Who were the Candy Bombers?
The direct answer is that they were a group of airmen during the Berlin airlift that followed the lead of a young 27-year-old pilot and started dropping candy tied to little parachutes to the children of the devastated city. (At first, in doing so, they were breaking all the rules of that vast and complicated undertaking; later the airlift command gave its blessing to the candy drops.) The name was coined by the children of Berlin and eventually came to be used for all the airlift pilots. In the larger sense what I argue in the book is that their approach to dealing with the Germans – a people the Americans had defeated and whose country they had occupied – became seen and accepted as the way America should act in the world. There was a big debate right after World War II, and even during the war, as to the kind of role America should play as it was coming into its own as a world power. During the Berlin airlift, as the candy drops became its defining feature, Americans came to view their role as a special one – a role predicated on the belief that we had a mission in the world to act in a way that married our military might with a sense of moral purpose.
Describe the evolution of this project, where did the idea for this book come from?
First and foremost I was looking to tell a thrilling and exciting narrative story. The kinds of books that have appealed to me in recent years are books like Seabiscuit or The Devil in the White City. Grounded in careful historical research they have the characteristics of some of the best of fiction and are, most of all, thrilling stories.
In some respects my choosing this particular tale to tell was a reaction to what was happening at the time in America and around the world. It was 2004 and I was working for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Abu Ghraib was starting to make headlines and the issue of Guantanamo Bay was also coming to the fore. And it seemed to me the America that I and so many others had grown up believing in was somehow absent from the world scene. I asked myself, when was the moment that America was at its most esteemed, most respected, most beloved around the world? It seemed clear it was during the Berlin airlift when Americans undertook what was then, and still is now 60 years later, the greatest humanitarian effort in history. It was a time when people throughout the world – on both sides of the Iron Curtain and on every side of every political or philosophical division – believed America was on the side of good and decency.
What sort of research did you do for The Candy Bombers? Who were your sources?
The research was grounded in a lot of archival work – at the National Archives; in the Library of Congress; the U.S. Army Archives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the U.S. Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama; and at numerous other archives and libraries throughout the U.S. In Germany I spent a lot of time at the Allied History Museum in Berlin and at the U.S. Air Force in Europe history offices in Ramstein. I also spent a lot of time traveling to locations integral to the story. For example, I managed to get to Rhein-Main Air Base outside Frankfurt, which was the primary airlift hub, just days before it was permanently shut down in December 2005. And of course I also visited Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and other landmarks there central to the story.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the research was the time I spent time with airlift veterans at their annual reunion and at a number of other venues around the country. With the help of the Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation I even got a chance to fly on a restored C-54 transport plane, the same kind of plane that served as the mainstay of the operation. But the real heart of the research, and what nobody else had done before, was my interviews and close collaboration with the original candy bomber, Gail “Hal” Halverson. He’s now 87 but still has more energy than just about anybody I know. I spent many days with him here in the U.S. (he has homes in Arizona and Utah) and accompanied him to a convention of airlift veterans. I also trailed him and interviewed him in Berlin on one of his trips there. Along with those interviews I was given unfettered access to his personal papers that were literally buried in boxes in his basement.
What sort of material did you find in those boxes?
They contained an absolute treasure trove without which the book would have taken on an entirely different character. Hal’s papers included news clippings and old flight logs, letters he’d received from candy companies offering donations and wishing him well; letters from school children all over the country who donated candy, pocket change and handkerchiefs to be fashioned into parachutes; and letters from the children and parents of Berlin. To this day I have a hard time reading them without getting a lump in my throat. Being able to see what a single candy bar meant to those kids who hadn’t tasted anything like that in years, and their parents who had been unable to provide such things to their children, was an extraordinary experience. The gratitude and joy expressed to Hal personally, and to America because of what he was doing, was amazing. It made sense of this entire story for me. And finally, Hal’s papers included his love letters to the woman who eventually became his wife, Alta Halverson. Their romance is very much a part of this book. It’s their story.
The book’s subtitle is “The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour.” There have certainly been many books, documentaries, histories and the like about the Soviet blockade of Berlin and America’s response. What’s the “untold” story here? What’s new in this book?
The Berlin Airlift is one of those stories that are in plain sight but actually not really known. Most people know that America brought food to Berlin by airplane after the war but they’re not exactly sure what happened. They don’t know the exact circumstances. As famous as it is, the airlift is often overlooked in stories of the Cold War and of post-WWII America, despite the fact that it played a crucial role in determining this country’s path both domestically and internationally. It’s thus no surprise that there’ve been few popular histories of the Berlin airlift.
What I think makes this book most different is that the airlift story is usually told in terms of great power politics (i.e. the negotiations between America and the Soviet Union) or in terms of pure military history (i.e. how this enormous undertaking was organized.) Both of those stories are important, are part of this book, and are central to the tale. The untold story is at the human level. At its heart this is a story about people. It’s about a group of Americans – some well-known, like Harry Truman; others unknown like Hal Halverson – who were somehow seen as leftovers of World War II, and weren’t given their due during that titanic struggle. And then came this moment when history tested them to the ultimate degree. It’s also the human story of how America went from wanting to punish Germans for the horrors of World War II to seeing them as people who deserved compassion and kindness. And finally it’s the human story of the Berliners themselves – the residents of Hitler’s capital. It’s the story of how they went from being a city of people who had cheered on the Nazis during the war, and continued to embrace many of Nazism’s fascist principles during the post-war American occupation, to being a city of people who passionately embraced democracy and freedom and loved America more than the population of perhaps any other foreign city on earth.
You say the men who broke the siege of Berlin were the misfits, the leftovers, and history’s second-stringers. What do you mean?
Each of the main characters in this book finds himself, after World War II, in a situation where he’s seen as a second stringer. Harry Truman had come into office after the death of his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a giant on the world stage, and spent almost his entire presidency derided as someone unable to fill FDR’s shoes. Many Americans considered him an object of scorn. Lucius Clay had dedicated himself to the art of war and railed at the circumstances that kept him from the battlefield. World War II was the opportunity to find the martial glory he had trained for all his life and instead he had been put in charge of organizing the war on the home front. James Forrestal, who kept scaling the heights of power in government, became the first secretary of defense and the cabinet official with more responsibility for national security than any previous cabinet member in history even as he was slipping into madness. Bill Tunner, who had organized a successful and legendary airlift over the Himalayas during the war, was consigned to a desk job in a forgotten corner of the Pentagon. And while others had found fame as bomber or fighter pilots during the war, “Hal” Halverson was stuck as a transport pilot, ferrying people and planes from South America to the European Theater of Operations because of his insistence on being a stickler for rules. All of these characters saw the great parade of World War II and its aftermath pass them by. But it turned out for each of them that their experiences – the very same experiences that kept them from finding glory during the war – were exactly what was needed at that moment when America experienced its greatest crisis of what became the post-World War II age.
Whom do you consider the unsung hero of the airlift?
I’d have to say that would be Bill Tunner – the general who came in after a couple of months of the airlift to save it from the descent into failure in which it found itself. He was a hard man. (I tell the story in the book of the seeming callousness with which he treated his wife’s illness and eventual death.) But he was also an amazing organizer. As I was writing the book, and watching an American city – New Orleans – in large measure destroyed by incompetence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he really appealed to me. With a pitiful number of planes and the most meager amount of materials at his disposal, he was able to feed what was then one of the largest cities in the world completely by air when there was almost no one in the world who thought such an undertaking would be possible.
You detail numerous incidents and anecdotes in The Candy Bombers. Which stands out most in your mind?
The moment that stands out most clearly for me was the moment of Berlin in November 1948. But first, let me give you some background. During the years after Germany’s surrender the American occupation seemed to be failing, and in Berlin the populace was becoming more opposed to democracy, not less. The city was more crime ridden than ever before. Life was becoming coarser. And it was a city that had been on the verge of starvation for at least four or five years – reaching back even to before the end of the war – with rations far below that which the U.N. said was necessary for human survival. In November 1948, when things were at a point were they seemingly couldn’t get any worse, the longest, most sustained fog in Europe’s recorded history engulfed the entire continent. As hungry as Berlin had been, things did indeed get worse. The airlift, which was the last tiny lifeline of food and coal for heat, was virtually shut down for days on end.
Everyone, including the joint chiefs of staff and the state department, expected Berliners to rise up and kick the Americans out or, at the very least, accept ration cards from the Russians that would allow Berliners to abundantly feed their families and heat their homes. Instead the exact opposite happened. Only four percent of Berliners accepted the offer of Soviet rations. The city, which just a couple of years earlier had become the world’s crime capital—racked with gang warfare, violent robberies, and brutal murders—became perhaps the safest big city in the world as the crime rate plummeted. And for the first time, in polls that had been done on a regular basis by the U.S. military government, Berliners switched from being opposed to democracy to being in favor of it. That, to me, is the summation of the untold story of the Berlin airlift. Were it not for the sense of kindness and humanity of the airlift and the candy bombing that transformation would never have happened.
Harry Truman’s totally unexpected victory over Tom Dewey is one of the most enduring milestones in presidential electoral history. Why do you say it was the Berlin crisis that gave Truman his victory?
As someone who has already written a book of American political history, if I thought I had any expertise at all it was in this area. And yet this was one of the things that was a real eye-opener to me. I had always believed the common historical explanation of Truman’s come-from-behind victory: that it was partly a result of his economic populism, partly a result of public appreciation for the New Deal, and partly because he was a ferocious campaigner, while Dewey, as one pundit described him, looked like “the little man on the wedding cake.” But it turned out that as much as the 1948 campaign was about all those things, it was as much or more about national security and the fear of war. That doesn’t come through in any of the histories of the campaign itself or of that era but it’s very apparent if you look at what was going on in the daily thrust and parry of the campaign and at what was on the minds of Americans during that election. Newspaper headlines, radio commentaries, and television news stories were suffused with, and dominated by, conversation and commentary about the Berlin crisis. In fact if you look back at the headlines in 1948, you’ll see that Berlin was more of a subject than Dewey, who was accepted by almost all Americans as the likely next president of the United States. He and Truman were engaged in a non-stop back-and-forth in their speeches, and their respective campaigns on this big struggle America was finding itself in with the USSR; the question of how to confront the Soviets; and which of them would be able to better deal with national security and the threat of an impending World War III.
Berlin was also central to the 1948 elections because for Truman the fight was not just about beating Dewey, it was also about beating the third party candidacy of Henry Wallace – another former vice president to FDR. The Truman/Wallace battle was waged almost exclusively over the issue of Berlin. Wallace staked his entire candidacy on the subject. Beyond Dewey being a strong candidate, the reason every pundit and journalist thought Truman was sure to go down to defeat was that they were convinced Wallace was going to split the democratic party and deny Truman enough votes to win. So Truman had to engage in a titanic struggle to define the future and soul of the Democratic Party. It was a struggle to determine who would be FDR’s and the Democratic Party’s true heir. It’s a struggle that defines the Democratic Party to this day. If Henry Wallace had gotten anywhere near the amount of support he was getting from Democrats before the Berlin crisis there’s no way Truman could have won. The fact that he didn’t get that kind of support was a direct result of America’s reaction to the Berlin airlift.
Why do you consider the Berlin airlift the “forgotten foundation tale of America in the modern world”?
Because it was the moment when America took its first feeble steps as a world power in a time other than that of global war. What we had done in World War I was fight in Europe and then pull back in the aftermath. Most people around the world and in the United States, including FDR, expected America would do the same after World War II. No one expected a long-term military commitment. But that’s where we found ourselves as 1947 turned into 1948, and Americans had to figure out how we were going to act at the summit of world power when we weren’t just a junior partner to France or England or some other great power and when we were on our own as leaders of the free world. In a matter of months we had the Berlin Blockade, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. All these things were happening in a rush of events that were puling America into a whole new role on the world stage. It was during the course of the Berlin airlift that we were able, for the first time, to figure out how to combine our military might with this sense of moral leadership that would be so important to figuring how we’d act for the rest of the 20th century.
In what way can the legend of the Candy Bombers and the lessons of the airlift help guide our way forward?
I think what shines through very clearly in the kind of foreign policy Harry Truman and others in the book ended up asserting is that America can’t just see people around the world as pawns in the global game. We have to not only convey that we are concerned with the well being of others and their future, we actually have to be concerned. Throughout the years of the occupation, before the Berlin blockade and airlift, we had already been bringing food to Germans and Berliners. But it had always been done with a sense of doing so for our own benefit as Americans to make sure Berliners, for example, didn’t turn to Communism. And it also seemed like we were doing the barest amount necessary to keep them alive. It wasn’t until the airlift came to be seen as something representing America’s kindness and sense of common humanity with the Germans we’d defeated in war that those Germans saw us as people who had their best interests at heart. What we've seen since 9/11 in Iraq and around the world has been America conveying the image that we’re acting for our benefit alone – it’s our way or the highway. There’s no sense, in our actions on the world stage, that we’re building a coalition of people who share a common destiny or that we believe the fate of people, whether in the Middle East or Africa or Asia, is intimately tied up with our own.
It should also be noted that throughout the process of the airlift, America was committed to the belief that it had to be done in conjunction with our allies and that at every step we had to walk with them even when it was inconvenient for us. And on the home front, Harry Truman made it clear that at a time of threat, all Americans had to be involved in the struggle. We forget that in 1948 – an election year – he took the incredibly unpopular step of calling for the draft, which had expired after World War II, to be reinstated. Needless to say his popularity, which had been building up from its low levels of 1946, started plummeting again. Nevertheless he believed all Americans had to serve. We haven’t seen that kind of leadership out of Washington in the years since 9/11 either.
You’ve said you were connected to this story on a more emotional and personal level than you would have thought when you first started working on this book. In what way?
All four of my grandparents were concentration camp survivors during World War II. When I was in Germany – in Berlin – I caught myself wondering whether the candy bombers had been right about treating the post-war Germans with kindness instead of a sense of punishment. As I began writing the book I had to resolve for myself the same kinds of questions American occupiers had struggled with. Also, both of my parents had grown up in postwar Europe – in Czechoslovakia – in conditions of hunger and hardship very similar to what the children of Berlin were dealing with in 1948 – the children who were so entranced by the candy bombers. And my parents were around that same age. As a result their memory, and the memory of them as children, was very much on my mind. It gave me a personal connection to the story that I otherwise might not have had.
What do you want readers to get out of this book?
Most of all I want them to get a good story. I want them to have a story that’s a page-turner; one that will appeal to people that would normally not want to read something that goes under the category of “history.” I also want them to take away a reminder of who we are supposed to be as Americans. This is a book about doing a great thing at a big national level – the Berlin airlift, a huge undertaking. It’s also about how one person’s individual actions can make a huge difference when done in the spirit of kindness and generosity. When Hal Halvorsen started dropping candy on the children of Berlin he couldn’t, in his wildest dreams, have imagined the impact he was going to have. His small gesture set in motion a chain of events that, for years to come, had huge repercussions for Americans and people around the world.
About the Author
Andrei Cherny is founder and co-editor of "Democracy: A Journal of Ideas," a quarterly print and online journal of progressive thought that seeks to spur new ideas on the big challenges of the 21st century.
He has provided policy and strategy advice to political leaders, national labor unions, Fortune 100 CEOs, and prominent civic leaders. A former senior speechwriter and advisor to Vice President Al Gore, Cherny was the youngest White House Speechwriter in American history.
Cherny has written on politics, policy, and history for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New Republic, is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, and appears as a commentator on television news programs including ABC’s Good Morning America, The O’Reilly Factor, and CNN Morning.
Cherny and his wife reside in Phoenix, Arizona where he is a criminal prosecutor. He is an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve. He graduated with honors from Harvard College and from the University of California Berkeley Law School.
Links:
Andrei Cherny (personal website)
The Candy Bombers (website for the book)
Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation
The Berlin Airlift Veterans Association
Merkel Opens Air Show, Meets Halvorsen (TWIG, May 30, 2008)
Berlin Airlift was 'Miracle of Friendship', Ambassador Scharioth Says (Germany.info)
Andrews AFB Open House Honors Heroes of the Airlift (Germany.info)
Friends Always: Andrei Cherny Tells 'The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlif and America's Finest Hour' (TWIG, June 6, 2008)
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