The Berlin Airlift

The Easter Parade that took place on April 16, 1949 required near perfect teamwork. Fuel and bulk cargo were first loaded onto ships in the United States, sent across the Atlantic, and unloaded in Germany. Once there, the fuel and cargo were shipped to one of our U.S. Air Force airfields: two were in the American Zone and two in the British Zone. Freight from the American Zone went to Tempelhof Airfield and cargo from the British Zone went to Gatow Airport.

Soviet forces harassed but did not attack the cargo aircraft of the Anglo-American alliance, although fighter pilots and antiaircraft gunners occasionally opened fire near the corridors, and searchlights that might temporarily blind a pilot sometimes played upon the aircraft by night. By the spring of 1949, it was obvious these tactics of harassment had failed to deter the American and British airmen involved in the airlift of supplies to Berlin.

Lieutenant Halvorsen's role in the Berlin Airlift was to fly one of many C-54 cargo planes used to ferry supplies into the starving city. At Tempelhof he saw about 30 children lined up behind one of the barbed-wire fences. He went to meet them and noticed that the children had nothing. So he told them that the following day he would drop gum out of his plane.

The accumulated candy was heavy, so in order to ensure the children were not hurt by the falling candy, Halvorsen made three parachutes out of handkerchiefs and tied them to the rations. In the morning when he and his crew made regular supply drops, they also dropped three boxes of candy attached to handkerchiefs. They made these drops at regular intervals. Support for this effort to provide the children of Berlin with chocolate and gum grew quickly. As news of “Operation Little Vittles” reached the United States, children and candymakers from all over the US began contributing candy.

The Berlin Airlift Monument (properly the “Monument for the Victims of the Airlift”) was erected in 1951; it was the first major monument in West Berlin after the war. Its design, created by the German architect Eduard Ludwig, features three arcs pointing west to symbolize the three air corridors that were the city's lifelines. As a result of this Berliners also call it the “Hungerkralle” (“hunger claw”) or “Hungerharke” (“hunger rake”). An identical counterpart reaching towards Berlin was erected in 1985 by the German-American Airlift Association at Frankfurt Airport. Since 1988, a smaller copy has also stood at Celle Air Base in Lower Saxony.

Eduard Ludwig (1906–1960) was a student at the Bauhaus design school, became one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's favourite students, and after graduating worked for him in Berlin until 1937. After the war, in 1946, he became professor at the newly founded architecture school at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, while maintaining his own architecture firm. He died in an accident in a bright red sports car on the AVUS, at the age of 54.