Impressions of a Berlin Airlift Pilot

 The Power of Hope and Freedom – a Personal Essay by Gail Halvorsen

There is a universal need for hope today every bit as much now as it was needed then. – Gail S. Halvorsen, Col USAF (Ret.), November 2007

Halvorsen peers from his plane at the Rhein-Main Air Force Base near Frankfurt.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

I began my life on small farms in Idaho and Utah. The closest large city to Garland, Utah was 40 miles away.

Things were peaceful. Then came Pearl Harbor. In 1943 and early 1944 I trained as a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force.

When I finished training I was assigned back to the US Army Air Corps. My first assignment was as a transport pilot in the South Atlantic Theater of Operations. The war raged and ended.

The last thing I ever thought might happen was that in 1948 I would be in Europe, flying day and night to Berlin, in thunderstorms, fog, ice and snow to feed the former enemy. The flattened ruins of the once proud and sophisticated capital looked like a moonscape as the wreckage passed beneath the wings of my flour laden C-54 Skymaster. Me, a farm boy, had been thrust into a world gone amuck. What a change from the orderly world of the farm! Everything on the farm was in its place. Neat bales of stacked hay, corn growing clean and tall. Now below my wings were splintered buildings, gaping to the sky with open roofs. Their once stately brick walls were broken into individual bricks and scattered in the streets and across lots now vacant. Lots that once held historic and architecturally classic buildings. It was a signature of war evident in countries around the world.

On that first flight to Berlin I was deep in thought. Hitler began his war of destruction. It had interrupted the orderly progress of my life. Now I was 27 years old. I should have had one or two children by now. Instead I wasn’t even engaged to be married. Several of my buddies had returned from the war to see their previously conceived child for the first time. Some of my buddies had not returned. They would not see their newborn child in this life. My close friend, Conrad Stefen, from Tremonton, Utah was still missing. Maybe his remains were somewhere under the flight path I had flown that very day, on my way from Frankfurt to Berlin. He had been shot down in a P-47 Thunderbolt three years before.

A US Air Force plane heading in to land over Tempelhof in June 1948.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

We had just left the security and comfort of life in America. We were beginning to get our lives back on track after the war. Now, here we were flying night and day in all kinds of weather. My bed was in the loft of a farmer’s old barn in Zeplinheim! Others lived in austere wooden barracks that had housed Hitler’s Displaced Person work crews. We had left for Germany so fast I had to drive the first new car of my life under the trees in Mobile Alabama, put the keys in my pocket, look back once and leave. I would never see that new, red, four-door Chevy again. How did the ground and flight crews feel after this major disruption of their lives?

Those of us who stayed in the military after the war already knew that the enemy and threat to the West was now Stalin and his Soviet Union. They wanted Berlin and West Germany. They had just taken Czechoslovakia and Hungary. West Berlin was next. We knew that Berlin was populated mostly by women and children. When word came that Stalin had cut off all the food and energy supplies to these suffering people the assignment became a worthwhile challenge. That didn’t make this major disruption easy and there was still some doubt.

However these last feelings of doubt left me when I landed that first load of 20,000 pounds of flour at Tempelhof in West Berlin. The German unloading crew poured through the open cargo door in the back of my aircraft. The lead man came toward the cockpit, moist eyes, hand outstretched in friendship. Unintelligible words but his expression said it all. He looked at the bags of flour and back to us like we were angels from heaven. People were hungry for food and freedom. We were giving them both and they were grateful. Gratitude is the magic potion that makes enemies friends and makes a seemingly impossible task doable. From then on the pangs of doubt were gone.

One of my fellow Airlift pilots had bombed Berlin during the war. I asked him how he felt about flying day and night in behalf of the enemy; the very ones who did their best to kill him as he flew over Berlin in 1944. He hesitated a moment, shuffling his feet and then said, "It feels a lot better to feed them than it does to kill ‘em." I only knew of one person who complained about flying day and night for the former enemy. This I believe was because of the West Berliner’s overt expression of gratitude and the peace one feels in their heart when they serve others, even the enemy.

One day in July 1948 I met 30 kids at the barbed wire fence at Tempelhof in Berlin. They were excited. They said, "When the weather gets so bad you can’t land don’t worry about us. We can get by on little food but if we lose our freedom we may never get it back." The principle of freedom was more important than the pleasure of enough flour. "Just don’t give up on us," they said. From these children I learned the importance of placing principle before pleasure in the decision making process and the self discipline required to do it. The pleasure of enough food could be put off for the promise of freedom at some indefinite time in the future. The Soviets had offered the West Berliners food rations but they would not capitulate.

For the hour I was at the fence not one child asked for gum or candy. Children I had met during and after the war in foreign lands had always begged insistently for such treasures. These Berlin children were so grateful for flour to be free they would not lower themselves to be beggars for anything more. It was even more impressive because they hadn’t had chocolate or gum for months. When I realized this silent, mature show of gratitude and the strength that it took not to ask, I had to do something. All I had was two sticks of gum. I broke them in two and passed them through the barbed wire. The result was unbelievable. Those with the gum tore off strips of the wrapper and gave them to the others. Those with just a piece of paper put it to their nose and smelled and smelled the tiny fragrance. Their expression of pleasure was unbelievable.

Halvorsen tossing candy to kids in Berlin from inside an aircraft in 1948.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

I was so moved by what I saw and their incredible restraint that I promised them I would drop enough gum for each of them the next day as I came over their heads to land. They would know my plane because I would wiggle the wings as I came over the airport. When I got back to Rhein-Main I attached gum and even chocolate bars to three handkerchief parachutes. It was delivered the next day. What a jubilant celebration. We did the same thing for several weeks before we got caught; threatened with a court martial which was followed by an immediate pardon. General Tunner said, "Keep it up."

Letters came by the thousands. A little girl, named Mercedes, wrote that I scared her chickens as I flew in to land but it was OK if I dropped the goodies where the white chickens were. I couldn’t find her chickens so I mailed her chocolate and gum through the Berlin mail. Twenty two years later, in 1970, I was assigned as the Commander of Tempelhof. One letter kept asking us to come to dinner. In 1972 we accepted. The lady of the house handed me a letter dated November 1948. It said, "Dear Mercedes I can’t find your chickens. I hope this is OK." Signed, "Your Chocolate Uncle." I had included a box of candy and gum. The lady looked at me with a smile and said, "I am Mercedes! Step over here and I will show you where the chickens were." We are close friends today, November 2007.

A little girl accompanied by her mother came to my plane on the tarmac at Tempelhof. She offered me her only surviving possession; A well worn teddy bear. She presented it to me with tears in her eyes, "This kept me safe during the bombings. I want you to have it to keep you and the other fliers safe on your trips to Berlin." I tried to refuse it but her mother said words to the effect that I must accept it because her daughter wanted to do all in her power to help save their city. I would like to find that little girl.

In 1998 on a visit to Berlin flying an old Airlift C-54, The Spirit of Freedom with Tim Chopp, a 60-year-old man told me he had caught a parachute in 1948. "It had a fresh Hershey candy bar attached. It took me a week to eat it," he said. "I hid it day and night. But it was not the chocolate that was most important. The most important was that someone in America knew I was in trouble and someone cared. That was hope for me." And then, with moist eyes, he said, "Without hope the soul dies. I can live on thin rations but not without hope." That is what the British, French and American Berlin Airlift, its dried eggs, dried potatoes, dried milk and coal meant to the Berliners: Hope for freedom. There is a universal need for hope today every bit as much now as it was needed then. Airlift is supplying hope around the world today, as it did in Berlin; to the unfortunate who are oppressed by man or nature.

My experience on the Airlift taught me that gratitude, hope, and service before self can bring happiness to the soul when the opposite brings despair. Because not one of 30 children begged for chocolate, thousands of children in Berlin received over 20 tons of chocolate, gum, and goodies dropped from C-54 Skymasters over a 14-month period. It all came from other aircraft and other aircrews besides myself.

Thirty one of my Airlift, Air Force buddies and 39 of my British comrades gave their lives for an enemy who had become a friend. Those patriots were the only real heroes of the Airlift. The Berlin Airlift changed postwar history and the rest of my life.

By Gail S. Halvorsen, Col. USAF (Ret.), November 2007