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The Candy Bombers got a very nice review on "The Dry Heat," the brilliantly-named politics and public policy blog run by former Arizona State Senator and "mover and shaker" Slade Mead. You can read it for yourself here.
Always good to get the hometown cheer!
Mr. Cherny:
I started your latest book, "The Candy Bombers", last week. Just wanted to drop you a note (for what it's worth) to let you know how impressed I am with it thus far. I'm only 100 pages in, but after reading some truly impressive writing last evening I felt compelled to write. Your description as to what Berlin looked like before the war and Hitler and Speer's elaborate plans to make "Germania" a place of envy and magnificence to the rest of the world was both fascinating and chilling.
Your development of some of the main characters in the book, particularly of Lucius Clay, James Forrestal and Hal Halvorsen is extremely well-done and very effective. Even though I'm an avid reader, particularly of history, I very rarely finish volumes any longer; your book will most certainly be an exception in that regard.
I was interested to read some strong early reviews of your work, especially those from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. After only 100 pages I heartly concur with the Kirkus review in particular.
I hope that your travels to promote the book will include Austin, Texas. If so, I'll most definitely drop by to see you talk and perhaps have you autograph my volume; the first of hopefully many fine works of history from you in the future.
Again, thanks for the great read, and best of luck with the book.
-- Larry
Dear Larry,
Thanks for writing and reading -- and, in your case, finishing reading! I did want this book to be driven by its interesting characters and to capture the drama inherent in these often forgotten events so I am glad to hear that in your opinion I succeeded.
I am working on an Austin stop for later this summer so please keep checking the events listing at www.thecandybombers.com for continuing updates. Also if you or others have a book club that is reading The Candy Bombers, please let me know. I'd be glad to schedule a time to call in or otherwise participate.
-- Andrei
Our granddaughter ordered The Candy Bombers sent to us because she knew we had served in WWII and had recently married when 1948 and the Berlin Blockade occurred. You certainly depicted the event and all of its trauma in a most interesting and readable style. It was such a frightening period in our lives. Thank you so much for finding all of the untold background for all of the happenings of the time. You have produced an outstanding and enjoyable book !!!
-- Mary Lou T.
Dear Ms. T.,
I really appreciate the note. One of the most moving parts of the tour has been to get to meet and talk to so many people who actually experienced and remember these events. As you say, it was a traumatic moment in our history that we have largely forgotten. At a reading I did last week in Scottsdale, we had two women who had caught candy from the "candy bombers," a Navy man who flew on the Airlift, and a man who had been in the German Luftwaffe then became a mechanic on the Airlift and now has lived in the United States since 1952. Just amazing stories!
-- Andrei
Dear Mr. Cherny:
The subject of the Berlin Airlift - which has not yet started in the book, I am on page 199 - is of great interest to me because I was in Europe in 1948 - in fact, I got married in Holland just a few months before the start of the Berlin Airlift and spent a great deal of time in Frankfurt, representing a Dutch Firm for whom I was working to learn the international food business and selling the Joint Agency, with Headquarters in the I.G. Farben Building in Frankfurt, food for the feeding of the German Population. I often drove by Rhein-Main airport and saw the constant takeoffs and landings of the planes involved in the Berlin Airlift.
What I would like to bring up to you is more of a feeling than a fact about your book, a feeling that I get that may or may not have been your intention. It really starts on page 91 2nd paragraph, when you speak about the "awful hand of vengence" (which) came down on Berlin. The paragraph starts "They came first with the bombs." As I read this I said to myself 'no, it didn't come first with the bombs, it came when the german people blindly followed a madman which brought havoc to all of Europe'. You speak of the brutality of the Russian soldiers, dismissing them as smelly boars, but not mentioning that roughly 26 million Russians perished as a result of the German attack on the Soviet Union. True much of the blame lies with the governance of the Soviet Union at the time, but still, virtually no family of the Soviet Union escaped without having a member killed by the Germans. What I feel you fail to convey is the deep feeling against not only the government of Germany but of the people of that country by the soldiers, not only from the Soviet Union but of the United Kingdom, of France and even of the United States where we had suffered little or nothing from the Germans. There was a passion, right or wrong, which led many of us not to wish to spend a vacation in Germany, to say nothing of the passions of the soldiers, and especially the soldiers of the Soviet Union, who had suffered so many casualties at the hands of the Germans. Many of these soldiers had also liberated camps in Poland and the Eastern Part of Germany and they had seen first hand what unbelievably brutal conditions existed at the hands of the German War Machine and those who fed it.
No, I am not excusing the brutal behavior of the Russian Troops in Berlin, but I am also not forgetting where the brutality began and how the German public, with a few notable exceptions, supported Hitler and his gang of thugs - as long as they were winning. They only started to turn against them when the war started to go badly, and even then, they didn't turn against him in any meaningful way. Yes, they suffered, but only as a result of those who represented them made others suffer to at least as great an extent as the people of Berlin were suffering. Ask the people of Leningrad, ask the people of Stalingrad!
I had an experience which has stuck with me through all these years. My wife and I were in Frankfurt with another person from the firm in Holland. He asked whether he could invite a contact of his, a German citizen, for dinner with us in Bad Homberg, where we were staying. The man came, he was fat and had no neck, he was wearing a silk shirt and a pearl stickpin. In the course of the dinner (this was in June 1948) he complained that no people had ever suffered as the German people were suffering under the heel of the Americans. My wife, who, with her family, had been in hiding in Holland for 2 years and 10 months, nearly starving the last winter of the war, calmly mentioned that the Dutch didn't have it so good under the occupation of the Germans. "Oh" said our guest, "we were protecting you from the British". My wife expressed some amazement, saying that she was unaware that the Dutch felt the need to be protected from the British. At this point our German guest said: "The trouble with the Americans is that they are the people of the hard hearts and the soft hands" and at that point something in my 21 year old mind snapped and I get up with the intention of taking my "soft" american hands and choking him until there was no life left within him. My wife saw what was going on and got me from behind and dragged me out of the room and up to our bedroom until I had calmed down. I never saw the person again in my life. This is something that happened 60 years ago, and yet it is as real today as it was in 1948.
Hope you do not mind my sharing some of these thoughts with you. I find your book to be excellent and I am looking forward to getting into the Airlift and reading all about it
-- Robert
Dear Robert,
Thank you for not only sharing your moving tale, but your important point about the story of the Airlift. As you mention, the story I tell in this book is about something bigger than just the Airlift itself -- that is why on page 199, the Airlift has not yet begun. I don't think we can understand, in any real way, what happened during the Airlift and blockade in 1948 without understanding the very difficult decisions America faced. One was about how to respond to the Soviet threat, but another was how to treat the defeated Germans. I hope you didn't in any way get the sense that I "went easy" on the WWII Germans. In fact, I've had a number of people tell me the opposite: that my description of the Berliners before and during the war (in the pages before the passages you site) was too hard on them since they had been less supportive of Hitler's rise than Germans in other parts of the country. I hope as you continue reading, you'll see that I lay the blame on what happened to Berlin squarely on the shoulders of Berliners -- and that I write with some detail about the feelings toward the Germans that were carried into the occupation by the American GIs.
But in a larger sense, the tension you describe is very much one of the themes of the book: how do we treat a defeated enemy? In the years after World War II, America faced -- as you've read in the book -- a very vigorous debate about how to remove what FDR called the "cancer" in the German people that had given rise to Nazism: with kindness or harshness? This was a debate that was not fully resolved until the Airlift -- and one that, as your note indicates, is still one we're struggling with today.
It is also a question I struggled with personally as I wrote this book. As I mention in the Acknowledgments, all four of my grandparents were concentration camp survivors and so the ultimate question of whether the Candy Bombers were right to treat the defeated Germans with humanity and compassion was one I had to answer for myself time and time again.
I'll try to blog more about this question in the coming days...
-- Andrei
One of the talks I've been giving around the country is something I call "Candy Bombers on Leadership" -- the lessons that business leaders and other executives can learn about organization from Bill Tunner, compassion from Hal Halvorsen, and courage and vision from Harry Truman. Without knowing this, Richard Edelman (the president and CEO of Edelman, the world's largest PR firm) picked up a similar theme in a blog post about The Candy Bombers. He has some very interesting insights that are worth reading.
P.S. Isn't it great that he is a regular blogger?!
Dear Mr. Cherny,
I knew the ending and yet I could not put your book down. I've watched PBS specials on the Airlift but they didn't communicate the abject destruction within Berlin; I felt like I could see it. Your description of the suffering of the people was likewise remarkable. The politics going on behind the scenes is much as it is today; just the players have changed.
I'm 56 and a baby boomer and Jewish. Growing up in the 50's, I listened to my parents and relatives who lived about what the Germans had done. I remember my Jewish friends and I discussing what we would do if could have captured Hitler or any of his henchmen.
It must have been difficult for these pilots who lost friends to the Germans and to the people at home in America who lost loved ones to have any desire whatsoever to help the Germans.
And yet, that's what Americans do. Help people. Even ones who hate them.
Despite the cynicism in the press and some of the public about America today, your book reinvigorates my faith in America. I know if we are allowed to drop supplies in Burma, we will. If somehow, we are allowed to help in Darfur, we will.
The book filled in the gaps in my historical knowledge but also bolstered my faith in the warmth of Americans.
--Curt, Fair Lawn, NJ
Dear Curt,
Part of what made writing this book such a joy was that over the past four years I got daily reminders of what America can be at its best. When the news was filled with tales from Abu Ghraib and of torture, I was able to be unearthing the forgotten story of when we were doing the right things in the world. When polls were being released showing that respect and admiration for America in other countries was at a low ebb, I was writing about when America was beloved and seen by other peoples as a force for decency, humanity, and justice. When we lost too much of a great American city because of incompetence during Katrina, I had this tale from when we were a "can do" country that figured out how to feed and suuply one of the largest cities on earth completely by air for a year with the most meager of resources.
I came away from this work of history convinced that this is still who we are at our core as a country. As you know from reading this book, this is no hagiography. The characters in this book are all imperfect people who make their share of mistakes. But that to me was what was so reassuring. Because if they can figure their way out of the brink of a catastrophic World War III, then surely we can again become America at its best today.
-- Andrei
CNN did a story on Hal Halvorsen and "The Candy Bombers":
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/05/17/pkg.candy.bomber.cnn
It features some of Halvorsen's great film from his time in Germany. If you've read the book, these are the children that he met at the Tempelhof fence.
Dear Mr. Cherny:
I read a lot of books and The Candy Bombers easily makes my top ten list of best books I have ever read. I have been waiting a very long time for someone to write a book on the Berlin Airlift and you did a great job in reporting what happened.
Keep up the good work.
-- Raymond
Raymond --
Thanks a lot for the high praise. I knew that this was just such an interesting, unknown story that if I could capture the drama of that moment and the compelling characters, then it would almost tell itself.
-- Andrei
Dear Mr. Cherny:
Having just finished “The Candy Bombers” I could not resume my day’s work without congratulating you, and thanking you, for that marvelous book.
I am an inveterate history buff, from Churchill to Upton Sinclair; from Morrison’s naval histories to Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, and have never encountered so lyrical an account of the human spirit in all its suffering and striving.
-- Joe, Smithville, NJ
Dear Joe:
As someone who grew up reading those writers -- and still turns to them for inspiration and guidance about our world -- I am deeply honored.
Thank you.
-- Andrei
Let me say one thing at the outset: if they had been passing out D minuses on the report card at Pixieland Kindgarten, I would have received one in arts and crafts. Asking me to take a pair of scissors and cut a straight line across a piece of paper is like asking Jack Daniels himself to put one foot before another in a field sobriety test.
Knowing all this, I should have realized I did not have all my wits about me when I decided to undertake a relatively ambitious project just minutes before I went on the Colbert Report last Thursday to talk about my new book, The Candy Bombers. I landed at JFK airport at a little past 7 am on the morning I was supposed to go on the show. Stuck in a middle seat on the plane, I had slept fitfully, if at all. I was jet-lagged and groggy. But somehow, on the ride into Manhattan, I hatched a plan. I wouldn’t just come onto Colbert prepared for battle, I would come with a prop: my own handmade version of the kind of candy-laden handkerchief parachute that Hal Halvorsen and the other candy bombers had dropped to the children of Berlin.
I got to the hotel and took a nap. I awoke in time for a radio interview, grabbed lunch at a nearby New York food truck, and returned back to the hotel for another radio interview. I finished and then turned to try to respond to some of the many emails from friends wishing me luck on the show. From the tone of most of them, people seemed to think I was really going to need it. I looked up from my laptop and it was a little after 3:30. The car from the Colbert show was coming to pick me up at six.
I had some handkerchiefs and Hershey bars that my publisher had sent me that were left over from the promotion packets they had sent out. Now I needed string to make the parachutes. I quickly realized I had no earthly idea where in Times Square I could get a roll of string. New York t-shirts? Yes. Jumbotron TV screens? Check. Broadway show tickets? Absolutely. String? Not so much.
I set out on a quest for this mystery material and finally found a drug store that, after a long search, was able to produce some string for me. I brought it back to my hotel, picked up some scotch tape and scissors from the front desk, and came up to the room. I laid it all out on my bed and immediately knew I had little idea about what to do next. I have spent the past four years obsessively researching every aspect of the events covered in my book. What were people wearing on a specific day? What was the weather like? What did the rooms I describe smell like? But I had only an academic understanding of how these parachutes were actually made. I had seen and handled them. I had looked at diagrams of instruction. But actually making one was a whole different question.
It was now past 4:30. I still had to get washed and shaved before the show. And here I was, with an hour and half before I had to leave, not spending my time thinking about what I actually was going to say before an audience of millions, but trying to cut little lengths of cheap string into even pieces, tying one end into holes I was making in the handkerchiefs, and then tying the other end around a Hershey bar. I did it four or five times before one of them looked halfway decent. I was terrified that the Hershey bar would fall out of my knot on the show and so I lashed it to the string with the scotch tape.
Finished, I quickly got ready and went downstairs where the car was already waiting. I suddenly felt the jetlag kicking in asked the driver if he could wait a minute while I got some coffee from the Starbucks next door. He said it was no problem. I asked if he wanted something and he laughed and said he didn’t. When I got into the car, the driver, a Polish immigrant, said, “You know, I’m sure they will have coffee for you there.” Good point.
It just took a few minutes to get to the studios. I was shown into the “Green Room” which was not green but had a fruit platter and some giant slabs of carrot cake laid out for me on the coffee table. And, yes, they had coffee.
Before long, a few of the show’s bookers and producers wandered in and, with minutes before show time, we found ourselves in a wide-ranging discussion of politics, matchmaking, US Weekly, and contemporary German politics. They gave me my guest gift bag. If you’ve heard about the amazing bags that people get for presenting at the Oscars, then…this was very different. But I wasn’t one to look a gift bag in the mouth. And after all who could complain about a half dozen boxes of Altoids, a 2.5 lbs drum of Cuban coffee, a bottle of Vodka, and an enormous “red, white, and blueberry” coffee cake?
I hardly noticed when Stephen Colbert wandered in to introduce himself. I don’t want to be the person that reveals there is no Santa Claus, but since I’ve been asked a number of times in the days since: No, he is not like anything like his character. He was charming and low key. “I play an idiot on the show,” he said and told me to aggressively disabuse him of his idiocy.
Once he left, I produced my little candy parachute and asked everyone what they thought about my taking on the air. They overlooked its deficient construction and said it would work well. They took from me to show the director and others and came back saying everyone was in favor of using it. In fact, I was told, there had been some discussion about whether it should be dropped onto the table while we were talking. Luckily, Colbert himself had nixed the idea. I’m sure it would have hit me in the head in mid-sentence.
The show started, I was sent into the makeup chair (I said I needed all the help they could give me), I got a last minute once over with the lint brush and then I was in the chair on the set waiting for my segment to begin. Soon the lights came on, he introduced me, ran over, shook my hand, asked me a question…and it was over.
It felt that fast. When we were done, Colbert leaned over to say I had done a good job. Some of the other staff members greeted me. I took the parachute off the table and threw it into the crowd.
Having now watched the segment a few times, I think it went pretty well. Colbert went easy on me, relatively. People have wondered if I was nervous. I certainly didn’t feel nervous and while I spoke quickly, I think it is because I was trying to get as much as I could in and match his energy. If I had to do it over again, I probably would not have spent the time outlining the three bad options America faced in the blockade and spoken more instead about the lessons we learned from the Airlift and what it means for today. But, that’s basically a quibble with what I did say.
After I walked off the set, I was asked to sign Colbert’s “guest book.” I wrote something about hoping I didn’t (candy) bomb. Which is why, on air, I left the jokes to him.
P.S. The next day it was raining hard in New York (or at least much harder than it’s been raining in Phoenix). It took me almost two hours to get back to JFK for my flight. The kind people at the ticket counter of an unnamed airline (it begins with “D” and ends with “elta”) said they wouldn’t give me a boarding pass since I was only 43 minutes early for my flight when I needed to be at least 45 minutes early. I thought I would be stuck in New York overnight. I resolved that if I was I would sit myself down and eat the entire “red, white, and blueberry coffee cake.”
P.P.S. For everyone’s sake, I got a ticket on Jet Blue for the last flight out to Phoenix. I got into my middle seat and started chit-chatting with the guy sitting next to me. “Looks like it’s a full flight.” “Hope we won’t be too delayed with the rain.” And so on. As you may know, Jet Blue features mini-TVs in the back of each seat with all kinds of stations: the major networks, a couple of ESPNs, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Travel Channel, Bravo, TNT…and Comedy Central. A couple of hours into the flight, the guy next to me flips to the repeat of the previous night’s Colbert Report. He watched the entire show, including my segment, sitting next to me and never put two-and-two together.
Bloomberg has excerpts from a long interview I did last month at their New York headquarters (the second-coolest looking workplace I've ever seen...next to Google's). The executive editor of their leisure and arts section says "The Candy Bombers" has "a fine eye for character and detail."
The Arizona Republic ran a Q&A about the The Candy Bombers in the Sunday paper. The accompanying photo didn't look anything like me...I hope!!
Hello Mr. Cherny,
I am currently reading your book The Candy Bombers and must say I'm finding it to be a very interesting and moving book. Several of the anecdotal stories of the citizens of Berlin, especially the children have been extremely touching. The young German girl who gave her rag doll to Mr. Halvorsen for his protection, the one she clutched while sheltering from the actual bombing Berlin suffered during the war brought tears to my eyes. And the young German boy who asked that candy be dropped at his home and then was upset when none came and asked "how did you win the war?" made me laugh.
I can only marvel at the change in attitude of the American soldiers and pilots as well as the German people that seemed to occur over a short time to the events of the time. After having seen the horror of the concentration camps and the feeling of how their lives had been interrupted to fight a second war in 20 years with Germany, I can understand the feelings of distrust and even hate the American servicemen felt toward Germany. That this was able to change and be appreciated by the German people as they were undergoing such terrible hardship is truly amazing.
Thank you for one of the most enjoyable and thought provoking books I have read in some time.
-- Mark, Bolingbrook, IL
Mark --
Thank you for your note. The story of how Americans and Germans moved past the animosity that built up on both sides in the years of war and occupation is one that isn't well one but that has much to teach us. We largely remember those years as ones where the hatred between both sides ended as soon as Hitler's regime fell but that was simply not so. History is more complicated than we sometimes recall, but a lot more interesting!
Thanks again.
-- Andrei
Today's USA Today features an op-ed I wrote about some of the lessons we might take from the experience of the German occupation on how America can carry out its special role of spreading democracy and freedom around the world.
Somewhere along the way in the editing process, an intro blurb was written by the good folks at USA Today that carries a number of mistakes about the Berlin Airlift. See if you can spot them all. They have been kind enough to say that a correction will run tomorrow.
This is why I maintain that the Berlin Airlift is one of America's "untold stories"...
UPDATE: The fast-responding editors at USA Today have fixed the mistakes in the online version.
I conducted an online discussion last week with David Frum on a number of subjects including presidential politics and my journal, Democracy, but much of the conversation was about The Candy Bombers and its implications for today. Frum is among the most thoughtful conservative writers and though he is now known as the person who authored the phrase "axis of evil" for President George W. Bush in 2002, I have been following his work since I read his first book, Dead Right, in college in 1994.
I got a special surprise in the mailbag today from the clearly brilliant Noa Lena Lehrer -- her beautiful painting of candy drops to the children of Berlin. At age 6 years old, she is graduating from kindergarten -- no doubt, with honors. I'm not sure whether or not she will continue to do art as a professional, but we will all want to be checking on her in the years ahead!
This page contains all entries posted to Andrei Cherny in May 2008. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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