Prologue: September 2001

On the lower tip of the island of Manhattan, fires trapped deep beneath the twisted metal girders were still burning. In great cities around the globe, people gathered to express their outrage and their sympathy. Hundreds of Londoners stood in silence when Big Ben rang at noon. When the guard changed at Buckingham Palace, the band played a song about the American flag still waving after a failed British assault on Fort McHenry. In Beijing and Amman, bouquets and wreaths piled high at the gates of the American embassies. In Dublin, the stores closed in commemoration. Children in the West Bank held candlelight vigils. In Paris, the newspaper headline was “We Are All Americans.”

But nowhere was there a greater outpouring of humanity and emotion than in the German capital of Berlin. There, 200,000 people gathered along the broad avenue leading through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. No one was quite sure why so many turned out.

The crowd felt young. Men and women in their twenties wore backpacks and shorts under the late summer sun; parents pushed strollers and held children by the hand in the enormous throng.

One woman stood still, alone in the crowd, lost in her thoughts as families and couples marched past her. She was old and stooped. Her hair was wild and she wore a dark, heavy coat even on the warm day. She was quietly sobbing.

Two young men approached her and asked why she was crying. She seemed startled, as if roused from a slumber. “I love Americans,” she said quickly, in a way that was so imploring they understand that it grabbed them and shook them by their lapels. She started to go on, to say more, to explain, but before the words came out, her gaze widened and warmed, the tears replaced by an ineffable joy. Her shoulders straightened just a bit. The wrinkles seemed to flee her face.

A distant, happy memory danced across her eyes as she looked upward, toward the sky. She began softly, in a whisper. “You see, I was a girl during the Airlift…”

Introduction: June 24, 1948

Years later, long after the bunting and banners had been torn down, delegates to the 1948 Republican convention would fondly remember the busty blonde in the rowboat. It was Wednesday night, June 23, 1948, and the floor in Philadelphia was open for nominations. For the first time in twenty years, a convention was meeting with neither economic depression nor global war as a backdrop. Instead, Americans—in those bursting, jubilant years after the end of World War II—were living in a period of plenty and progress that would have been unimaginable only a few years before.

Outside the convention hall, Philadelphia was hot and humid. After only a few moments of walking about, the delegates felt as if a heavy velvet had been draped over their skin. But they rushed between the various candidates’ headquarters in a mood of delirious excitement. Harold Stassen, the young former governor of Minnesota who was the favorite of Republican voters across the country, handed out red-white-and-blue buttons and 1,200 pounds of cheese. Robert A. Taft, the grandson of an attorney general and son of a president and chief justice of the Supreme Court, passed out buttons in the shape of a four-leaf clover. With a pained expression, the favorite of conservatives acceded to his advisers’ request and shook hands for the cameras with a baby elephant named Little Eva. The pachyderm was draped with a blanket on which was written: “Renounce Obstinate Bureaucracy, End Roguish Tactics, And Tally Americanism, Freedom, Truth,” a catchy slogan whose acronym just happened to be “Robert A. Taft.” Over at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey put them all to shame. His campaign gave away cigarette holders, ashtrays, and matchbooks; lipstick, luggage, and lingerie; unlimited bottles of pop provided by the president of Pepsi-Cola; chewing gum, boxes of chocolate, and 5,000 rolls of Life Savers. Thus, of course, Dewey was the convention’s front-runner.

The air of abundance was evident on the convention floor where two marching bands, Scottish bagpipers, and men with megaphones all competed for attention. The statuesque sailor in the eye-popping outfit, there on behalf of Stassen, moved through the sea of delegates atop a float, greeted with chants of “Man the Oars and Ride the Crest, Harold Stassen—He’s the Best.” “To Steer Our Craft, Let’s Take Taft” came the shouted answer. To make the speakers’ voices heard above the commotion, the arena installed what H. L. Mencken called “a loud-speaker system that is to any loud-speaker system of the past as the range of Himalayas is to a crabcake.” For weeks leading up to the convention, newspapers and magazines had carried ads for television sets that read “Meet Your Next President on RCA Victor.” The new phenomenon of television carried the proceedings from gavel to gavel since it was an inexpensive way to fill airtime. Ten million people, including President Harry S Truman sitting in front of a television in the White House, watched the convention—more than had witnessed every previous political convention in America combined. It was then the largest television audience in history.

The Republican convention had a plethora of seemingly everything, but what it had most—and this fairly oozed from the delegates—was confidence. The Democratic Party had been split by the issue of relations with the Soviet Union, resulting in what the New York Times’ chief political correspondent described as the country’s “general conviction that the nominee of the convention will become the next president of the U.S.”

But in the pivotal year of 1948, it was not the campaign of Thomas Dewey to capture the White House that would dominate the newspaper headlines. Another event would seize the public’s attention and ultimately deny Dewey his victory. It was the battle for Berlin.

IT WAS 4 A.M. in Philadelphia, almost dawn, when the convention adjourned and the delegates stumbled bleary-eyed into bed, not realizing that while they had been in the convention hall a global crisis had arisen that threatened to spark World War III. Berlin, a city divided up between the victors of the last world war, lay deep within the Soviet-occupied parts of Germany. At 6 A.M. on June 24, 1948, as the cheers for Taft were dying down in Philadelphia, the Russians, in order to capture control of the entire city, halted the trains, trucks, and barges that brought food, coal, and every other supply into the western portions of the capital on a daily basis. Two and a quarter million people in Berlin—the biggest city in the world—were cut off from everything they needed to survive.

To Colonel Frank Howley, the bombastic head of America’s occupation government in Berlin, it was “a wicked decision, the most barbarous in history since Gengis Khan reduced conquered cities to pyramids of skulls.” That morning, a gentle drizzle was falling on the capital, but Howley rode to work in an open car so that the knots of worried Berliners he passed could see he was unafraid. There was another reason he rode with the top down in the rain. He thought there was a chance that assassins might be lurking in the shadows waiting to kill him in advance of a Soviet attack on western Berlin. He liked to dare them to take their best shot.

Howley drove through a city that had once been among the most elegant and sophisticated in Europe. American and British bombs from high above and a brutal Russian invasion had all but flattened Berlin. By 1948, the distrust and enmity between the conquerors and the conquered had barely begun to thaw, and Berlin had barely begun to rebuild. It was a city, wrote a reporter at the time, “which lacks everything but ruins.” In the three years since the end of the war, Berliners had lived with the pains of hunger and cold every day—and this made the prospect of no more food and warmth all the more terrifying.

When the blockade was announced, a frisson of panic leapt through the city. Since dawn, Soviet radio had been announcing that the water supply would be cut off next. In the city’s sixteen water plants, the gauge levels were plummeting as Berlin’s mothers filled-up every available container with all the water they could hoard—bathtubs, buckets, even their own chamber pots. Around Berlin, taps began to dry out. Howley phoned the broadcast chief of the American-run radio station and gave him very precise instructions. Minutes later, Berliners heard the announcer make an unusual request. “Give your baby a bath. All of you take baths. Use as much water as you want. There’s plenty of it.” And around Berlin, households turned off their water and emptied their bathtubs. Almost instantaneously, the city’s water supplies returned to normal.

But the fear that truly seized Berliners that morning was not a lack of water, it was war. Many believed the blockade was a precursor to a Russian invasion of the western sectors of Berlin. Howley himself went on the radio that afternoon to reassure the city. With all the considerable bravado he could muster, he addressed the Red Army commanders directly, spitting out his words as if they were gristles of rancid meat in his mouth: “If you do try to come into our sector, you had better be well prepared. We are ready for you.” The bluster was meant for Berliners’ comfort rather than as a threat to the Russians. It was a bluff and not at all a convincing one: The military forces of the western democracies were outnumbered 62 to 1 in Berlin and its surrounding areas. The Soviets had more troops within a few hours of the city than America had in the world. “Militarily we didn’t stand a chance,” Howley would admit. The Russians could have “liquidated us before you could say ‘Politburo!’”

FOR THREE YEARS, America had watched as the Communists took control of the nations of Eastern Europe, one after another, but, so far, the Soviets had only captured governments in the areas already under their thumb. Much of West Berlin was American territory—in the struggle there the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would face off directly for the first and only time. It would be the testing place that would determine whether the Soviets could conquer the rest of Europe or whether democracy could hold its ground; whether there would be a hot war or a cold peace.

The Americans and their British and French allies quickly concluded that they had three options on that morning of June 24, 1948. They could retreat from Berlin and leave the entire city and its people to the Russians. However, “withdrawal would snuff the last candle of light east of the Iron Curtain,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor that week. “And it would set ablaze new fires of Communism to the west.” It would be a death sentence for the democratic leaders in Berlin, and it was widely assumed by the top officials in America that a retreat would mean that Communists would capture control of Italy, France, and the rest of Germany next. As the New York Times put it, an evacuation “would inevitably entail the surrender of all Germany and of Europe.” They might well have been right—certainly NATO would never have been born and the Marshall Plan would have died in its early infancy.

They could try to hold their ground in the city, watching helplessly as Berliners steadily starved in the streets in front of the eyes of the world, knowing that it would be only a matter of time before they would rise up against the allies and force them out in order simply to survive.

Finally, they could try to bring food into the city by force, likely bringing about a new world war against an enemy of vastly superior strength. “All the Russians need” to overrun American forces in Germany, said Bob Lovett, America’s acting Secretary of State at the time, “is shoes.” If this had occurred, the Red Army would have raced across Western Europe—it was estimated that the Russians could reach the English Channel in 48 hours—and America would have had no choice but to raze Moscow, Leningrad, and other Russian cities with atomic bombs.

“Never before had a city been summoned to surrender before the threat of starvation, civil war within, or a bigger war without,” wrote an American newsmagazine that week. The general in charge of American forces in Europe and of the occupation of Germany, Lucius Clay, took a look at the alternatives that morning and confided to a journalist, with a snap of his fingers, “I wouldn’t give you that for our chances.”

THESE WERE THE choices on June 24, 1948. What happened next is as much an American fable as that winter in Valley Forge, the last desperate stand of the Alamo, or the bus boycott in Montgomery. It was a turning point in the nation’s history, the moment America came to fully accept the mantle of leader of the free world. But more than that, it was the moment when America became beloved by the very people it had defeated in battle and whose cities it had leveled—and was revered by people around the world who looked to the United States as a source of decency and good.

This book does not aim to be a comprehensive history of the Berlin blockade and the American response. Able scholars have trod that ground before. Rather, using recently declassified documents, new interviews with those who were there, unpublished letters, and unexplored details, it is the story of when Americans learned—for the first time—how to act at the summit of world power. Some aspects of this story, if not the particulars, may be familiar: the president written off for reelection, an allied response to the siege of Berlin, a secretary of defense battling America’s demons and his own. Even the account of a kind American pilot who dropped candy to the children of Berlin has been referred to often in passing as a warmhearted human interest story. But these are not separate threads. Instead, in the course of a year, these stories were woven together into a single fabric—each strand tied into the others—that is the forgotten foundation tale of America in the modern world.

It is a story of America at her best, but it is by no means a simple story or a straight line. Those who are accustomed to the jerky, flickering, black-and-white newsreel images of Harry Truman and his advisers might be surprised by the people they will meet ahead. Freed from their imprisonment in bronze statues and marble busts, they turn out to be at times short-sighted, petty, crassly political, calculating, often miscalculating. They were, it turns out, human—and it is their very humanity that makes what they accomplished so extraordinary. For despite their foibles and failings, they were able to heal the wounds of a terrible war, save the world from the advances of a new threat without firing a shot, and bring freedom and democracy to a place that had never known them and was thought to be unsuited to them.

Three years after the end of the greatest war the world had ever seen, the appetite for great men had disappeared along with the confetti and the kissing in Times Square. The men who broke the siege of Berlin were the misfits, the leftovers, history’s second-stringers. Hal Halvorsen, a lovesick pilot who had served far from the conflict, not in dogfights over Normandy or on bombing runs over Dresden, but in the backwaters of a global war—flying transport missions on the outskirts of the headlines. Lucius Clay, a general who had spent World War II on the home front in charge of defense procurement; frustrated, overlooked, haggling over spare parts instead of commanding troops in battle. Bill Tunner, a superb military organizer who had achieved great glory in commanding the most successful air transport mission in history but, with the war’s end, with his family falling apart, had been downsized to a desk job in a forlorn corner of the Pentagon. James Forrestal, a secretary of defense ignored and flailing. Harry Truman, an accidental president, derided by his own party, headed toward defeat, who had proved to be little match for the eloquence and elegance of his predecessor.

Yet, in the year after that June day in 1948—long after the postwar parades had passed, after the ticker-tape had been swept away, after all the heroes had supposedly been minted—it was these unlikely men who improvised and stumbled their way into inventing a uniquely American approach to the world that married the nation's military and its moral might. Clay’s stubbornness in standing against the American foreign policy establishment would save a city; Tunner’s zeal would achieve what no one else thought was possible; Forrestal’s vision would define the nation’s outlook even as it consumed him; Truman would find victory at home and abroad because of his decisions in Berlin; and Halvorsen, the ordinary young pilot, would, almost single-handedly, transform how the citizens of defeated Germany’s capital saw the United States.

Their story has powerful resonance for our own time. In confronting the Berlin blockade, America went to battle against a destructive ideology which threatened free people around the world. In a country we invaded and occupied that had never had a stable democracy, we brought freedom and turned their people’s hatred of America into love for this country, its people, and its ideals. Never before—or since—would America be so admired around the world and stand so solidly on the side of light.

Those were the years when people thought that atomic bomb shelters and air-raid drills would be parts of daily life forever. But because of the legacy of The Candy Bombers, this turned out not to be true. Today, in a time of metal detectors and air marshals, their legend and its lessons can help guide our way forward.

THE STORY BEGINS in the spring of 1945. In Germany, Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich is falling, order itself is crumbling, and, on the broad plains of Central Europe, the two greatest armies in history are converging on open fields where, after a long winter, the green grass of spring brings a new hope.