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 engage readers who might not usually read a work of history.

But the moral of this story was playing in the background of my mind as I searched for the right tale to tell. At this time of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, I asked myself, “When was the moment that America was at the summit of the world’s esteem, when it was seen as an unquestioned force for good?” It seemed clear that the answer was during the Berlin Airlift when Americans undertook what was then, and still is now sixty years later, the greatest humanitarian effort in history. As opposed to the missteps in the occupation of Iraq, here America was able to bring democracy to Nazi Germany and have its people end up loving us. In another long-term ideological struggle like the one we’re facing after 9/11, we rallied people and nations from around the world to our side. Unlike the aftermath of what we saw with Hurricane Katrina, the Berlin Airlift is the story of America as a can-do country that was able to feed millions of people, under terrible conditions, by flying all the food and supplies they needed by air in small, rickety airplanes for an entire year. It truly is the story of America at its best.

Writing The Candy Bombers took me to two continents and sixteen states. 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 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 a primary Airlift hub, just days before it was permanently shut down in December 2005. And, of course, I also visited Templehof Airport in Berlin and other landmarks there that are central to the story.

But what made the writing of this book special was the chance to work with those who were there: Berliners who recalled receiving candy and food as children, Airlift veterans who spoke of their involvement in this operation as the pride of their long lives. Most of all, I cherished the chance to spend time — and try to keep up — with the original candy bomber, Gail “Hal” Halverson. He’s now 87-years-old but still has more energy than just about anybody I know. I spent many days with him in his homes in Arizona and Utah, accompanied him to a convention of Airlift veterans, and trailed him on a visit to Berlin. And, crucially, he allowed me to literally rummage through his basement for letters and private papers that had gone unexamined for decades. It was in those dusty boxes and fraying scrapbooks that I found the story of the Berlin Airlift that had never been told before — the human story.

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. The Airlift is often overlooked in stories of the Cold War and of post-WWII America. It is given a paragraph or even a sentence in most histories of the era. It is not recounted in book after book in the way we see with D-Day or the Cuban Missile Crisis. But what happened there 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 closest we’ve ever come to World War III, and the moment America came to fully accept the mantle of leader of the free world.

When the Airlift story is told it is usually in terms of great power politics and the negotiations between America and the Soviet Union or in terms of pure military history and how this enormous undertaking was organized. Both of those stories are important, are part of this book, and are central to the tale. But the untold story — really the previously unknown 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 the human story of how Americans went from wanting to punish Germans for the horrors of World War II to treating them with 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 postwar 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.