On the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, The Candy Bombers is a remarkable story with profound implications for our time. Bringing together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews, Andrei Cherny tells the tale of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat, but changed how the world viewed the United States – setting in motion the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and America’s victory in the Cold War.

In the tradition of the best nonfiction narratives, The Candy Bombers takes readers along as American pilots, with only a few small rickety planes, manage to feed and supply west Berlin completely by air for nearly a year, as as Harry Truman exploits the very real threat of war to win an upset reelection campaign, as America’s first secretary of defense descends into madness in the midst of a dangerous military crisis, and as an ordinary American pilot shows that acts of basic human kindness can send powerful ripples through the course of history.

The Candy Bombers is the forgotten foundation tale of America in the modern world, the story of when Americans learned, for the first time, how to act at the summit of world power – a powerful and exciting work of historical narrative, and one with strong resonance for the world today.