THE CANDY BOMBERS

Writing with the flair of a novelist, Cherny (The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age, 2000) tells the story of the Berlin Airlift.

The author sets the scene with the dramatic meeting of Russian and American troops at the banks of the Elbe on April 25, 1945. “The forces of liberation have joined hands,” announced the BBC; only Berlin remained to be subdued to end the war in Europe. The Red Army was first into the bombed-out city, which it vengefully pillaged and raped. Within three years, the Soviet Union had methodically expanded its hegemony in Eastern Europe, and relations with America were dangerously strained. In Berlin, the Russians manipulated elections in their sector and rejected the Western currency. Closing entrances into the American, British and French sectors of the city on June 25, 1948, the Soviets hoped to push out the West for good, in the process consigning 2.5 million Berliners to starvation. The U.S. airlift of coal and food into Tempelhof was initially intended to buy time during the standoff, but over the course of 11 months Operation Vittles would employ an armada of Skymaster C-54s and deliver millions of tons of cargo. Cherny dramatically weaves together the conjoined fates of numerous characters: Gen. Lucius Clay, newly appointed head of military government of Germany; Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and his nemesis, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, who ran against Truman in 1948; Col. Frank Howley, instrumental in managing the airlift; and pilots Curtis LeMay, Bill Tunner and Gail Halvorsen, the last-named celebrated for dropping little parachutes of candy for Berlin children. The author skillfully delineates the airlift’s role in dramatically improving Germans’ and Americans’ attitudes toward each other, with significant consequences for the Cold War. His account amplifies and vivifies material presented in a more bare-bones fashion by Jon Sutherland and Diane Canwell in Berlin Airlift: The Salvation of a City (2008).

Lively, densely detailed and unabashedly enthusiastic.