They Called Him a Gangster. He Dropped THIS on Berlin

July 1948. At the end of a runway in Berlin, an American pilot named Gail Halvorsen broke a stick of gum in half and passed it through a barbed wire fence to children who had asked him for nothing. What happened next became one of the best-known stories of the Berlin Airlift: handkerchief parachutes, a promise to "wiggle his wings," and thousands of letters addressed to "Onkel Wackelfluegel," Uncle Wiggly Wings. But the story starts earlier, with a word invented in Nazi propaganda for Allied airmen: Luftgangster, "air gangster." In this video we follow both sides of that fence: what the children of Berlin had been taught, what the American airmen had been told about Germans, and what a lieutenant from a farm in northern Utah did with two sticks of Doublemint. In this video: 0:00 July 1948: two sticks of gum 3:35 "Luftgangster": the word for an American in a cockpit 5:30 A farm boy from Utah flies to Berlin 6:20 June 24, 1948: the blockade begins 7:05 What the bombs had done to Berlin 7:51 Landing at Tempelhof 9:54 The scale of the airlift 11:02 Why historians call the candy a PR story too 12:08 Christel and the girl with the teddy bear 12:26 May 12, 1949: the blockade ends 13:06 Halvorsen returns to Berlin 14:22 A hundred years old, and still "Uncle Wiggly Wings" 15:08 The story in the order Berlin lived it Key facts mentioned: the Berlin Airlift ran about fifteen months; American and British crews flew about 278,000 flights and carried more than 2.3 million tons of cargo. Operation Little Vittles dropped more than 21 tons of candy, a tiny fraction of the cargo, yet it is the part Berliners still remember. If someone in your family flew in the Berlin Airlift or remembers a candy parachute, tell us in the comments. We read them all. New videos about World War II, told from the other side of the fence: subscribe to World War 2 Desk. Note: this video uses archival footage and photographs. Where no footage of a specific moment exists, we show footage from the same period or location. #BerlinAirlift #CandyBomber #WW2History