Dan Sullivan

In 1948, a young American pilot gave two sticks of gum to a group of German children behind a barbed-wire fence. What happened next helped America win the Cold War. June 1948. Berlin. Stalin has blockaded the city. Two million people are cut off from food, fuel, and heat — the Soviets are trying to starve them into submission. America's answer: fly EVERYTHING in. Coal. Flour. Milk. Medicine. A plane lands every 90 seconds, day and night. One of those pilots is Lt. Gail Halvorsen — a 27-year-old farm kid from Utah. On his day off, he walks over to Tempelhof Airport and finds 30 German children watching the planes through a barbed-wire fence. He braces himself. Everywhere else in war-torn Europe, kids had swarmed him begging: "Any gum, chum?" These kids don't ask for anything. They just want to know one thing: "Please don't stop the airlift. Please don't leave us." Halvorsen checks his pockets. Two sticks of Wrigley's gum. Thirty kids. Two sticks of gum. He hands them through the fence and waits for the fight. There is no fight. The kids break the gum into tiny pieces. The ones who don't get a piece pass around the empty foil wrappers — just to smell it. Halvorsen breaks. Right there at the fence. "I'll drop more from my plane tomorrow," he blurts out. A kid asks: "How will we know which plane is yours?" He tells them he'll wiggle the wings. That night he ties candy bars to handkerchiefs, makes tiny parachutes, and stuffs them in his C-54. The next day, on approach to Tempelhof, he wiggles his wings — and drops chocolate from the sky. The kids named him Uncle Wiggly Wings. Word spread. His crew donated rations. Then his whole squadron. Then Hershey sent candy by the truckload. American schoolkids mailed in handkerchiefs. His superiors were furious — he'd broken regulations. Then they saw the headlines and shut up. By the end of the airlift, American pilots had dropped 23 tons of candy under 250,000 parachutes over Berlin. The Soviets tried to starve a city. America dropped chocolate from the sky. Gail Halvorsen died in 2022, at 101 years old. At his memorial, elderly Germans — the children from behind that fence, now in their 80s — flew across the ocean to say goodbye to Uncle Wiggly Wings. He always said the same thing about that day at Tempelhof: "The small things you do turn into great things."