Value principles over power: Erhard rose to Germany’s highest political office but had little interest in power for its own sake. “In my eyes,” he said, “power is always dull, it is dangerous, it is brutal and ultimately even dumb.” He was committed instead to the principles of liberty, which meant handing to the people the power he could have hoarded for his government.
30
Gail Halvorsen
The Candy Bomber
In his 1986 bestselling book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum mused:
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air—explode softly—and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth—boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap either—not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. A child who touched one wouldn’t have his hand blown off.
Something akin to what Fulghum imagined actually happened almost forty years earlier. The man responsible for it is Gail Halvorsen, known in history as the “Candy Bomber.”
Checking Stalin
I first learned of Colonel Halvorsen in late 2013. I was watching a DVD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s annual Christmas concert from the year before. NBC’s Tom Brokaw narrated a segment about a U.S. Air Force officer who dropped candy from C-47 and C-54 cargo planes during the 1948–49 Soviet blockade of Berlin. Then across the stage strolled Colonel Halvorsen himself, smiling and still robust at ninety-two.
Halvorsen undertook his remarkable venture in the wake of the Nazi surrender, when Germany was divided and occupied by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Berlin lay deep within Soviet territory, but it, too, was carved up into zones. Joseph Stalin hoped the Western Allies would leave the entire city under Soviet control. Tension over the future status of Berlin produced the first major confrontation of the Cold War.
That crisis began after another hero, Ludwig Erhard (see chapter 29), introduced a new currency. For the three years from the end of the war until the spring of 1948, the Soviets handled the printing of Reichsmarks for all of occupied Germany. They promptly overprinted, knowing that currency debasement would thwart economic recovery. That fit right into Stalin’s plans to keep Germany vulnerable to Soviet domination. By 1948, Germans were using cigarettes as money instead of the depreciating paper Reichsmark.
Words of Wisdom from Gail Halvorsen
“Without hope, the soul dies.”
When Erhard, the economics director appointed by the British and Americans, ended rationing and price controls and introduced a new, sounder currency, the deutsche mark, on a Sunday in June, the Soviets reacted by cutting all land connections (including electricity) between Berlin and the sectors of Germany occupied by the Western Allies. A hundred miles inside the Soviet sector, West Berlin was suddenly inaccessible by road, river, canal, or railway.
Stalin offered to lift the blockade if the deutsche mark were abandoned, and he introduced his own new currency, the Ostmark, in the Soviet zone. But Germans en masse began using the deutsche mark and rejecting the Ostmark, even in East Berlin. Erhard and the Western Allies held firm against Stalin. They organized a campaign of airlifts to ferry food, water, fuel, and other supplies to the besieged city. It was called “Operation Vittles.” Pilots and crews from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa flew more than 200,000 flights over the next year, bringing West Berliners up to nine thousand tons of vital provisions every day.
Although Stalin undoubtedly feared the ramifications of shooting down unarmed aircraft on humanitarian missions, the airlift didn’t go unchallenged. Soviet harassment took the form of shining searchlights at the pilots as they attempted landings and takeoffs and using Soviet planes to “buzz” Allied aircraft. Communist propaganda, especially by radio, constantly warned Berliners that collapse was imminent. Stalin calculated that the West’s resolve would weaken, but within weeks it was clear that the airlift was working. Berliners organized mass protests against Soviet actions, which only strengthened the world’s moral and material support for the Western relief effort. Finally, at one minute after midnight on May 12, 1949, the Soviets ended the blockade.
Gail Halvorsen of Utah was one of the thousands of airlift pilots who saved West Berlin in the eleven months of the airlift. He performed his duty ably, but that wasn’t what made him a hero. Compassion, creative thinking, and initiative led him to truly heroic acts.
“Operation Little Vittles”
While on the ground at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport between flights, Halvorsen noticed some local children observing the planes from behind a fence. He approached them and offered his only two sticks of gum. Grateful, the children broke the gum into pieces to share with one another; those who didn’t get any sniffed the empty wrappers.
Halvorsen was struck by what the kids told him. “Don’t give up on us,” they said. “If we lose our freedom, we’ll never get it back.”
“American-style freedom was their dream,” Halvorsen later recalled. “Hitler’s past and Stalin’s future were their nightmare.”
Halverson promised the children he’d come back with more and told them that they would know his plane from the others because he would “wiggle” his wings. A day later, he did just that as he dropped chocolate bars attached to parachutes made from handkerchiefs.
Those few chocolate bars were just the beginning. Halvorsen made additional drops of candy that he gathered up from fellow airmen who sacrificed their rations. The crowds of anxious children grew. Kids sent letters to the air base addressed to “Uncle Wiggly Wings.” In his book Candy Bomber: The Story of the Berlin Airlift’s Chocolate Pilot, Michael O. Tunnell recounts an especially poignant episode:
By October of 1948 Peter Zimmerman must have decided he’d never score a candy parachute unless he took matters into his own hands. So he sent a letter—in English—to the man he hoped would soon be his Chocolate Uncle. He also tucked a map and a crude homemade parachute into the envelope. “As you see,” he wrote, “after takeoff fly along the big canal to the second highway bridge, turn right one block. I live in the bombed-out house on the corner. I’ll be in the backyard every day at 2 p.m. Drop the chocolate there.”
Halvorsen followed the instructions, but poor Peter Zimmerman kept missing out on the candy drops. Young Zimmerman wrote again to Halvorsen, complaining, “Didn’t get any gum or candy, a bigger kid beat me to it.” After several more drops that failed to reach him, Zimmerman sent an impatient letter to Halvorsen: “You are a pilot?” he wrote. “I gave you a map. How did you guys win the war?” He offered to build a fire so Halvorsen would know exactly where he was.
To make sure Zimmerman wasn’t disappointed again, Halvorsen boxed up some gum and chocolate and mailed him the package.
When news of the unauthorized candy drops broke in the international media, Halvorsen feared he would be disciplined by his superiors. But instead they approved. Halvorsen’s two sticks of gum blossomed into a full-blown campaign: “Operation Little Vittles.”
Soon he was attracting donations and volunteers from all over the globe. The National Confectioners Association in America contributed massive amounts of candy. Children and their parents donated candy and provided homemade parachutes by the tens of thousands. By the time the Soviets finally relented and ended the blockade, Operation Little Vittles had dropped at least twenty-three tons of sweets on Berlin. It was a huge factor in kindling the goodwill and close ties that still exist between the German people and those of America and its allies.
Freedom, Integrity, and Hope
In the decades since the airlift, Gail Halvorsen has been honor
ed many times in many countries for his initiative and humanitarianism. In 2002 he wrote The Berlin Candy Bomber, a moving account of his experiences in those critical months of 1948–49. Full of photos and copies of letters he received from German children, it’s a gem of a read.
Why did he do it? Why did he risk being disciplined by his superiors to help the children of West Berlin? Surely his attitudes about freedom, integrity, and hope shaped his perspective. Colonel Halvorsen has offered a series of maxims we should all remember: “The desire for freedom is inborn in every human soul, no matter on which side of the border he or she is born”; “Keep your word; integrity begets hope, faith, trust, peace of mind, and confidence for yourself and others”; “Give service to others if you seek genuine fulfillment; a happy person has goals that include others”; “Seek a positive outlook on life, and the world will be manageable, even if difficult; attitude is not everything, but it does affect everything”; and “It is never so good or never so bad that the existing situation cannot be improved with patience, determination, love, and hard work.”
Thank you, Gail Halvorsen, for your inspiration. People like you—helping other people from the goodness of their hearts—are truly a beautiful thing. You and the other heroes of the Berlin airlift saved a city of more than two million.
Lessons from Gail Halvorsen
“Give service to others if you seek genuine fulfillment”: Gail Halvorsen did not stop at serving the people of Berlin through the airlift. Moved by the German children’s gratitude and longing for freedom, he became the “Candy Bomber,” leading a massive aid effort.
“Keep your word”: Halvorsen kept his promise to Berlin children by starting his unauthorized candy operation. Though he sensed that his superiors would discipline him for it, he understood that keeping your word “begets hope, faith, trust, peace of mind, and confidence for yourself and others.”
31
Joe Louis
Fighter on Many Fronts
If you remember the famous 1938 fight for the world heavyweight boxing title between Detroit’s Joe Louis and Germany’s Max Schmeling, you’ve been around a while. If you don’t, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about it from your father or grandfather. It was a rematch that Louis, known as the “Brown Bomber,” won in just 124 seconds.
Joe Louis was a hero not only for whom and what he fought but also for maintaining his integrity along the way. He dealt personally with poverty and racism. He overcame a speech impediment and the loss of his father at an early age. He took on the best boxers of his day. He battled the Nazis. He crossed swords with the Internal Revenue Service. When he died at age sixty-six in 1981, he was widely revered as a champion of character and was beloved by good people of every color.
“One-Man Triumphs”
The grandson of slaves, Joseph Louis Barrow was born in 1914 in LaFayette, Alabama. He barely spoke until he was in the second grade. At age twelve, he moved with his mother, his stepdad, and his seven siblings to Detroit after a scare from the Ku Klux Klan. To his credit, the young man never viewed the racism of a few as indicative of the many. He judged men and women the way he wanted them to judge him: namely, by what Martin Luther King would call “the content of their character.”
In spite of his mother’s desire that he pursue either cabinetmaking or the violin, he showed an early penchant for pugilism. He dropped “Barrow” and became simply “Joe Louis” when he started competing in the ring as a teenager, apparently because he didn’t want his mom to know he was boxing. She soon found out, as did the rest of the world.
The Great Depression was in full swing when Louis fought the first big match of his amateur career, in 1932. He lost to a future Olympian. Undaunted, he went on to win all but three of his next fifty-three fights (forty-three by knockout) and caught the attention of boxing promoters. He went pro in 1934.
One of the most famous dates in boxing history is June 22, 1937. That’s when Louis went up against heavyweight titleholder James Braddock, knocking him out in the eighth round. Americans black and white stayed up all night across the country in celebration, but the joy was especially pronounced in black communities. Here’s how author Langston Hughes described Louis’s influence:
Each time Joe Louis won a fight in those depression years, even before he became champion, thousands of colored Americans on relief or WPA, and poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs. No one else in the United States has ever had such an effect on Negro emotions—or on mine. I marched and cheered and yelled and cried, too.
Words of Wisdom from Joe Louis
“There’s no such thing as a ‘natural.’ A ‘natural’ dancer has to practice hard. A ‘natural’ painter has to paint all the time, even a ‘natural’ fool has to work at it.”
In seventy-two professional fights, Louis scored fifty-seven knockouts and lost only three matches. For twelve years (1937–1949), he held the heavyweight championship—the longest stretch in the sport’s history. He successfully defended his title twenty-five times, also a record for heavyweights; at one point he fought seven times in seven months. His closely watched 1938 defeat of Max Schmeling embarrassed the Third Reich because it said to the world, “This Aryan superiority thing is nothing more than propaganda.”
Breaking Barriers
A month after Pearl Harbor, Louis enlisted in the U.S. Army and went off for basic training with a segregated cavalry unit at Fort Riley, Kansas. Asked why he would be willing to serve a country where blacks still did not enjoy equal rights, he replied, “There’s nothing wrong with America that Hitler can fix.”
The army used Louis to cheer up the troops by sending him some twenty thousand miles for ninety-six boxing matches in front of two million soldiers. He was eventually given the Legion of Merit for his “incalculable contribution to the general morale.” It was in the army that he befriended Jackie Robinson, the future major league baseball player. Louis persuaded a commanding officer to drop charges against Robinson for punching out a fellow soldier who called him the N-word.
Nobody who ever really knew Joe Louis, it seems, had an unkind word for him. Perhaps the worst ever said was actually spoken in jest, by fellow boxer Max Baer: “I define fear as standing across the ring from Joe Louis and knowing he wants to go home early.”
You may not think of Louis in connection with the game of golf, but he made an impact there as well. Golf was his longtime hobby. In 1952, as an amateur, he received a sponsor’s exemption to play at a PGA Tour event in San Diego. Only one problem: the PGA had a “Caucasian-only” clause in its bylaws. As Bob Denney of the PGA of America reports, when Louis found out about the discriminatory rule, he and others sent a petition to the governor of California. The governor said that the clause was unconstitutional. The PGA wouldn’t remove the rule until 1961, but it did agree to give Louis an exemption to compete in the tournament. Thus he became the first black American to play in a PGA Tour event.
Just as Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Joe Louis broke it in golf. His appearance as an amateur paved the way for black golfers like Calvin Peete to play on the pro tour. According to the Golf Channel’s Rich Lerner, Louis also helped “black professionals like Bill Spiller, Teddy Rhodes, Howard Wheeler, Clyde Martin, and Charlie Sifford make their way in a white man’s sport.”
Battling the IRS
A very different fight that Louis waged is less well known than his boxing. It was with the Internal Revenue Service. As we do in our day, Louis had to contend with a president whose fingers itched to get into the pockets of wealthy Americans. I first learned of this story from historian Burton Folsom, author of the superb book New Deal or Raw Deal?
In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt pushed Congress to raise the top income tax rate to 79 percent, then later to 94 percent during and after World War II. In the war years, Joe Louis donated money to military charities, but the complicated tax laws wouldn’t allow him
to deduct those gifts. Although Louis saw almost none of the money he won in charity fights, the IRS credited the full amounts as taxable income paid to Louis. He had even voluntarily paid back to the city of Detroit all the money he and his family had received in welfare years earlier, but that counted for nothing with the feds.
Louis retired as heavyweight champion in 1949. But he couldn’t remain out of the ring long. In 1950 the IRS ruled that his tax debt, with penalties and interest included, stood at more than $500,000 (nearly $5 million in 2016 dollars). The federal government sometimes reached settlements in such situations; Folsom recounts how, in 1944, FDR had personally halted an IRS investigation into a young but politically valuable congressman named Lyndon Johnson. Louis received no accommodations. His debt would accumulate interest each year.
Although he showed obvious signs of physical deterioration after so many punishing fights, Louis felt compelled to come out of retirement in 1950 to fight Ezzard Charles, the new champion. After he lost the fight, his mother begged him to stop. “She couldn’t understand how much money I owed,” he said. “The government wanted their money, and I had to try to get it to them.”
The next year, Louis fought Rocky Marciano and lost. The fight earned him $300,000. That sounds like a great opportunity to pay off what he owed the government—until you remember that the tax rate on high incomes stood at 91 percent. He could barely make a dent in the debt with interest compounding. When his mother died in 1953, the IRS swiped the $667 she left him in her will. By 1960 his debt had soared to more than $1 million.
According to Folsom, “Louis refereed wrestling matches, made guest appearances on quiz shows, and served as a greeter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas—anything to bring in money to keep the tax man at bay.”
Real Heroes Page 19