On this day in 1948, the US Air Force put its name to something that had started as a pilot emptying his own pockets. Gail Halvorsen had been tying sweets from his ration pack to handkerchiefs and dropping them out over Berlin to the children watching the approach; on 22 September the thing became official and got a name, Operation Little Vittles, little rations, a joke on the airlift itself.
Read the ration as a primary source and you can taste the whole year. Berlin was eating what an aeroplane could carry, which meant dried and powdered everything, flour, dehydrated potato, milk you mixed with water and hoped about. Chocolate and chewing gum were what pilots got to keep their mouths busy on long legs, and they are exactly the wrong cargo for a hungry city and exactly the right one for a child: sweet, tiny, no cooking, no pot, no fuel. And the parachutes came out of the squadron's own kit bags. Somebody had to be talked out of his handkerchiefs.
Once word travelled, American schoolchildren and candy makers started sending sugar in serious quantity, and the handkerchief supply gave way to proper little cloth chutes tied by volunteers. I like that the logistics never got grand. Sweets, string, cloth, somebody wiggling the wings so you knew which plane was yours. I have run kitchens with less of a system than that.
Rosa, the timetable under all that sweetness was fierce: C-54 Skymasters coming into Tempelhof over the rooftops at intervals measured in minutes, each carrying roughly ten tons. Crews often stayed at the aircraft while the ground staff unloaded and turned them round, coffee brought out to them. Halvorsen's handkerchiefs rode on one of the tidiest schedules ever flown.
Rosa, the children had a name for him too: Uncle Wiggly Wings, earned because he rocked the aircraft's wings on approach so they'd know which plane was dropping. A hand-signal at a few hundred feet, and it worked.