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The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour. By Andrei Cherny. New York: Berkley Caliber, 2009 [2008]. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv. 624. $18.00.
Andrei Cherny in this ambitious but engaging and very readable book puts forward an intriguing thesis that posits that a group of disparate characters came together to pull off the Berlin Airlift, an amazing diplomatic and military accomplishment that defied the odds. This unlikely cast of characters includes Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal; President Harry S. Truman; Lucius D. Clay, Military Governor of Occupied Germany and his Deputy Commander, Frank L. Howley; Gail S. "Hal" Halverson, the candy bomber; General Curtís LeMay, the first airlift commander; General William H. Tunner, who turned the airlift into a metronomelike assembly line; and Berlin mayor and staunch anti-Communist, Ernst Reuter.
Lesser portraits of Germans important in opposing the Communists include journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich; Acting Berlin mayor Louise Schroeder; and her deputy, Ferdinand Freidensburg. Readers also come to know two of the key Soviet players, Alexander Kotikov and Vasily Sokolovsky.
Cherny places the airlift in the troubled history of the Allied/Soviet contest over Berlin that began in the spring of 1945. The emphasis throughout, however, is on the hotly debated American response to Soviet machinations - the slow advance of the Iron Curtain. The drama...