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America's memories of the Berlin Airlift have been reduced to something like this: The Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin. The United States flew in a bunch of food and won the world's admiration. The Soviets gave up.

It sounds so simple.

What makes The Candy Bombers a successful work of popular history, then, is that it shows how reality was much more complicated: that the airlift started almost by accident, that it succeeded despite opposition at the highest levels, that its success may have saved not only democratic Europe, but the presidency of Harry Truman.

Author Andrei Cherny, a former Al Gore speechwriter and a Navy Reserve officer, comes close to breathless overkill and is downright clunky at times in painting a battle of good Americans vs. evil communists. But when he lets the facts speak for themselves, he offers an enjoyable, timely narrative.

Berlin in 1948 was still a city "which lacks everything but ruins," as one reporter put it. Germans were despised as the instigators of two generations of global war. The idea of starving them into pacifism was just fine with most Americans. Berliners reciprocated by loathing the Americans, whose bombs had terrorized the city as they reduced it to rubble.

But as Mr. Cherny describes, old hatreds were soon trumped by fresh fear of Soviet communism, which had toppled Czechoslovakia, co-opted Finland and seemed capable of taking Italy and France.

Still, when the Soviets shut ground access to Berlin on June 24, America was in no position to fight. Soviet troops outnumbered the West's forces 62-to-1 around Berlin.

To delay a retreat that most assumed was inevitable, America's military governor in Germany, Lucius Clay, called for the city to be supplied by air. It was an act of audacity and desperation that nobody expected to succeed. So the stage was set for heroes to emerge.

Mr. Cherny finds them.

On the front lines were the pilots who faced exhaustion, menacing Soviet fighter planes and the foggiest Berlin winter since the 1860s. Forty-eight American and British fliers would die in the airlift.

On the political front, Mr. Cherny credits the vision of the sometimes-erratic Defense Secretary James Forrestal and the determination of Truman, who overruled the Pentagon's top generals and insisted that the airlift be given full support.

Logistically, Gen. Bill Tunner stuffed cargo planes so efficiently that by the end of February, 16 million pounds of goods a day were reaching Berlin, double the minimum required.

And then there is pilot Hal Halvorsen, the original "Candy Bomber" of the title. Moved by an encounter with shirtless, shoeless children he met on a brief ground visit to Berlin, he used some handkerchiefs, twine and his crew's candy ration to parachute treats to children waiting on the approach path to Tempelhof airport.

Halvorsen's aw-shucks demeanor would be grating in a fictional character. But he was real, and his act of unsanctioned kindness became the symbol of the airlift. It turned Americans' eyes toward the people of Berlin and Berliners' hearts toward the West, as they became their own heroes in the battle for their liberty.

The candy bombers taught America a lesson, Mr. Cherny says: "The Cold War was a new kind of war, one that would be fought and won not primarily with bullets and armaments but with ideas and appeals." They and the airlift showed "that for democracy to take root it required a change in minds and hearts more than in economic conditions, that America's strength was not just military muscle but an undisputedly moral voice."

Candy bars as "smart" bombs. It sounds so simple. But it wasn't.

The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift

and America's Finest Hour

Andrei Cherny

(Putnam; $29.95)

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