C8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022
ObituariesObituaries of residents from the
District, Maryland and Northern
Virginia.
James Mernin,
Marine Corps sergeant
James Mernin, 94, a retired
Marine Corps staff sergeant who
worked as a standardization spe-
cialist for the General Services
Administration from 1968 to
1995, died Jan. 12 at a hospital in
Falls Church, Va. The cause was
pneumonia, said a son, Michael
Mernin.
Sgt. Mernin, who lived in Vien-
na, Va., was born in New York City.
He served from 1945 to 1967 in the
Marine Corps. At GSA, he over-
saw quality standards on goods
and services acquired by the gov-
ernment.The cause was heart ailments,
said his wife, Colleen Devereux.
Lt. Cmdr. Devereux was born in
Brooklyn and was a 1976 graduate
of the U.S. Naval Academy in
Annapolis. He served aboard com-
bat vessels and was a specialist in
operations research and opera-
tional logistics. A former resident
of Woodbridge, Va., he moved to
Fredericksburg last summer.OF NOTEFrancis Devereux,
government contractor
Francis Devereux, 68, a Navy
lieutenant commander who left
active service in 1992 and spent
the next 30 years as a government
contractor who worked on classi-
fied military planning and de-
fense planning strategies for Met-
ron and other firms, died Oct. 31
at his home in Fredericksburg, Va.Ulyses St. Arnold,
Interior Department officer
Ulyses St. Arnold, 92, an offi-
cer of the Department of the
Interior’s Bureau of Indian Af-
fairs who retired in 1991 after 30
years of federal service, died
Dec. 28 at a hospital in Alexan-
dria, Va. The cause was compli-
cations of covid-19 and pneumo-
nia, said a son, Daniel St. Ar-nold.
Mr. St. Arnold, a resident of
Fort Washington, Md., was born
in Assinins, Mich. He was a
member of the Ojibwe Tribe of
the Keweenaw Bay Indian Com-
munity in Michigan. His work at
the Bureau of Indian Affairs
included Native American hunt-
ing, fishing and water rights.
— From staff reportsBY EMILY LANGERGail “Hal” Halvorsen, an Air
Force pilot whose gesture of
kindness during the Berlin airlift
— sending tons of candy flutter-
ing down from the sky to the
city’s beleaguered children — en-
dured in memory as a redeeming
moment amid the aggressions of
the Cold War, died Feb. 16 at a
hospital in Provo, Utah. He was
101.
The cause was sudden-onset
respiratory failure, said his
daughter Denise Halvorsen Wil-
liams.
Mr. Halvorsen, who retired at
the rank of colonel after a three -
decade Air Force career, was a
27-year-old lieutenant when he
embarked on the mission that
would earn him the adoration of
thousands of children in Berlin
and the gratitude of two coun-
tries, Germany and the United
States, for his role in healing the
wounds of World War II.
After the war, the defeated
state of Germany was partitioned
into zones administered by the
victorious Allies. The American,
British and French sectors com-
bined to form West Germany. The
Soviet sector became East Ger-
many. Within East Germany lay
the city of Berlin, which also was
divided into two sections, east
and west, eventually separated
by the wall that came to repre-
sent the Iron Curtain that had
fallen across Europe.
From June 1948 to May 1949,
in one of the first major confron-
tations of the Cold War, Moscow
blockaded West Berlin, blocking
rail and road access to that part
of the city. More than 2 million
West Berliners, deprived of food,
fuel, medical supplies and other
basic necessities, faced starva-
tion.
The Berlin airlift, one of the
most massive humanitarian aid
missions ever undertaken, cir-
cumvented the Soviet blockade
by delivering goods to West Ber-
lin by plane. More than 278,000
flights into Berlin — including
190 by Mr. Halvorsen, The Wash-
ington Post reported in 1998 —
delivered more than 2 million
tons of supplies to the city over 15
months. The accounting of casu-
alties varies, but at least 70 Amer-
ican and British airlifters were
killed during the operation,
which ran day and night in often
hazardous conditions, with
planes sometimes landing every
three minutes.
Mr. Halvorsen, who had been
fascinated by flight ever since his
days growing up on his family’s
farms in Idaho and Utah, volun-
teered to fly in the airlift. He was
making a delivery at the Tempel-
hof airfield in West Berlin in July
1948 when he encountered a
group of 30 children on the other
side of a barbed wire divide.
“I saw right away that they had
nothing and they were hungry,”
he told The Post decades later.
“So I reached into my pocket and
pulled out all that I had: two
sticks of gum.” The gum was
enough for only four children,
but even the fragrance of the
wrappers delighted the others.
In a promise that seemed the
stuff of fairy tales, Mr. Halvorsen
pledged to the children that he
would return the next day and
drop chocolate and other sweets
from the sky. They would recog-
nize his plane among the many
others buzzing the city, he told
them, because he would wiggle
his wings.
The explanation “took some
translating,” Mr. Halvorsen, who
became known to the children as
Uncle Wiggly Wings, recalled
years later to NBC News. “But
then they said, ‘Jawohl!
Jawohl!’ ”
Mr. Halvorsen returned to his
base, collected candy rations
from his fellow airmen and at-
tached them to handkerchiefs. “A
jubilant celebration” followed
the next day, he recalled, when
the miniature parachutes floated
down to earth.
Mr. Halvorsen continued mak-
ing the candy drops, attracting
increasing numbers of children,
until a German journalist took
note and published an article
about his escapades. Mr. Halvors-
en had not consulted his superi-
ors about his candy missions,
reasoning that bureaucratic red
tape would do little to improve
the lot of the children of Berlin.
Apprised of Mr. Halvorsen’s
actions, a commanding officer
dressed him down, admonishing
him that pilots were not to make
unauthorized drops. A court-
martial appeared to be on the
table. But then the officer told
him to carry on. It was a “good
idea,” Mr. Halvorsen recalled the
officer saying, one that cultivated
enormous goodwill within Ger-
many.
“You have to remember, these
were kids 5, 6, 7, 8 years old whohad never tasted a piece of candy
before, never tasted a piece of
chocolate,” Andrei Cherny, the
author of the book “The Candy
Bombers: The Untold Story of the
Berlin Airlift and America’s Fin-
est Hour,” told NPR. “Their only
experience with America at thisage was the country that had
bombed them during World War
II, in many cases killed many of
their relatives, and then occupied
them in a rather harsh occupa-
tion in the years afterwards. And
suddenly, here was falling from
the heavens, literally, this Her-shey bar or this Wrigley gum.”
Mr. Halvorsen’s private project
grew into an official mission
dubbed Operation Little Vittles.
(The Berlin airlift as a whole was
known among American forces
as Operation Vittles.) American
candy-makers donated tons of
sweets for the effort, which
quickly drew headlines and
cheers on both sides of the Atlan-
tic. By the end of the airlift, pilots
had dropped a reported 23 tons
of candy over West Berlin.
For the children who received
them, those sweets held meaning
no tiny, crinkled candy wrapper
could contain.
“There was no food or clean
water in Berlin; we were starving
to death,” Ingrid Azvedo, one of
the beneficiaries of Mr. Halvors-
en’s good deeds, told The Post in- “Then along came this tall
and skinny pilot, who reached
into his pocket to give us all that
he had. A kindness like that stays
with you for a lifetime.”
Gail Seymour Halvorsen was
born in Salt Lake City on Oct. 10,
1920, the son of sugar beet farm-
ers.
He received a scholarship to
obtain a private pilot’s license in
the fall of 1941, shortly before the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
that precipitated U.S. entry into
World War II. He joined the Civil
Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of
what became the Air Force, and
then the Army Air Forces, serving
during the war as a transport
pilot in the South Atlantic.
After World War II, Mr. Hal-
vorsen enrolled at the University
of Florida, where he received a
bachelor’s degree in aeronautical
engineering in 1951 and a mas-
ter’s degree in engineering in- He worked during his Air
Force career as an engineer in the
space program and returned to
the Tempelhof air base as a com-
mander.
After his military retirement,
he worked at Brigham Young
University in Provo as a dean of
student life.
Mr. Halvorsen’s first wife, the
former Alta Jolley, died in 1999
after nearly 50 years of marriage.
Survivors include his wife of
22 years, Lorraine Pace Halvors-
en of Green Valley, Ariz.; five
children from his first marriage,
Brad Halvorsen of Draper, Utah,
Denise Halvorsen Williams of
Provo, Marilyn Halvorsen So-
rensen of Orem, Utah, Bob Hal-
vorsen of Midway, Utah, and
Mike Halvorsen of Concord, N.C.;
and many grandchildren and
great-grandchildren.
Mr. Halvorsen was the author
of a memoir, “The Candy Bomb-
er,” written with his daughter
Denise and published in 2017.
A “candy bomber” to the end,
he participated in a flight that
dropped candy over the war-torn
Balkan territory of Kosovo in the
late 1990s. In a commemoration
of the 50th anniversary of the
Berlin airlift, he co-piloted a
plane that made more sweets
rain down over the by-then uni-
fied city.
He was overcome with emo-
tion, all those years later, when
he thought back and reflected on
what the candy must have meant
to the children on the ground in
1948 and 1949.
“You’d be walking along in the
fog, and through the clouds came
a little parachute with a fresh
piece of chocolate,” he told The
Post. “It was a symbol of hope
that somebody out there realized
you were under siege.... I think
hope is the thing, not the candy
bar. It was the hope.”
GAIL H ALVORSEN, 101
During Berlin airlift, pilot showered children with candy and kindness
ASSOCIATED PRESS
German children surround Air Force Lt. Gail “Hal” Halvorsen, the “candy bomber” of the Berlin
airlift, at the Tempelhof airfield in October 1948 to thank him for dropping sweets from his plane.ISAAC HALE/ARLINGTON HEIGHTS DAILY HERALD/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Halvorsen retired as a colonel after three decades i n the Air
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