U.S History - The Marshall Plan

In 1947, the world was reeling from the devastation wrought by the Second World War. The capitals of Europe still smoldered even in the midst of reconstruction and the futures of their people swayed in limbo.

A substantial amount of the estimated 60 million WWII casualties were residents of mainland Europe. Of those who struggled through the conflict and found themselves breathing at its end found themselves in dire straits.Infrastructures lied in ruin - roads, bridges, railways, and airstrips were devastated by air strikes and demolitions leaving many villages, towns, and cities economically isolated.

By contrast, the economy of the United States found itself in the midst of an economic and consumer spending boom. Throughout the war, U.S. factories had not only supplied the United States war effort, but the war effort of its allies as well.

Post-war reconstruction frameworks were discussed at both the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and the Potsdam Conference from July 17 - August 2 1945. Only the Potsdam Conference yielded a feasible plan - the Morgenthau Plan - but by 1947, problems with the Morgenthau plan became roadblocks to progression and a new plan was adopted, one that would ultimately be of the greatest aid to the people or Europe and, especially, divided Germany.

Officially dubbed the European Recovery Program (ERP), the Marshall Plan was the blueprint of western European re-construction laid out in late 1947 by former general, then Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. The plan laid out some $13 billion to all European nations directly effected by the war - i.e. the countries devastated the most. The Marshall plan was a blue-print for true Western European reconstruction, true Western European economic revitalization and a plan that aimed to defend Western Europe from the outreached fingers of Communism.

From the late stages of the war to the time the Marshall Plan was moving into its infantile stages of implementation, the Soviets condensed the territories ceded to them by Germany into what became known as the Eastern Bloc. This area included Soviet controlled East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, other Balkan states, and countries bordering Russia-proper. This area included vast areas of Europe's most fertile land and was cut off from the Allies and Eastern Europe. Precious food supplies, along with other resources such as coal, were hidden from the Allies behind the Iron Curtain.

But aside from strictly stimulating the economies of Europe and injecting the necessary grease into the machines of industry and agriculture to supply the people of Europe with necessities, the Marshall Plan, most emphatically, stemmed the growth of communism into states beyond the Eastern Bloc.

The Marshall Plan brought about the Truman Doctrine and the ideology of containment. The Marshall Plan forced the Soviets to cordon Berlin in the Berlin Blockade and it forced the responsive Berlin Airlift that brought some 2.3 million tons of supplies into Soviet controlled Berlin. The Marshall Plan fired the first shots of the Cold War and shaped U.S. foreign policy for the next four decades.