What was the Marshall Plan?

The European Recovery Programme (nicknamed the ‘Marshall Plan’) was set up because the economic infrastructure of Europe had been destroyed by the Second World War and because this – and the coldest winter on record – had by 1947 reduced the people of Europe to starvation. Also, in response to Soviet ‘salami tactics’, Congress had in March 1947 decided to ‘support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’

Returning from a fact-finding mission, a shocked General George Marshall told Truman that all of Europe would turn Communist unless the European economy could be jump-started.So Truman agreed.

Marshall announced his Plan, not in Congress, but to students at Harvard University on 5th June 1947. He explained his idea in simple terms: the European economy had been destroyed because the Nazis had reorganised it to support their war effort.

The United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

The British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin called the Plan ‘a lifeline to sinking men, bringing hope where there was none’ and by 12 July he had organised a meeting of European nations in Paris, which asked for $22 billion of aid. Stalin was invited but – seeing the Plan as a US plot to undermine the Soviet Union – he forbade Cominform countries to take part.

Marshall Aid had a huge effect on Europe; the years 1948-1952 were a time of massive economic growth. It also stopped the spread of Communism – one of the hungry teenage boys in Germany who was given soup by American trucks driving onto his schoolyard was Helmut Kohl: who grew up to be the first Chancellor of a free and unified Germany.