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The Marshall Plan Revisited

At the end of World War II much of Europe lay in ruins. Here is the story of how one man's vision helped restore much of the Continent to health and prosperity.

by John Meakin


It's hard to imagine today that 50 years ago much of Europe's industrial production had been destroyed. Germany lay in ruins. Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and other European countries had been badly mauled and were exhausted.

All across the Continent, villages, towns and cities had been pounded into rubble. Transportation was unreliable or nonexistent. Roads, bridges and railroads lay wrecked and demolished. Tens of millions of men, women and children had been killed or maimed. Millions more struggled just to find food to eat and a dry place to sleep at night. For many the peaceful and prosperous life widely known a decade earlier was a shattered, far-off memory.

The fallout of World War II

Western Europe had just seen decades of progress battered into dust in the firestorm of World War II. The economy was in shambles; Britain faced a desperate shortage of coal and electrical power. Trade was paralyzed, and factories had been crippled across Europe. Farms, mines and manufacturing concerns struggled to provide food, shelter, clothing and power to the war's survivors. Nothing came easy on a continent on which neighboring countries had spent six years fearing and hating each other, killing and being killed.

A shattered Europe was starved for capital to reinvest in industry; capital with which to relieve a crippling debt burden; capital to enable Europeans to get their people back to work and adequately feed them.

The particularly severe winter of 1946-47 only exacerbated the problems and shortages. Reconstruction required products from the United States, and the Europeans simply did not have the dollars to purchase such material.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn15/marshallplan.htm


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