Cold War · MAY 1949
What did the Marshall Plan achieve, and at what cost?
The seminar question: “What did the Marshall Plan achieve, and who bore the costs of the settlement it helped create?”
In 1947 the United States answered Britain’s inability to support Greece with the Truman Doctrine and offered Europe roughly $13 billion in Marshall aid, which Moscow refused for its sphere. When Stalin closed road and rail routes into West Berlin in June 1948, the Allies flew in some 2.3 million tons of supplies until May 1949.
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Europe’s recovery was far from assured in the winter of 1946–47. Canals froze, fuel ran short and German rations were halved. The hardship also troubled American policymakers for a political reason. Communist parties in France and Italy had already won around a quarter of the vote; if living conditions remained desperate, they might gain power through elections without a Soviet invasion. The Marshall Plan sought to restore production and give people reason to expect a better future. Recovery was to serve containment.
The short answer
- Europe was starving, and hunger votes. Marshall’s planners looked at Europe’s political troubles alongside its material shortages. In the winter of 1946–47 frozen canals interrupted supplies and German rations were halved. French and Italian communist parties already had about a quarter of the vote. If hunger increased their support, they could gain power at the ballot box without Soviet tanks. Aid would meet immediate needs while helping restore production and confidence. Western European output passed its prewar level by 1951, and communist electoral support eventually receded. Recovery had several causes; the Plan contributed substantially.
- Why Moscow refused the money. Stalin had to consider what acceptance would require. Marshall aid was offered to the Soviet Union and its sphere, and he sent Molotov to Paris with ninety economists before withdrawing him. Open accounts and integration into a Western-led system threatened Soviet control over both the command economy and its buffer. Historians still debate whether Washington expected acceptance or intended to drive a wedge into the bloc. Czechoslovakia’s government agreed to attend the talks, only to reverse course after Soviet pressure by phone. Moscow kept control, while its neighbors lost access to the aid.
- Berlin: geography as leverage. The occupation arrangements of 1945 placed Western Berlin deep inside the Soviet zone. The Western powers had no written guarantee of ground access, but they did have three agreed air corridors, each twenty miles wide; the three arrows show them. Closing the land routes let Stalin exert pressure without an overt attack. Supplying the city by air let the West respond without sending an armed convoy through. Geography gave each side a way to contest the city while trying to avoid direct combat.
- The bomb behind the politeness. Behind the Berlin crisis stood the possibility of a much larger war. The United States retained an atomic monopoly until August 1949. Stalin did not shoot down the transports, and Truman sent B-29 bombers to England as a signal. Those aircraft were not configured to carry atomic weapons, so the signal depended partly on what Moscow believed they could do. Both governments applied pressure while trying to avoid turning the confrontation into a shooting war.
THE TURNING POINT
Berlin, 24 June 1948 — the gates close. On 24 June 1948 the blockade cut ordinary land supplies to Berlin’s Western sectors. Stalin hoped to prevent a West German state without war. The airlift gave the Western response a human focus: Berliners who had recently been defeated enemies became symbols of resistance. It also helped convince skeptical senators that Europe would stand up for itself. While aircraft were still flying, the United States Senate approved NATO by 82–13. The blockade was one of several causes of the alliance, but it helped unite the coalition Stalin had hoped to divide.
What it changed
NATO: the entangling alliance at last. The North Atlantic Treaty, signed by twelve nations on 4 April 1949, gave the United States its first peacetime European alliance since 1778. Article 5’s “an attack on one…” made collective defense a standing commitment: an attack on one member would engage the others. Follow the blue column on the timeline to see Greece and Turkey join in 1952 and West Germany in 1955.
Two Germanies, one open wound. Two governments now claimed authority on opposite sides of the old occupation line: the Federal Republic, founded in May 1949, and the German Democratic Republic, founded in October. Neither recognized the other. Find their hatched split on the map. Berlin remained divided but comparatively open, providing a route out of East Germany for around three million people by 1961. That year the East German government closed the route with a wall.
The Cominform and the first heretic. Stalin responded to the Marshall Plan by tightening discipline among communist parties. The Cominform, founded in 1947, brought them under closer direction, while purges enforced obedience. Yugoslavia’s Tito resisted. His forces had liberated much of the country without the Red Army, and he refused Stalin’s orders. Expelled from the Cominform in 1948, he remained in power. Watch Yugoslavia turn charcoal: a communist government had broken with Moscow and survived.
The full answer, argued
The Plan’s roughly $13 billion helped Western Europe recover and encouraged cooperation that later contributed to the EEC. Recovery also helped create conditions in which French and Italian communists lost electoral ground, while the deutschmark anchored the Western order for decades. The price of that settlement was unevenly borne. Disclosure and cooperation threatened Stalin’s control, and his refusal helped make Europe’s economic division harder to reverse. Czechoslovakia’s leaders initially wished to attend the talks but were forced to change course. Many historians judge the trade knowingly made and worthwhile; Czechs, Poles and Hungarians bore costs of a settlement in which they had little choice. Any judgment of the strategy must take both its achievements and those costs into account.
An interesting fact
At the Tempelhof fence, pilot Gail Halvorsen shared two sticks of gum with children. He began signaling his approach by wiggling his wings, then dropping sweets on handkerchief parachutes. American schoolchildren helped tie the parachutes, and “Operation Little Vittles” grew to deliver roughly 23 tons of candy. The airlift also cost lives: some seventy British and American airmen, along with German ground workers, died in crashes and accidents along the corridors, although no shot was fired.
This is the study layer of Marshall Plan and Berlin Blockade, chapter 2 of The Cold War, 1945–1991; the full index of the atlas is here.
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