Dan Ford's Bookshelf: good reading

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It all began with Greece. At Yalta, President Roosevelt and (reluctantly) Prime Minister Churchill had given Comrade Stalin free rein in Eastern Europe, condemning Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, Hungarians, and Bulgarians to 45 years of Soviet slavery. Southern Europe, however, was still up for grabs, and it was the British Army that kept the Communists from taking over. Britain however was broke. Luckily for the Greeks, Harry Truman was a very different man than Roosevelt, and he promulgated a Truman Doctrine that put southern Europe in the American sphere of interest. (That included Turkey, which has only a toehold in Europe, and since the 1940s has been a pain the continent's ass.)

To make it happen, the Doctrine was followed by a Plan, which was named for Truman's secretary of state, General George Marshall, and articulated in a speech at Harvard's graduation in June 1947. Though Europeans are loath to admit it, the Marshall Plan was the greatest act of generosity ever to follow a war, and it saved Europe, if not from Stalinist tyranny, but from years of desperate poverty.

I wrote about this in a "long essay" for King's College London some years ago. At the time, there was astonishingly little published about the Marshall Plan beyond a few thousand pages in Foreign Relations of the United States. That gap has since been ably filled by the economist and academic Benn Steil in The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War. (I link to the Kindle edition on Amazon.com, which at the moment is selling it quite cheaply. Amazon also sells hardcover and paperback editions.)

Seventeen European countries benefitted from American generosity, to a total of $13.3 billion -- 184 billion of today's much-debauched dollars. A better measure, however, is that the Marshall Plan cost 1.1 percent of America's gross domestic product, the equivalent of $356 billion today.

It's a huge book, though fully half of it is given over to notes and appendices, and true to its sub-title the account of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift is as thrilling to read about as it was to live through. There's even a photo of Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, pilot of a four-engine Douglas C-54 who became known as der Schokoladenflieger or Candy Bomber for dropping sweets to the children who crowded the Tempelhoff fence to watch the big plans land. The transport arrived every three minutes at the beginning, increasing to once a minute, bringing up to 4,593 tons of food and coal to Berlin each day, until Stalin finally realized that he couldn't drive the US, Britain, and France out of the city, and that their sectors would become part of West Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

What followed, in another of those marvelous German words, was the Wirtschaftswunder -- the economic miracle that transformed West Germany and to a lesser extent the rest of Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Soviet Russia and its captive nations just couldn't keep up. It's no exaggeration to say that the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and to the unification of Germany with Berlin as its capital.

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