Should we say thank you?

Hugh Wilford

• BuyThe Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe by Greg Behrman
  Aurum, 448 pp, £25.00, February 2008, ISBN 978 1 84513 326 9
• BuyWinning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower by Nicolaus Mills
  Wiley, 290 pp, £15.99, August 2008, ISBN 978 0 470 09755 7

The winter of 1947 was Europe’s coldest since 1880. In Britain, a fuel shortage effectively halted industrial production for three weeks and led to a sixfold increase in unemployment. In Germany, thousands of Berliners were treated for frostbite and seven froze to death. French farmers stopped sending food to market and hoarded it for their own families, causing food riots in several cities and, for some, a creeping nostalgia for the German occupation. In Rome, unemployed workers looted shops and attacked the 74-year-old foreign minister, Carlo Sforza. It seemed that Europe – exhausted, divided and hungry – was on the verge of succumbing to another political catastrophe, only this time the threat came not from Fascism but from the Soviet Union.