Last month I mentioned how I was at the beaches of Normandy, where 80 years ago, thousands of Americans died in destroying the Nazi war machine. As a youngster, I was fascinated yet distressed by pictures of WWII in books and museums, including the rubble of bombed out towns in Normandy and Belgium and cities like London, Vienna, and Nurnberg. It had been total war.
President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act three years after the war. It became known as the Marshall Plan, named after Secretary of State George Marshall, who proposed in 1947 that the United States provide economic assistance to kick-start the smoking ruins of postwar Europe’s economies.
The plan’s goals were to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve European prosperity, and prevent the spread of communism. And it did. Stalin’s USSR was on the move, and the Marshall Plan inspired hope amid the devastation, stemming and containing communist east of the Iron Curtain. The United States also benefited from trading partners who now wanted and could afford American goods.
The Marshall Plan was in stark contrast to the infamous Treaty of Versailles, which bankrupted and starved Germany after WWI and set the conditions for a murderous Nazi regime. The United States understood that punishing the German and Italian people would likely result in yet another World War. We did, however, punish many of their criminal leaders.
The Marshall Plan was a reflection of Matthew 25:35-36. The United States, as a nation with Judeo-Christian ethical traditions, helped our former enemies’ populations, however brutal their governments had been. It was one of our most far-sighted foreign policies.
When I traveled there as a young woman and more recently, I saw cities rebuilt with some of those stones and bricks from the war rubble to look like their quaint and beautiful pre-war selves – thanks to U.S. taxpayers.
