ABSTRACT
During the wartime conferences of the three leaders, Roosevelt and Stalin had pulled together, sometimes to isolate Churchill, sometimes even to overrule him. The alignment of the U.S.A. with the U.S.S.R. had continued into 1945 after Roosevelt's death and was responsible, among other things, for Eisenhower's restraint upon the Allies' march eastwards and the U.S.S.R.'s consequent penetration into Austria and Czechoslovakia and as far into Germany as they reached. How then did it happen that by 1947 the antagonism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. was so deep as chiefly to cause the Cold War which characterised the post-war decade? The beginning of the Cold War is sometimes dated quite precisely from June 5, 1947. On that day, through her Secretary of State, General George Marshall, the United States offered economic aid to Europe. The idea of Marshall Aid was that it should be given after the European states had concerted a programme of needs. Ernest Bevin, then British Foreign Secretary, took the lead in concerting this programme. He worked with France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg (the Benelux countries), approached Italy, with whom a peace treaty had been signed on February 10, 1947, and saw to it that the programme should include Greece, though she was still in civil war. It was at this date also to include the U.S.S.R. But at Paris, where Molotov had arrived to take part in the planning, the U.S.S.R. announced through him a separate view. The Soviet Union insisted that each state to benefit from Marshall Aid should prepare a separate programme of needs. The other participating states opposed this view. At the end of June Molotov walked out of the Paris meeting. A week later the Molotov plan for economic aid to eastern Europe was announced.
