With the end of the Second World War Western Europe lay in tatters: tens of millions of citizens killed, national economies ruined, ancient cities bombed to rubble, and Communist parties flourishing by feeding off people's understandable despair. What followed was the United States' audacious plan to bankroll Europe's recovery with no less than $13 billion of economic aid over four years - the equivalent of, astonishingly, $100 billion today. But US Secretary of State George Marshall's Plan was more than altruistic, seeking to modernize Europe's economies and ensure a prosperous market for American goods, restore its faith in democracy and capitalism, and enmesh the continent in a military alliance. It was the linchpin of America's strategy to meet the Soviet threat, helping to trigger the Cold War and, eventually, win it. On the ground the Marshall Plan kept the huge Dunlop tyre plant in Birmingham going, financed the reconstruction of bridges in Germany, hydroelectric dams in France, clearing the Corinth Canal in Italy, shipping coal to the Netherlands, tractors to rural Turkish farmers, as well as huge amounts of food aid (not least to Berlin during the famous Airlift of 1948). This is a definitive work of post-war history. Greg Behrman is the Henry Kissinger Fellow for Foreign Policy at The Aspen Institute, and also the author of The Invisible People, a study of the global AIDS pandemic. He lives in New York.