Harm Takkens vividly remembers that spring day a half century ago when he sailed from his World War II-battered homeland with a shipload of immigrants heading for America.
The Dutch farmer was hurled into a new world of fresh-plowed fields and wheat harvests. On family farms in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, he worked long days learning the latest techniques."We were so backward here - a lot was destroyed and bombed during the war. We needed a push economically," says Takkens, now 70. "It changed my world and transformed me."
What took Takkens to the United States was the Marshall Plan, the postwar reconstruction program that resuscitated Europe's war-wrecked economy with American dollars and expertise.
Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, called the plan "the most unsordid act in history," and historians laud it as the United States' most successful foreign policy endeavor this century. President Clinton plans to visit the Netherlands on May 28 to commemorate its 50th anniversary.
With Marshall Plan money, farmers, engineers and businessmen from across Europe were sent to the United States to pick up the technological know-how needed to modernize their industries back home.
The plan channeled some $13 billion - more than $65 billion in today's dollars - in reconstruction aid and technical assistance to 16 European countries between 1948 and 1952.
U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall planted the seeds of the plan on June 5, 1947, in a graduation address at Harvard University.
Marshall, credited with masterminding the U.S. military victory in World War II as the Army chief of staff, told the Harvard crowd: "It is logical that the United States do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace."
Although Europe had been liberated from the Nazis two years earlier, cities were still reeling economically. Food and raw materials were short, gold and dollar reserves were depleted, and factories lay in rubble.
To Europe, Marshall's words meant help was on the way.
Former British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called the plan "a lifeline to sinking men."
"I felt that it was the first chance we had ever been given since the end of the war to look at (the) European economy as a whole," he said at the time.
Dirk Stikker, then Dutch foreign minister, summed up the mood: "Churchill's words won the war; Marshall's words won the peace."
The program won Marshall the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize.
Although it was an American-financed plan, it was left to the Europeans to draw up the details and implement their own recovery.
"The whole time there was a feeling - it was in the air - that something would come from the Americans, but no one knew the scope nor the extent of the assistance," recalled Ernst van der Beugel, who was a young Dutch civil servant among the European officials gathered in Paris to work on the plan.
After Marshall's speech, "there was definitely a sense of relief," he said.
Veteran U.S. envoy Vernon Walters, who accompanied Marshall to Europe to discuss the plan, remembers the de-va-sta-tion.
"When they were liberated, the economy was in such an appalling condition," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "The overwhelming feature that brought about the Marshall Plan was the degree of human misery still prevailing in Europe years after the war."
Despite its lofty aims, the plan had opponents in Washington. Some people worried about sinking so much money in a former battleground. Isolationist lawmakers feared it could lead to another war.