Harrison E. Salisbury, the noted foreign correspondent, wrote in his Epilogue to Alexander Werth's final book on post-war Russia: 'There is no period of time more essential to our understanding of the late twentieth-century world than the murky, fear-ridden, suspicious, power-haunted early post-war years and their reflection in the policies of the United States and the Soviet Union.'1 This essay looks into the 'murky' era from the point of view of one major member of the wartime Grand Alliance that Salisbury did not mention: Great Britain, in the location where confrontation in Europe first became evident to all Germany. East and West Germany today lie separated along the line which divided the three western allied zones of occupation from the Soviet Zone following the second world war. Germany's present division, to a significant degree, has roots in the economic troubles of the British in administering their heavily industrial zone to the northwest. American authorities at the time appeared willing to exploit those difficulties to further their own policies in Germany. From 1945 to 1947 United States economic strength played a decisive role in that country as well as throughout all Western Europe, culminating in the famous proposal by her Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall for economic assistance to wartorn Europe. The whole period presents us with an interesting early case study in the use of economic power in international affairs. As a subject for study, economic diplomacy has come in for greater attention in recent years by observers of the 'new diplomacy' than it did in the early Cold War period.