Alliance for Peace (review)

Alliance for Peace (50 min., 16mm), United States Air Force Film, 1951. Produced during the height of the Cold War and narrated by the late Edward R. Murrow, this film presents a visually biased summary of the events leading up to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Many of the important political and economic events surrounding the origins of the Cold War in Europe are portrayed in graphic terms, the problem of Poland, the coup in Czechoslovakia, the Marshall Plan, the Greek Civil War and the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the opposition to it, and the Berlin Blockade. Heavy emphasis complete with sinister sounding language and music is placed on the threat of the international Communist conspiracy to democracy in Western Europe. Western European opposition to the Marshall Plan is cited as evidence of this conspiracy. In distributing this film the Air Force has wisely added the caveat that the film is to be regarded as historical footage. How distant it all seems now, watching this film with the events of the last twenty years in mind, together with the findings of recent historians of American foreign policy. The film is quite useful, not only as a visual summary of events in the 1945-1950 period, but also for examining both the biases which surrounded our foreign policy in that period and also the techniques which were used to shape that policy. John T. Reilly, Instructor, Dept. of History Bristol Community College, Fall River, Mass. ...