A car arrives at the White House in Washington DC. President Harry S. Truman greets President of Mexico, Miguel Aleman, during state visit of Mexican President to Washington DC on April 29, 1947. Next scene shows President Truman being presented a Jewish Torah by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, first President of the newly declared State of Israel. Exterior view of south side of White House. Truman with Secretary of State, George Marshall, by the fireplace inside the White House. They discuss world affairs looking at a globe. An animated map shows the increasing Soviet Communist influence in Europe. April 3, 1948, President Truman signs the European Recovery Program (ERP), better know as the Marshall Plan, as members of Congressional leadership look on. Sacks of grain being off loaded at a dock in Italy, as part of Marshall Plan aid. Scene shifts to October 6, 1948 with crowd gathered outside the Democratic Convention at Convention Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Convention delegates applaud during President Truman's address. Officials on stage. Truman talks about his sincere desire to promote peace throughout the world. Pictures of Franklin Roosevelt and Alben Barkley on stage. Exterior view of north side of the White House. Truman seated at a table.
"Get your new ration books and identity cards here" seen written on a sign. British civilians line up to obtain new post-war ration books, after the end of World War 2. Women shopping for rationed food. British ships idle in ports as exports wane. View of New York harbor with tugs and barges and Manhattan skyline and skyscrapers in background. Woman holding poster advertising First International Auto Show (held from February 5-10, 1949, at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory, Twenty-fifth Street and Lexington Avenue, in New York City), including European cars to be shown in New York City. British cars in their first car show. One of the cars shown is the 1948 Ghost Minx with two women seated inside it. A 1948 Jaguar convertible is also shown. Communist parades in Europe and Asia. Start of Marshall Plan to help Europe rebuild after the war. Newspaper shows President Truman signing Foreign Aid Bill (led to Marshall Plan).
'Problems of Peace in Europe' produced in 1948, depicts reconstruction problems in aftermath of World War II and includes footage from during the war and soon after the war. Scene of desperate and hungry civilian people (possibly in Germany but could be elsewhere in Europe) scrambling over each other and trying to find food on the ground among garbage or wreckage, circa 1945 or 1946. European peoples massing to reestablish political order and seek relief in post-war Europe. Montage of images of people from all walks of life. Reminders of war showing aircrews in bombers and bombs falling. Batteries of rockets being fired. A formation of U.S. B-17s and a B-26 aircraft with D-day stripes, in flight. Allied bombing of cities with devastating effect (likely 1944-1945). Aerial view of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Aerial view of a major U.S. industrial complex, with many smoke stacks and industrial pollution. Mass of workers leaving at end of shift at a U.S. manufacturing plant or factory. Views of two different streamlined locomotives pulling passenger trains at high speed, approaching camera position. Freight trains speeding on railroads. Farmers harvesting and baling hay by machine and cultivating fields with tractor. Multiple wide views of the K-25 building of the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the world's largest building in 1944 when it was built, and an instrumental part of the Manhattan Project effort to develop the atomic bomb in World War 2. Huge sprawling industrial sites in America. Map of Europe. Street scene in Germany with destroyed buildings and rubble cleaned from street, but still piled up in places. Desperate, hungry, and poverty stricken German citizens rummaging through garbage piles for anything to eat or anything of value. Two very young German boys standing together on a street, with one boy smoking a cigarette. Children scrambling over trash and rubbish heaps.
A documentary depicts life of people in the post-war ( World War II) economic challenges and hard times in Europe and the United Kingdom. (Before Marshall Plan of 1948). Animated map of Western Europe. Ruins and debris of buildings in cities of Europe damaged during the war.Two women walk past rubble. The damaged buildings. People cross a damaged bridge. A man at work during the construction of a bridge. Men make boats. Smoke comes out from a factory. In the Netherlands, a man in a textile factory works with weaving machinery. Another man paints a machine part. Men at work in the factory. A man and a woman eat food. A French farmer plows a field with the help of two horses. Scene in Norway of boats in a harbor. Norwegian fishermen at a dock. A fisherman untangles a fishing net. People buy food from shops. They walk on a street. People wait in a line for bread ration because of drought of 1947. Loaves of bread on display in store window. A coal processing plant exterior. A small steam locomotive moves on tracks at the factory yard. Close up view of two British coal miners with black soot on faces and bodies as they dig out coal from a mine using a pick axe. Queue of British citizens walk in a line to get coal. A man distributes equal amounts of coal to the British men and women in the queue, who receive a coal ration loaded into a bag. A power plant. A man operates factory controls (controls made in Liverpool), reducing output to lower levels due to power rationing. Different machines at work. View of a large industrial cog wheel slowing to a stop, and a large compressor in a factory slows to a stop. A view of a city. People walk in a street. British men and women enter a food shop in England, with a sign at the doorway indicating that bread is being offered only by ration. A woman feeds hens in a yard. A farmer negotiates with another farmer to sell livestock, but he shakes his head to refuse the offer. People in a city purchase food and other goods in a black market. A woman buying food from a black market seller. She hands him a pile of cash bills in payment. Italian women picking olives beneath olive trees in grove in Italy. A man enters a food shop and speaks to a woman; the shelves in the store are almost empty. A railroad train freight car moves on tracks. A railway freight car factory in Belgium. Men at work in the factory. A man checks a line of completed rail car wheels in the factory. Freight cars lie unused in the factory yard as French customers cannot buy them since the company in Belgium will not accept French Francs in payment. An unemployed Italian man sitting on a wall collects cigarette butts. Weavers in Holland dig in a peet bog as that their weaving jobs are not available.
Legislators entering a hall in Czechoslovakia, in 1948. Inside,an image of the Small Coat of Arms of the Republic of Czechoslovakia (1920) dominates the scene. New scene shows Gustav Husak, acting Prime Minister, delivering an address urging support for the Communist Party. The next sequence shows violent Communist-led demonstrations, as armed trade unionists riot in the Prague streets, attacking the offices of the political opposition. Police attempt to restore order. On February 25, 1948, the communists achieve a Czechoslovak coup d'état. On February 27th, Czech President, Edvard Benes, receives a delegation including communist Premier Klement Gottwald and the 12 new members of the cabinet, at the Presidential Palace. He is seen signing documents accepting the communist cabinet. Change of scene shows Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, giving a speech rejecting the change. (He remained in office, but died under suspicious circumstances on On March 10, 1948.) View of Masaryk in his casket. Mourners at his funeral.The Czech Parliament Building with flag at half staff. President Benes seen strolling, using a cane, accompanied by his wife, Hana Benes, in the garden of their summer home, Benesova vila, in Sezimovo Usti. Narrator notes that he refused to sign a new constitution drawn up by the communists. He died of natural causes at his villa on September 3, 1948. Scenes of his funeral and of him in his casket. Views of Benes' state funeral, with mourners lining the streets. View of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Narrator describes circumstances using Churchill's term "Iron Curtain." A communist parade in an Eastern European city. A person who was roughed up on the street. View of East German uprising in 1953, being suppressed with Soviet tanks. Uprising in Poland in 1955 being put down by local police and Russian soldiers. Polish musicians playing and examples of Polish political cartoons permitted under relaxed communist rule.
A civilian narrator is speaking from the Military Airlift Command (MAC) Headquarters Command Post, at Scott Air Force Base,Illinois. He mentions MAC missions supplying war materiel to Israel, in 1973, and the famous Berlin Airlift of 1948. Scene shifts to troops in military exercises, riding across fields in U.S. M113 armored personnel carriers (APCs) and walking with their weapons and gear. An M60 Patton tank moves along a muddy road, past the camera. Troops of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne division stand in formation on a ramp next to a MAC C-141 transport aircraft. They are about to be airlifted to Europe, to participate in War games, in Germany. Some of their armor and trucks seen offloading at a destination airfield. Major John Gray, Jr. of the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division is interviewed, standing in front of a C-141 aircraft from the MAC 62d Airlift Wing, stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. UH-1 (Huey) helicopters deploying infantry in a field and moving away as the troops advance during an exercise. M113 APCs moving past the camera. MAC C-141s landing in Germany as they airlift the U.S. troops who participate in these exercises.Several C-141s taxiing on the airfield. A MAC C-5 Galaxy aircraft with its nose hatch open and armored vehicles that it carried, parked in front of it. Closeup of turret on an M60 medium main battle tank. View of the tank being loaded into a C-5 and view inside the aircraft as the tank is maneuvered in its cargo hold.