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Man & Plow. Italy was desperate, and seemed to be the nation most in danger of falling into the Communist camp. Northern Europe was poverty-stricken. Finland was feeding her cattle a mixture of fish and wood pulp.
Greece was in spasms. The Greek Army, Congressmen found, was being used largely to protect important people and their important investments in factories, lands, banks. One member suggested that it would be cheaper to bribe 15,000 Communist guerrillas to be good than to support an ineffective Greek Army of 150,000.
Despite their undernourishment, Germans were at work. Congressmen were impressed by the not unusual sight of a man yoked up with an ox to a plow while a woman or a child held the plow handles. The denazification program had retarded Germany's recovery. Expert workers by the hundreds of thousands were being restricted to manual labor because they had once been Nazi party members.
Appraiser's Advice. The Herter Committee was not yet ready with a formal report. But committeemen were ready to broadcast what some of their recommendations would be.
Despite Europe's poverty and the protestations of Europeans, the committeemen would knock down the Paris conferees' $19 billion request to something around $12 billion. They would insist that the State Department make it clear that the money was a loan, not a gift, and that the U.S. get some important returns in strategic materials of which it is short: e.g., rubber, tin, manganese, mercury, copra. The cash should be doled out annually, not handed over in large lump sums, and the U.S. should stalk behind every dollar until it was spent, possibly through some special Government corporation operating in Europe.
The committee would begin writing its report in Washington on November 5. Optimistic members expected to have it ready in time to present to the Foreign Relations Committees, which would start work on the $580 million stopgap aid program, and possibly the Marshall Plan, on Nov. 10.