Although I've written from a narrowly Italian perspective, you might be interested in this old post of mine, as well as this other answer examining the more political dimension of US postwar aid to Italy.

Beyond those two answers, I can outline some ideas for you to help frame the wider events happening around the Marshall Plan; indeed the lead-up to implementation of the Marshall Plan was the culmination of a long, and somewhat convoluted, series of events. In September of 1947, under the strain of reconstruction, of the newly-constituted welfare system, and of its postwar military obligations, the British government found itself with no choice but to suspend the pound sterling’s convertibility to the U.S. Dollar, effectively going into default. And Britain was far from the only country whose economic conditions worried the State Department; with nearly all of Europe suffering from a deep balance of payments deficit with regards to the United States, American policymakers came to believe that Europe was on the brink of economic collapse, and with it, communist revolution. By the following year the United States Congress undertook to accelerate European reconstruction through the famous Marshall Plan, named after the US Secretary of State at the time.

The US congress’ worries tied to American dollars being funneled into European social welfare programs led to the Marshall Plan being intentionally capped at a lower level than expected, creating some concerns tied to the United States’ role as guarantor of Europe’s peace and prosperity. However, the plan was nonetheless a strong bulwark against economic unrest that was quickly fermenting political unrest, both domestic and international: traditionally poor Franco-German relations showed no sign of improving post-war, as the French government was bent on tightly controlling its occupation zones in Germany in order to obtain coal, a vital economic resource. On the wider global stage, Great Britain’s proven inability to fulfill the role it had built for itself as Europe’s dominant military power — and the consequential reliance on the United States as Europe’s primary defender — accelerated the breakdown of trust between the Soviet Union and the United States, with the former far from happy that the great power across the Atlantic was showing no signs of reducing its interest in Europe.

Indeed, the impetus to guard against the U.S.S.R. was far from an unfounded perception in 1947. That year, representatives of the United States, Soviet Union, China, Great Britain and France met twice in Moscow and once in London, ostensibly to agree on the postwar organization of Germany and Austria. However, talks were derailed by the growing ideological divide between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.: Stalin’s previous agreements had been clear with Churchill to divide Europe into Russo-British spheres of influence, but the plan fell apart once it became clear that Great Britain would be unable to meet its postwar responsibilities. Having instead to contend with the United States as Europe’s dominant power changed the Russian attitude significantly: evidently Stalin felt that while Churchill and Atlee governments could be reasoned with in terms of political control and spheres of influence, the United States appeared fundamentally disinterested in traditional European-style imperialism, and openly condemned the increasingly repressive soviet chokehold on Eastern Europe; a most unwelcome criticism that the U.S.S.R.'s leaders felt was brash coming from a power based across the ocean that showed no signs of leaving Europe.

But, given this climate, while American Marshall Plan aid was certainly helpful, it is important not to understand the European leaders' own initiatives to rebuild and indeed expand their economies and be able to contrast any form of soviet encroachment. Fresh from the breakdown in talks, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s reported in the house of commons in January 1948 that, “The solution arrived at Yalta was looked upon by His Majesty’s Government at that time as a sensible compromise between conflicting elements, but there is no doubt that, as it has evolved, it has revealed a policy on the part of the Soviet Union to use every means in their power to get Communist control in Eastern Europe, and, as it now appears, in the West as well.” In the same address, Bevin went on to advocate a political and defensive union of Great Britain, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, as well as Germany, provided its form of government was pluralistic. To this effect, the Brussels Treaty was signed in March of 1948. American authorities were enthusiastic about the prospects of a European Federation: in addition to an unrelenting faith in American-style federal democracy, a united Europe would be an additional bulwark against soviet aggression should Russian tanks cross the inner German border. In the American mind’s eye, Great Britain was to take a leadership position within this European Federation. However, the British were far more preoccupied with keeping their own empire together and had a different conception of what a united Europe would look like. Although the British Government was initially enthusiastic about a military and political union, there was a disinterest — if not outright aversion — with regards to establishing any sort of supranational authority, as well as a reluctance to jeopardize English industry by opening up economically. This attitude brought no shortage of annoyance to the American proponents of European Federalism, who long considered the medium-sized European nation-state an obsolete sort of polity, and were themselves disinterested in helping the European states maintain their colonial empires. To make matters worse, the French government’s line increasingly mirrored that of Great Britain, especially as it became clear that German inclusion was only a matter of time.

But arguments on the structure of the union did not jeopardize the notion that European Unity was necessary. The consequences of being overly reliant on the United States were all but clear; Marshall Plan money had come at the cost of submitting portions of economic policy to the intergovernmental Organization for European Economic Cooperation (O.E.E.C.), which was itself monitored by the European Cooperation Agency (E.C.A.), an agency mostly staffed by prominent American former businessmen (incidentally, this agency was also given the second goal of promoting European unity, again revealing American enthusiasm for a united Europe as a major force against the soviet threat).

Europe’s doubts tied to the Marshall Plan didn’t stop at compromises of sovereignty either. The inflow of Marshall plan money into the western zones of occupied Germany, along with the perception in the U.S.S.R. that the government of the United States was attempting to permanently tether western Europe to itself, led the Soviet Union to further strengthen its hold on eastern Europe in addition to blockading the jointly-occupied city of Berlin; so while rhetoric of communist parties might have been mollified in Western Europe, the Soviet Union only entrenched its stance. Although the blockade was rendered irrelevant by the famous Berlin Airlift orchestrated by the United States with the contribution of Great Britain, the feeling that western Europe was on the cusp of a new occupation, either economic by the United States, or military and political by the Soviet Union, became pervasive. Thus perhaps the most lasting effect of the Marshall Plan was the emergence of the necessity to turn Western Europe into a “third force” in the world.