Speech Transcript:

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Seventy-eighth
Congress:

This Seventy-eighth Congress assembles in one of the great moments in
the history of the Nation. The past year was perhaps the most crucial
for modern civilization; the coming year will be filled with violent
conflicts-- yet with high promise of better things.

We must appraise the events of 1942 according to their relative
importance; we must exercise a sense of proportion.

First in importance in the American scene has been the inspiring
proof of the great qualities of our fighting men. They have
demonstrated these qualities in adversity as well as in victory. As
long as our flag flies over this Capitol, Americans will honor the
soldiers, sailors, and marines who fought our first battles of this
war against overwhelming odds the heroes, living and dead, of Wake
and Bataan and Guadalcanal, of the Java Sea and Midway and the North
Atlantic convoys. Their unconquerable spirit will live forever.

By far the largest and most important developments in the whole
world-wide strategic picture of 1942 were the events of the long
fronts in Russia: first, the implacable defense of Stalingrad; and,
second, the offensives by the Russian armies at various points that
started in the latter part of November and which still roll on with
great force and effectiveness.

The other major events of the year were: the series of Japanese
advances in the Philippines, the East Indies, Malaya, and Burma; the
stopping of that Japanese advance in the mid-Pacific, the South
Pacific, and the Indian Oceans; the successful defense of the Near
East by the British counterattack through Egypt and Libya; the
American-British occupation of North Africa. Of continuing importance
in the year 1942 were the unending and bitterly contested battles of
the convoy routes, and the gradual passing of air superiority from
the Axis to the United Nations.

The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942--or
eventually lose everything. I do not need to tell you that our
enemies did not win the war in 1942.

In the Pacific area, our most important victory in 1942 was the air
and naval battle off Midway Island. That action is historically
important because it secured for our use communication lines
stretching thousands of miles in every direction. In placing this
emphasis on the Battle of Midway, I am not unmindful of other
successful actions in the Pacific, in the air and on land and
afloat--especially those on the Coral Sea and New Guinea and in the
Solomon Islands. But these actions were essentially defensive. They
were part of the delaying strategy that characterized this phase of
the war.

During this period we inflicted steady losses upon the enemy--great
losses of Japanese planes and naval vessels, transports and cargo
ships. As early as one year ago, we set as a primary task in the war
of the Pacific a day-by-day and week-by-week and month-by-month
destruction of more Japanese war materials than Japanese industry
could replace. Most certainly, that task has been and is being
performed by our fighting ships and planes. And a large part of this
task has been accomplished by the gallant crews of our American
submarines who strike on the other side of the Pacific at Japanese
ships--right up at the very mouth of the harbor of Yokohama.

We know that as each day goes by, Japanese strength in ships and
planes is going down and down, and American strength in ships and
planes is going up and up. And so I sometimes feel that the eventual
outcome can now be put on a mathematical basis. That will become
evident to the Japanese people themselves when we strike at their own
home islands, and bomb them constantly from the air.

And in the attacks against Japan, we shall be joined with the heroic
people of China--that great people whose ideals of peace are so
closely akin to our own. Even today we are flying as much lend-lease
material into China as ever traversed the Burma Road, flying it over
mountains 17,000 feet high, flying blind through sleet and snow. We
shall overcome all the formidable obstacles, and get the battle
equipment into China to shatter the power of our common enemy. From
this war, China will realize the security, the prosperity and the
dignity, which Japan has sought so ruthlessly to destroy.

The period of our defensive attrition in the Pacific is drawing to a
close. Now our aim is to force the Japanese to fight. Last year, we
stopped them. This year, we intend to advance.

Turning now to the European theater of war, during this past year it
was clear that our first task was to lessen the concentrated pressure
on the Russian front by compelling Germany to divert part of her
manpower and equipment to another theater of war. After months of
secret planning and preparation in the utmost detail, an enormous
amphibious expedition was embarked for French North Africa from the
United States and the United Kingdom in literally hundreds of ships.
It reached its objectives with very small losses, and has already
produced an important effect upon the whole situation of the war. It
has opened to attack what Mr. Churchill well described as "the
under-belly of the Axis," and it has removed the always dangerous
threat of an Axis attack through West Africa against the South
Atlantic Ocean and the continent of South America itself.

The well-timed and splendidly executed offensive from Egypt by the
British Eighth Army was a part of the same major strategy of the
United Nations.

Great rains and appalling mud and very limited communications have
delayed the final battles of Tunisia. The Axis is reinforcing its
strong positions. But I am confident that though the fighting will be
tough, when the final Allied assault is made, the last vestige of Axis
power will be driven from the whole of the south shores of the
Mediterranean.

Any review of the year 1942 must emphasize the magnitude and the
diversity of the military activities in which this Nation has become
engaged. As I speak to you, approximately one and a half million of
our soldiers, sailors, marines, and fliers are in service outside of
our continental limits, all through the world. Our merchant seamen,
in addition, are carrying supplies to them and to our allies over
every sea lane.

Few Americans realize the amazing growth of our air strength, though
I am sure our enemy does. Day in and day out our forces are bombing
the enemy and meeting him in combat on many different fronts in every
part of the world. And for those who question the quality of our
aircraft and the ability of our fliers, I point to the fact that, in
Africa, we are shooting down two enemy planes to every one we lose,
and in the Pacific and the Southwest Pacific we are shooting them
down four to one.

We pay great tribute--the tribute of the United States of America--to
the fighting men of Russia and China and Britain and the various
members of the British Commonwealth--the millions of men who through
the years of this war have fought our common enemies, and have denied
to them the world conquest which they sought.

We pay tribute to the soldiers and fliers and seamen of others of the
United Nations whose countries have been overrun by Axis hordes.

As a result of the Allied occupation of North Africa, powerful units
of the French Army and Navy are going into action. They are in action
with the United Nations forces. We welcome them as allies and as
friends. They join with those Frenchmen who, since the dark days of
June, 1940, have been fighting valiantly for the liberation of their
stricken country.

We pay tribute to the fighting leaders of our allies, to Winston
Churchill, to Joseph Stalin, and to the Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek. Yes, there is a very great unanimity between the leaders of
the United Nations. This unity is effective in planning and carrying
out the major strategy of this war and in building up and in
maintaining the lines of supplies.

I cannot prophesy. I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations
are going to strike next in Europe. But we are going to strike--and
strike hard. I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them in
Norway, or through the Low Countries, or in France, or through
Sardinia or Sicily, or through the Balkans, or through Poland--or at
several points simultaneously. But I can tell you that no matter
where and when we strike by land, we and the British and the Russians
will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly. Day in and day
out we shall heap tons upon tons of high explosives on their war
factories and utilities and seaports.

Hitler and Mussolini will understand now the enormity of their
miscalculations--that the Nazis would always have the advantage of
superior air power as they did when they bombed Warsaw, and
Rotterdam, and London and Coventry. That superiority has
gone--forever.

Yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it--and they are going
to get it.

Our forward progress in this war has depended upon our progress on
the production front.

There has been criticism of the management and conduct of our war
production. Much of this self-criticism has had a healthy effect. It
has spurred us on. It has reflected a normal American impatience to
get on with the job. We are the kind of people who are never quite
satisfied with anything short of miracles.

But there has been some criticism based on guesswork and even on
malicious falsification of fact. Such criticism creates doubts and
creates fears, and weakens our total effort.

I do not wish to suggest that we should be completely satisfied with
our production progress today, or next month, or ever. But I can
report to you with genuine pride on what has been accomplished in
1942.

A year ago we set certain production goals for 1942 and for 1943.
Some people, including some experts, thought that we had pulled some
big figures out of a hat just to frighten the Axis. But we had
confidence in the ability of our people to establish new records. And
that confidence has been justified.

Of course, we realized that some production objectives would have to
be changed--some of them adjusted upward, and others downward; some
items would be taken out of the program altogether, and others added.
This was inevitable as we gained battle experience, and as
technological improvements were made.

Our 1942 airplane production and tank production fell short,
numerically--stress the word numerically of the goals set a year ago.
Nevertheless, we have plenty of reason to be proud of our record for
1942. We produced 48,000 military planes--more than the airplane
production of Germany, Italy, and Japan put together. Last month, in
December, we produced 5,500 military planes and the rate is rapidly
rising. Furthermore, we must remember that as each month passes by,
the averages of our types weigh more, take more man-hours to make,
and have more striking power.

In tank production, we revised our schedule--and for good and
sufficient reasons. As a result of hard experience in battle, we have
diverted a portion of our tank-producing capacity to a stepped-up
production of new, deadly field weapons, especially self-propelled
artillery.

Here are some other production figures:

In 1942, we produced 56,000 combat vehicles, such as tanks and
self-propelled artillery.

In 1942, we produced 670,000 machine guns, six times greater than our
production in 1941 and three times greater than our total production
during the year and a half of our participation in the first World
War.

We produced 21,000 anti-tank guns, six times greater than our 1941
production.

We produced ten and a quarter billion rounds of small-arms
ammunition, five times greater than our 1941 production and three
times greater than our total production in the first World War.

We produced 181 million rounds of artillery ammunition, twelve times
greater than our 1941 production and ten times greater than our total
production in the first World War.

I think the arsenal of democracy is making good.

These facts and figures that I have given will give no great aid and
comfort to the enemy. On the contrary, I can imagine that they will
give him considerable discomfort. I suspect that Hitler and Tojo will
find it difficult to explain to the German and Japanese people just
why it is that "decadent, inefficient democracy" can produce such
phenomenal quantities of weapons and munitions--and fighting men.

We have given the lie to certain misconceptions--which is an
extremely polite word--especially the one which holds that the
various blocs or groups within a free country cannot forego their
political and economic differences in time of crisis and work
together toward a common goal.

While we have been achieving this miracle of production, during the
past year our armed forces have grown from a little over 2,000,000 to
7,000,000. In other words, we have withdrawn from the labor force and
the farms some 5,000,000 of our younger workers. And in spite of
this, our farmers have contributed their share to the common effort
by producing the greatest quantity of food ever made available during
a single year in all our history.

I wonder is there any person among us so simple as to believe that
all this could have been done without creating some dislocations in
our normal national life, some inconveniences, and even some
hardships?

Who can have hoped to have done this without burdensome Government
regulations which are a nuisance to everyone--including those who
have the thankless task of administering them?

We all know that there have been mistakes--mistakes due to the
inevitable process of trial and error inherent in doing big things
for the first time. We all know that there have been too many
complicated forms and questionnaires. I know about that. I have had
to fill some of them out myself.

But we are determined to see to it that our supplies of food and
other essential civilian goods are distributed on a fair and just
basis--to rich and poor, management and labor, farmer and city
dweller alike. We are determined to keep the cost of living at a
stable level. All this has required much information. These forms and
questionnaires represent an honest and sincere attempt by honest and
sincere officials to obtain this information.

We have learned by the mistakes that we have made.

Our experience will enable us during the coming year to improve the
necessary mechanisms of wartime economic controls, and to simplify
administrative procedures. But we do not intend to leave things so
lax that loopholes will be left for cheaters, for chiselers, or for
the manipulators of the black market.

Of course, there have been disturbances and inconveniences--and even
hardships. And there will be many, many more before we finally win.
Yes, 1943 will not be an easy year for us on the home front. We shall
feel in many ways in our daily lives the sharp pinch of total war.

Fortunately, there are only a few Americans who place appetite above
patriotism. The overwhelming majority realize that the food we send
abroad is for essential military purposes, for our own and Allied
fighting forces, and for necessary help in areas that we occupy.

We Americans intend to do this great job together. In our common
labors we must build and fortify the very foundation of national
unity--confidence in one another.

It is often amusing, and it is sometimes politically profitable, to
picture the City of Washington as a madhouse, with the Congress and
the Administration disrupted with confusion and indecision and
general incompetence.

However--what matters most in war is results. And the one pertinent
fact is that after only a few years of preparation and only one year
of warfare, we are able to engage, spiritually as well as physically,
in the total waging of a total war.

Washington may be a madhouse--but only in the sense that it is the
Capital City of a Nation which is fighting mad. And I think that
Berlin and Rome and Tokyo, which had such contempt for the obsolete
methods of democracy, would now gladly use all they could get of that
same brand of madness.

And we must not forget that our achievements in production have been
relatively no greater than those of the Russians and the British and
the Chinese who have developed their own war industries under the
incredible difficulties of battle conditions. They have had to
continue work through bombings and blackouts. And they have never
quit.

We Americans are in good, brave company in this war, and we are
playing our own, honorable part in the vast common effort.

As spokesmen for the United States Government, you and I take off our
hats to those responsible for our American production--to the owners,
managers, and supervisors, to the draftsmen and the engineers, and to
the workers-- men and women--in factories and arsenals and shipyards
and mines and mills and forests--and railroads and on highways.

We take off our hats to the farmers who have faced an unprecedented
task of feeding not only a great Nation but a great part of the
world.

We take off our hats to all the loyal, anonymous, untiring men and
women who have worked in private employment and in Government and who
have endured rationing and other stringencies with good humor and good
will.

Yes, we take off our hats to all Americans who have contributed so
magnificently to our common cause.

I have sought to emphasize a sense of proportion in this review of
the events of the war and the needs of the war.

We should never forget the things we are fighting for. But, at this
critical period of the war, we should confine ourselves to the larger
objectives and not get bogged down in argument over methods and
details.

We, and all the United Nations, want a decent peace and a durable
peace. In the years between the end of the first World War and the
beginning of the second World War, we were not living under a decent
or a durable peace.

I have reason to know that our boys at the front are concerned with
two broad aims beyond the winning of the war; and their thinking and
their opinion coincide with what most Americans here back home are
mulling over. They know, and we know, that it would be
inconceivable--it would, indeed, be sacrilegious--if this Nation and
the world did not attain some real, lasting good out of all these
efforts and sufferings and bloodshed and death.

The men in our armed forces want a lasting peace, and, equally, they
want permanent employment for themselves, their families, and their
neighbors when they are mustered out at the end of the war.

Two years ago I spoke in my Annual Message of four freedoms. The
blessings of two of them--freedom of speech and freedom of
religion--are an essential part of the very life of this Nation; and
we hope that these blessings will be granted to all men everywhere.

'The people at home, and the people at the front, are wondering a
little about the third freedom--freedom from want. To them it means
that when they are mustered out, when war production is converted to
the economy of peace, they will have the right to expect full
employment--full employment for themselves and for all able-bodied
men and women in America who want to work.

They expect the opportunity to work, to run their farms, their
stores, to earn decent wages. They are eager to face the risks
inherent in our system of free enterprise.

They do not want a postwar America which suffers from
undernourishment or slums--or the dole. They want no get-rich-quick
era of bogus "prosperity" which will end for them in selling apples
on a street corner, as happened after the bursting of the boom in
1929.

When you talk with our young men and our young women, you will find
they want to work for themselves and for their families; they
consider that they have the right to work; and they know that after
the last war their fathers did not gain that right.

When you talk with our young men and women, you will find that with
the opportunity for employment they want assurance against the evils
of all major economic hazards--assurance that will extend from the
cradle to the grave. And this great Government can and must provide
this assurance.

I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America
after the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.

I dissent.

And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should
become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I
stand.

I say this now to this Seventy-eighth Congress, because it is wholly
possible that freedom from want--the right of employment, the right
of assurance against life's hazards--will loom very large as a task
of America during the coming two years.

I trust it will not be regarded as an issue--but rather as a task for
all of us to study sympathetically, to work out with a constant regard
for the attainment of the objective, with fairness to all and with
injustice to none.

In this war of survival we must keep before our minds not only the
evil things we fight against but the good things we are fighting for.
We fight to retain a great past--and we fight to gain a greater
future.

Let us remember, too, that economic safety for the America of the
future is threatened unless a greater economic stability comes to the
rest of the world. We cannot make America an island in either a
military or an economic sense. Hitlerism, like any other form of
crime or disease, can grow from the evil seeds of economic as well as
military feudalism.

Victory in this war is the first and greatest goal before us. Victory
in the peace is the next. That means striving toward the enlargement
of the security of man here and throughout the world--and, finally,
striving for the fourth freedom--freedom from fear.

It is of little account for any of us to talk of essential human
needs, of attaining security, if we run the risk of another World War
in ten or twenty or fifty years. That is just plain common sense. Wars
grow in size, in death and destruction, and in the inevitability of
engulfing all Nations, in inverse ratio to the shrinking size of the
world as a result of the conquest of the air. I shudder to think of
what will happen to humanity, including ourselves, if this war ends
in an inconclusive peace, and another war breaks out when the babies
of today have grown to fighting age.

Every normal American prays that neither he nor his sons nor his
grandsons will be compelled to go through this horror again.

Undoubtedly a few Americans, even now, think that this Nation can end
this war comfortably and then climb back into an American hole and
pull the hole in after them.

But we have learned that we can never dig a hole so deep that it
would be safe against predatory animals. We have also learned that if
we do not pull the fangs of the predatory animals of this world, they
will multiply and grow in strength--and they will be at our throats
again once more in a short generation.

Most Americans realize more clearly than ever before that modern war
equipment in the hands of aggressor Nations can bring danger
overnight to our own national existence or to that of any other
Nation--or island--or continent.

It is clear to us that if Germany and Italy and Japan--or any one of
them-- remain armed at the end of this war, or are permitted to
rearm, they will again, and inevitably, embark upon an ambitious
career of world conquest. They must be disarmed and kept disarmed,
and they must abandon the philosophy, and the teaching of that
philosophy, which has brought so much suffering to the world.

After the first World War we tried to achieve a formula for permanent
peace, based on a magnificent idealism. We failed. But, by our
failure, we have learned that we cannot maintain peace at this stage
of human development by good intentions alone.

Today the United Nations are the mightiest military coalition in all
history. They represent an overwhelming majority of the population of
the world. Bound together in solemn agreement that they themselves
will not commit acts of aggression or conquest against any of their
neighbors, the United Nations can and must remain united for the
maintenance of peace by preventing any attempt to rearm in Germany,
in Japan, in Italy, or in any other Nation which seeks to violate the
Tenth Commandment--"Thou shalt not covet."

There are cynics, there are skeptics who say it cannot be done. The
American people and all the freedom-loving peoples of this earth are
now demanding that it must be done. And the will of these people
shall prevail.

The very philosophy of the Axis powers is based on a profound
contempt for the human race. If, in the formation of our future
policy, we were guided by the same cynical contempt, then we should
be surrendering to the philosophy of our enemies, and our victory
would turn to defeat.

The issue of this war is the basic issue between those who believe in
mankind and those who do not--the ancient issue between those who put
their faith in the people and those who put their faith in dictators
and tyrants. There have always been those who did not believe in the
people, who attempted to block their forward movement across history,
to force them back to servility and suffering and silence.

The people have now gathered their strength. They are moving forward
in their might and power--and no force, no combination of forces, no
trickery, deceit, or violence, can stop them now. They see before
them the hope of the world--a decent, secure, peaceful life for men
everywhere.

I do not prophesy when this war will end.

But I do believe that this year of 1943 will give to the United
Nations a very substantial advance along the roads that lead to
Berlin and Rome and Tokyo.

I tell you it is within the realm of possibility that this
Seventy-eighth Congress may have the historic privilege of helping
greatly to save the world from future fear.

Therefore, let us all have confidence, let us redouble our efforts.

A tremendous, costly, long-enduring task in peace as well as in war
is still ahead of us.

But, as we face that continuing task, we may know that the state of
this Nation is good--the heart of this Nation is sound--the spirit of
this Nation is strong--the faith of this Nation is eternal.