Address to Army Ordnance Association

Detroit, Michigan, June 3, 1946

It is now more than a year since the German High Command came to my headquarters in the schoolhouse at Theims to sign the documents of unconditional surrender. Because that day was hastened by this city’s production of the impediments of war, I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity of meeting with the members of the Detroit Chapter of the Army Ordnance Association. You and your city hold a place high on the Honor Roll of war work. Through you, in this audience, and the men and companies associated with you, was administered more than half the total dollar value of the Ordnance Department’s procurement.

To me, your group represents two things: One, the power and flexibility of the American industrial plant; the other, the intimate relationship between civilian effort and military strength. In the first point is one source of the victory and world leadership that our fighting men won for us. In the latter, lies the key to our future security and our ability, with the other nations, to build a lasting peace.

In 1941 we were attacked because our immediate military weakness led aggressors to discount the possibility of an effective reaction. Against us were arrayed powerfully armed enemies who for many years had been engaged either in war or preparation for war. We overcame their seemingly insuperable advantage and became an arsenal for the Allied world. This we could do because the necessary time for rearmament was furnished us by the heroic resistance of our Allies, and because the men and women of Detroit and other American industrial centers, workers and management, scientists and engineers, political leaders and technicians, combining their brawn and skills and techniques, abandoned their peacetime endeavors for a gigantic effort to arm against the aggressors.

The Germans have excused their defeat by the claim that we won merely a technological victory through the possession of cities and production centers like Detroit, with men and women highly skilled in production processes. In part, that is true. The weapons of war came to us in the field in such numbers that the Allies were able to bury the enemy under weight of metal, to hit him with a crushing punch, to slash and cut his armies with terrific speed. We were in a position to sacrifice metal to save American lives.

The statistics of your production are known to all the world. Repetition by me would add nothing to their impressive and staggering proportions. But the flexibility of your productive effort remains a cause for wonder. Detroit, that to most of us before the war meant only trucks and automobiles, came to mean, in war, practically everything that we needed to defeat the enemy. Every man in our armed forces who marched or rode or sailed or flew into combat was armed and equipped to an appreciable extent by this city. Planes and guns, tanks and cannon and jeeps and trucks, small arms and binoculars and fire control instruments, were only part of your production. The amazing variety of it was made possible by the intelligence with which you tackled your job, the technical skills you applied to it, the great wealth of experience you poured into it.

The Detroit area had no corner on technology and production. All over our country, all our production centers contributed to victory. But Detroit is a symbol of the strength our enemies came to fear.

But the excuse of the Germans for their latest defeat is far wide of the full truth. The heroics and sacrifices of our fighting men was the real spearhead of our victorious organization. The feeble Nazi excuse is refuted by many instances, when outnumbered and outgunned by the enemy, our men won through to victory. Moveover, there was more to our outpouring of weapons and equipment than mere material power to produce. There was the American spirit and American unity of will.

We proved that a free people, operating within a free economy, can achieve a teamwork, an integration of every material and human resource of the nation, such as no totalitarian power can attain. That was the essence of our victory. The strength we derived from such unity in time of war is the sort of strength we must preserve to save us from future war. The victory that national teamwork won for us now provides an opportunity to build a world ruled by law, rather than by brute force. Effort and energy and sacrifice are required of all if we are to attain our goal.

A lasting peace does not emerge spontaneously from the unconditional surrender of an enemy or even from the firm settlement of boundary disputes or the signing of peace treaties. All human experience underscores the obviousness of that fact.

Our national security is a first and essential step toward lasting peace. Democracy must have a firm base - to use a military expression - from which to project its ideals and benefits to others who may be groping or undecided in the adoption of governmental systems. We are an example to the world of the possibilities of democracy - weakness is likely to inspire contempt or disdain, rather than a desire to emulate. In order to stand securely in the world as the fearless, but understanding champions of liberty we must draw on all civilian resources which can contribute to the country’s defense. Cooperation between all the agencies of government, all the economic and industrial and scientific and social agencies of our nation is essential. Security is a national structure whose strength grows with the contribution of every individual.

The Army, as one of the main agencies responsible for national security, recently adopted measures to extend such relationship. By the establishment of the General Staff Division for research and developments, the War Department has taken a further step toward the continuing application of national scientific resource to the solution of military problems.

Full success in the Division’s mission requires civilian assistance in military planning from industrialists and scientists working in the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research. Security is no measured by the number of weight of guns alone, the armadas of planes that can be put aloft, or even the temporally exclusive possession of the atomic bomb. Security is not static. Military stockpiles can become junk because of a single scientific development and the security they lend can be wiped out by a single laboratory experiment.

Idolatrous worship of weapons because of their bigness or destructiveness can jeopardize a security program that is not keyed to the future through continuing research. The destructive power of a weapon is not necessarily the index to its combat effectiveness, now or later. Only close scrutiny by men qualified to evaluate all factors involved in the attainment of an objective can decide whether or not any specific weapon is the most effective means to attain its given end. Only they can accurately suggest the lines along which exploration should be conducted for the development of a better weapon.

Unified effort by civilian and military agencies was the outstanding characteristic of our war effort. The measure of cooperation then achieved should not be considered the ultimate. Our national security depends on its continued growth. As you well know, research is not a commodity that the Army can buy at a quoted price and have delivered to its warehouses in properly sized and marked parcels. A weapon already in existence can be ordered, but research is a technique where results cannot be predicted. Military training does not prepare adequate numbers of men in that technique. Nor should the Army be forced to depend on its own efforts to develop the best guarantee of security, so long as we have at our door, within the democracy of which the army is an essential part, the vast technical and scientific resources of civilian life. Cooperation between civilian and military agencies will assure us the finest in scientific research.

There appears little reason for duplicating within the Army any commercial research or manufacturing organization, which by its experience is better qualified than the Army to carry out some of our tasks. A case in point is our world communications net which tied the theater commands to the War Department. Commercial interests make this type of communications their business and are organized to plan, engineer and operate such a system. Peacetime cooperation would make possible the easy integration of these facilities in time of war as an organic part of the Armed Forces.

In general, the more use we are able to make of outside resources, the more energy the Army will have to devote to strictly military problems for whose solution there are no outside facilities or which for special security reasons can only be handled by the military. We need every resource for the thorough exploration of the wide fields that lie before us.

The nation must not only develop and fully exploit for man’s betterment all the possibilities of nuclear fission, but we must do the same in innumerable other fields.

We have no monopoly on scientific talent. We do not control all the raw materials of research. We do not possess scientific facilities that others cannot duplicate. But we have all three in such measure that we can, through cooperative effort, maintain a national stature that will earn us continued international respect and prove a sound insurance against disaster in any future emergency.

I would like to stress, however, that our security program must be far more than a lop-sided dependence on offensive and defensive weapons. Scientific effort and scientific research produces more than guns or shells or bombs. The social sciences, and the humanities also, play a dominant part in building a security structure and lasting peace. Only by the development of our total national resources - intellectual and material, scientific and social, economic and commercial - can we have a firm foundation for our security structure. It must be based on a sound and healthy national life in which the individual citizen willingly sacrifices for the common benefit.

Progress in this direction will measure the value of our contributions to the whole problem of eliminating war. We cannot reach this goal overnight or attain it by any amount of wishful thinking. Only by the slow and thorough processes of education through every element of our people - of the world - can it be won. In the schools and factories, on the farms, in offices and homes, it must be taught as a part of good citizenship.

You men this evening can help immeasurably in developing truly American attitudes toward the problem of peace and by continuing to devote a portion of your research and development to our security. We do not need the largest standing Army in the world, if we have the finest. We do not need to make our country a warehouse for war, if we develop techniques that obsolete weapons of aggression. The security of our country demands brains, not brute force, keen minds, rather than stockpiles of weapons. Above all it needs a partnership of the American people in which all our elements and all our enterprises shall cooperate for the increase of our security. Let us not allow ourselves to grow embarrassed in using the word 'patriot.' Let us rather strive to deserve that title. For it is clear that by remaining true to ourselves - to our country and all for which it stands - we can best advance that greatest of all human goals, attainment of lasting peace!

Our forebears did not hesitate to put every ounce of their energy into the realization of their ideal - a free, prosperous and united America. Because nothing could break their iron determination, they achieved their goal. Our ideal today is a free, prosperous and cooperative world. Only if we are secure will we be free to work wholeheartedly and determinedly for this result, for in the presence of a deadly fear, logic, reason and tolerance cannot live. National unity is the root of our strength - a truism we must not forget as we champion democracy and stand for justice and right in a united world.

When the Axis challenged us to fight for freedom, the answer roared out of the factories and offices and shops of this area, of all America. It was carried into the heart of Germany, out across the Pacific into the cities of Japan by Americans true to the traditions of Valley Forge and the Argonne Forest.

Now, we freely pose for ourselves a challenge to attain a greater goal - a secure, peaceful and free world. That challenge is worthy of all that’s in us. Progress toward it is the greatest heritage that we can bequeath to the future generations.