“Today the guns are silent.  A great tragedy has ended.  A great victory has been won.  The skies no longer rain death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight.  The entire world is quietly at peace.  The holy mission has been completed.  And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way.  I speak for the un-named brave millions homeward bound to take up the challenge of that future which they did so much to salvage from the brink of disaster.

“As I look back on the long, tortuous trail from those grim days of Bataan and Corregidor, when an entire world lived in fear, when democracy was on the defensive everywhere, when modern civilization trembled in the balance, I thank a merciful God that He has given us the faith, the courage and the power from which to mould victory. 

 We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph and from both we have learned there can be no turning back.

“We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.  We have had our last chance.

 “If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.

 “The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, arts, literature and all material and cultural developments of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

 “And so, my fellow countrymen, today I report to you that your sons and daughters have served you well and faithfully with the calm, deliberate, determined fighting spirit of the American Soldier and Sailor, based upon a tradition of historical truth as against the fanaticism of an enemy supported only by mythological fiction.

“Their spiritual strength and power has brought us through to victory.