Images (18)
Document
| id |
id
125961104
|
|---|---|
| contentType |
contentType
document
|
| source |
source
import
|
Source image fields (6)
Extracted text
OCR Page 1 of 18A FIGHTING FAITH FOR AMERICA
by
Honorable Harry S. Truman
Chairman, Senate Committee to Investigate
the National Defense Program
Something is desperately wrong with our American home front in this
war. Something so wrong that it now worries our Generals and Admirals as
much as the enemy does. It has let loose an avalanche of bitter letters
to Washington from American soldiers all the way from Sicily to the Solomons
and from Australia to Attu. As one of them put it to a newspaper correspon-
dent on the eve of Independence Day:
"What we've got is the Fourth of July coming up and the
country we are fighting for fighting itself. I want to be
proud of my country, and the reports in the paper this morning
made me ashamed. The country is too damned big and too
damned beautiful to carry on like this.
Hitler once counted upon a crisis on our home front to insure his
final triumph. Might he count on it yet to save him from final ruin?
What has produced this crisis, and what is the remedy?
It has been the job of the Senate War Investigating Committee to look
into the home front situation and make recommendations. This assignment from
Congress has put us in a position to uncover and clear up a maze of technical
bottlenecks and financial and material waste hampering the war effort. It has
also given us an inside picture afforded to few of what is going on in America.
Since the Committee was organized in March, 1941, it has submitted 21
major reports covering Army camps, War Production Board, aluminum, gasoline
and fuel oil, rubber, steel, ordnance, aircraft, shipbuilding and manpower.
With a total expenditure of less than $160,000 it has effected savings to the
taxpayers estimated all the way from two to eleven billion dollars. The Com-
mittee has listened to many hundreds of witnesses, taken 5 million words of
TRUMA
NARA
Relations
belongs_to