Truman’s State Of The Union

by John Hawkins | May 6, 2002 7:20 pm

Truman’s State Of The Union Address On April 16, 1945:[1] When Harry Truman became President of the United States, it was not under the best of circumstances. Americans had spent the last four years bleeding and dying overseas in WW2. We’d paid a tremendous price for the freedom of the world and conventional wisdom said that hundreds of thousands of Americans were going to die to finish off Japan and Germany once and for all. Then the unthinkable happened. A man who was widely considered America’s most beloved president, FDR, passed away and Truman had to fill his shoes. Four days after he assumed the presidency, Harry Truman reassured America of his determination to finish the war while letting all of us know that better days lay ahead. Read this little snippet of the speech and I think you’ll start to see why they called him “Give ‘Em Hell Harry”…

So that there can be no possible misunderstanding, both Germany and Japan can be certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that America will continue the fight for freedom until no vestige of resistance remains!

We are deeply conscious of the fact that much hard fighting is still ahead of us.

Having to pay such a heavy price to make complete victory certain, America will never become a party to any plan for partial victory!

To settle for merely another temporary respite would surely jeopardize the future security of all the world.

Our demand has been, and it remains-Unconditional Surrender! We will not traffic with the breakers of the peace on the terms of the peace.

The responsibility for making of the peace-and it is a very grave responsibility-must rest with the defenders of the peace. We are not unconscious of the dictates of humanity. We do not wish to see unnecessary or unjustified suffering. But the laws of God and of man have been violated and the guilty must not go unpunished. Nothing shall shake our determination to punish the war criminals even though we must pursue them to the ends of the earth.