Remarks at the Naval Air Station in Adak, Alaska.

Gentlemen, I like your food. I like your climate. (Laughter) You don't realize the thousands upon thousands of people who would give anything in the world to swap places with you. I have seen some of them. Of course, I haven't been down to the Southwest Pacific, but last year I saw two battalions of our engineers down in Liberia, and I would much rather be here than in Liberia.

It's a treat to see this place and see what has been done here in such a short time. Say, for example, the spot where the Army moved a stream and made a harbor out of it. I have never been to this country before, but I know the parallel of it very well. I have spent lots of time up around the coasts of Maine and Newfoundland. And Americans of all kinds can live here and get by with it all right. I am thrilled with what we have done here. I wish more people back home could come out to Alaska and see what we have done here in an incredibly short time.

When the Japs first struck out here—not here but west of here—two years ago, folks back home, especially on the Coast, got panicky. The newspapers were in the lead. Well, they figured out that from these islands the enemy was going to come down and destroy San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The invasion was on! The continent of the United States was going to be captured by the Japs!

And of course, we live in a pretty big country. The people in the Midwest didn't quite see the peril. There was a lot of feeling, a lot of fear, a lot of laughter about the Pacific Coast. And the mere fact of what we have done in regaining the islands west of here from the Japs has had a tremendous morale effect on all of the United States. People see things now—on the war—from a more ordinary common sense point of view. People realize, I think, the fact that we are actually engaged in a war, either working or fighting, all over the Pacific, all over Europe, and in many parts of Africa. They realize for the first time that this is a global war. That is one reason why many of us realize that it is a great privilege to take part in this kind of thing, a thing that has changed our people's point of view tremendously.

I have to be in close contact every day with the Army and Navy on the potential defense of the United States, and I was thinking a little while ago that if back in 1940 or early in 1941 I had said to the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and the Navy, "Our next war is going to be in the Aleutians and down in the Southwest Pacific," they would have all laughed at me. They are the experts at that sort of thing. I am not an expert. I am just an ordinary American. We can see now that we Americans were caught unprepared, because we were ordinary human beings, following the best advice we had at the time. No one would have guessed in 1941 that we would be attacked in such an unsportsmanlike manner as we were. No one could have visualized Pearl Harbor, either out there or in Washington. But if we had known then what we know now, we would have expected an attack in 1941.

No one then visualized the great many thousands of our men in the services who would be up here in Alaska, first throwing the Japs out, and secondly making it impossible for the Japs to come back. Live and learn. That is one thing we are all doing these days. In the days to come I won't trust the Japs around the corner. We have got to make it impossible for them—and we are all doing a great deal to make it impossible for them—to repeat this particular route of access to the United States. That is why it is important, this work we are all doing on this spot. We are going to make it humanly possible to deny access to or aggressive attack by the Japanese of another generation against any part of the United States.

And so we are all taking part in a very interesting and historical development—the protection of our kind of life, our kind of civilization back home, and at the same time we are gaining a better knowledge of a different part of the United States. We will remember that this is the United States, and that it is always going to be a part of the United States.

It has made me very happy, seeing with my own eyes the development of this place, the greatest part of which is not even one year old. What we are doing here is going to be of real value to our national defense and to our national growth.

I was talking to Admiral Nimitz down at Hawaii the other day, talking about the problem of a lot of people—people in our services who want to go places after this war. There is a certain percentage of our people who haven't got roots back in the villages, on the farms—people who want to go on pioneering. And after all, the ancestors of most all of us, from one generation back to ten generations, were pioneers in a pioneer country. And although this is not the best climate in the world up here in the Aleutians, it isn't the worst, and Alaska—the mainland of Alaska—is a big country.

I was noticing, just the other day, that if you superimpose Alaska on a map of the United States, one corner of it, the southeastern corner, would land somewhere around Charleston, South Carolina, and these islands—the Aleutian Islands—would end up somewhere near Los Angeles. And the mainland of Alaska would occupy nearly all of the central and midwestern States—Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. It's an enormous territory.

Well, it is going to open up for those in the services who want to start life in a new spot; and there are people like that. I wouldn't say we will bring a hundred thousand people to Alaska, but there are those who will at least want to go to a country much of which is good land to live on. There are an awful lot of people in Norway, Sweden, and Finland who live in a country very similar to this. In spite of the climate, and, in winter, the long nights, they are a thoroughly happy people with a very high type of civilization. Alaska opens up a new field, and a very promising field too, from all that I hear of its possibilities.

It has been a privilege to be with you, and to see this pioneer work. You are doing it awfully well—doing a good job, first, for the defense of your country, and secondly you are doing it for the future of our Nation. You are making our future secure for the years to come, more so than it has been in the past; and it took this war to make us do it.

It is good to be with you. Good luck. I won't say I want to stay longer, for I have to see other places too. My time is limited, and I have to be careful in scheduling it. By the time I get back home next week, I will have been gone thirty days—my limit, when Congress is left in Washington all alone.