http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12165&st=&st1=
Harry S. Truman
XXXIII President of the United States: 1945 - 1953
97 - Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference.
August 9, 1945
[Delivered from the White House at 10 p.m.]
My fellow Americans:
I have just returned from Berlin, the city from which the Germans intended to rule the world. It is a ghost city. The buildings are in ruins, its economy and its people are in ruins.
Our party also visited what is left of Frankfurt and Darmstadt. We flew over the remains of Kassel, Magdeburg, and other devastated cities. German women and children and old men were wandering over the highways, returning to bombed-out homes or leaving bombed out cities, searching for food and shelter.
War has indeed come home to Germany and to the German people. It has come home in all the frightfulness with which the German leaders started and waged it.
The German people are beginning to atone for the crimes of the gangsters whom they placed in power and whom they wholeheartedly approved and obediently followed.
We also saw some of the terrific destruction which the war had brought to the occupied countries of Western Europe and to England.
How glad I am to be home again! And how grateful to Almighty God that this land of ours has been spared!
We must do all we can to spare her from the ravages of any future breach of the peace. That is why, though the United States wants no territory or profit or selfish advantage out of this war, we are going to maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace. Bases which our military experts deem to be essential for our protection, and which are not now in our possession, we will acquire.
No one can foresee what another war would mean to our own cities and our own people. What we are doing to Japan now--even with the new atomic bomb--is only a small fraction of what would happen to the world in a third World War.
