Production for war is based on metals and raw materials—­steel, copper, rubber, aluminum, zinc, tin.  Greater and greater quantities of them will have to be diverted to war purposes.  Civilian use of them will have to be cut further and still further—­and, in many cases, completely eliminated.

War costs money.  So far, we have hardly even begun to pay for it.  We have devoted only 15 percent of our national income to national defense.  As will appear in my Budget Message tomorrow, our war program for the coming fiscal year will cost 56 billion dollars or, in other words, more than half of the estimated annual national income.  That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes.  It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials.  In a word, it means an “all-out” war by individual effort and family effort in a united country.

Only this all-out scale of production will hasten the ultimate all-out victory.  Speed will count.  Lost ground can always be regained—­lost time never.  Speed will save lives; speed will save this Nation which is in peril; speed will save our freedom and our civilization—­and slowness has never been an American characteristic.

As the United States goes into its full stride, we must always be on guard against misconceptions which will arise, some of them naturally, or which will be planted among us by our enemies.

We must guard against complacency.  We must not underrate the enemy.  He is powerful and cunning—­and cruel and ruthless.  He will stop at nothing that gives him a chance to kill and to destroy.  He has trained his people to believe that their highest perfection is achieved by waging war.  For many years he has prepared for this very conflict—­planning, and plotting, and training, arming, and fighting.  We have already tasted defeat.  We may suffer further setbacks.  We must face the fact of a hard war, a long war, a bloody war, a costly war.

We must, on the other hand, guard against defeatism.  That has been one of the chief weapons of Hitler’s propaganda machine—­used time and again with deadly results.  It will not be used successfully on the American people.

We must guard against divisions among ourselves and among all the other United Nations.  We must be particularly vigilant against racial discrimination in any of its ugly forms.  Hitler will try again to breed mistrust and suspicion between one individual and another, one group and another, one race and another, one Government and another.  He will try to use the same technique of falsehood and rumor-mongering with which he divided France from Britain.  He is trying to do this with us even now.  But he will find a unity of will and purpose against him, which will persevere until the destruction of all his black designs upon the freedom and safety of the people of the world.

We cannot wage this war in a defensive spirit.  As our power and our resources are fully mobilized, we shall carry the attack against the enemy—­we shall hit him and hit him again wherever and whenever we can reach him.