IKE DEMANDS WORLD PEACE
Hero delivers victory talk to Congress
General lauds G.I.’s, Allies, home front
Capital assembles greatest crowd
WASHINGTON – Authorities today estimated the crowd at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s homecoming at between 800,000 and 1,000,000, the largest ever here.
Other crowds:
- The late President Roosevelt’s funeral procession two months ago – nearly 450,000, largest until today
- President Roosevelt’s return from Hyde Park after his fourth-term election – about 300,000
- Reception for Charles A. Lindbergh, June 11, 1927 – 250,000
- President Woodrow Wilson’s homecoming from Paris in 1919 – 100,000
- Gen. John J. Pershing’s reception in 1919 – 100,000
WASHINGTON (UP) – Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a conquering hero come home, told the world’s leaders today that the combat soldier of this war expects them “to preserve the peace he is winning.”
He 54-year-old Texas-born Kansan, given perhaps the most tumultuous and heartfelt homecoming reception in this capital’s history, declared in an address before Congress that “the problems of peace can and must be met.”
The grief of those who mourn for the dead, he said, “can be relieved only by the faith that all this shall not happen again.”
The tanned and smiling Eisenhower went before Congress after perhaps the greatest reception and parade ever given here to a returning hero.
Capital’s greatest crowd
Police Inspector Harvey G. Callahan estimated that the crowds totaled between 800,000 and 1,000,000. He said it was “definitely the biggest… ever in the capital’s history.” The population of the metropolitan area is slightly less than 1,500,000.
Speaker Sam Rayburn had to bang away with his gavel several times to quiet the House chamber.
Below him in the well were Gen. George C. Marshall, Army chief-of-staff; Adm. Ernest J. King. commander-in-chief of the U.S. Fleet, and Adm. William D. Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff. They were grinning at Eisenhower and applauding.
Jammed into the House chamber also were the Supreme Court Justices, the Cabinet, and a host of foreign ambassadors, ministers and charges d’affaires. The galleries were packed.
Speech is read
Gen. Eisenhower began by saying he would deviate from a “long-established custom” of speaking extemporaneously. He then put on his glasses and calmly read the speech he had prepared – without oratorical flourishes and as matter-of-factly as though he were briefing his staff.
It was “Eisenhower Day” for everybody from President Truman down, and – in the words of Secretary of War Stimson – it was “a proud day for America.”
Gen. Ike flew home with 55 other returning warriors in four-engined Skymasters which were escorted on the last 50 miles of their trip to the National Airport here by a roaring armada of bombers and fighters.
Smiles galore
The man who engineered the defeat of Germany’s western might had a long speech for Congress, a shorter one for the Pentagon’s 32,000 workers, and an inexhaustible supply of smiles for the hundreds of thousands who greeted him with shouts of “Welcome Ike.”
But all he could say when he stepped on his home soil for the first time in a year and a half was: “Oh, God, it’s swell to be back.”
For long seconds after he stepped from his plane, following a 21-hour flight from Paris, Gen. Ike held his wife in his arms and gave her a kiss that she should remember.
Then he gave himself up to the crowds of hero-worshippers who had been gathering along Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues for hours.
From the airport and the Pentagon, where he exchanged tributes with the War Department’s thousands, Gen. Eisenhower and his men rode through the city in open reconnaissance cars past jammed thousands along flag-banked streets to the District Building. That is Washington’s “City Hall.”
There the reception reached its noisy climax. There also he received the key of the city.
At the Pentagon, 77-year-old War Secretary Stimson paid him this brief tribute: “You have served us with the highest honors.”
With characteristic modesty, Gen. Eisenhower told the assembled workers, “I bring you the thanks of three million fighting men.”
At the District Building, District Commissioner J. Russell Young hailed him “as a great and brilliant leader.”
‘Very proud of you’
“We are very proud of you and of what you and your men have done,” Mr. Young said. “God bless you and keep you for America.”
Gen. Eisenhower said, “I’m very happy and very proud. This is indeed the high spot in my life.”
All long the parade route were cheering and clapping crowds. Government girls squealed and jumped up and down trying to glimpse him. In the cloudless sky, processions of planes paced the parade.
At the Navy Building, an excited WAVE squealed, “I’ve got goose pimples.”
Ike salutes veterans
The brief stop at the District Building over the parade, moved on to the Capital where the general solemnly saluted 600 wounded veterans who had fought under him in Europe.
After his address to Congress and a civic luncheon, at which the people of the District presented him with a silver service, Gen. Eisenhower went to the White House where, in the Rose Garden, President Truman gave him his third Distinguished Service Medal, the nation’s second highest award.
The general said he would “rather have the distinction of receiving this from the President than any other honor I know of.” Mr. Truman replied: “I’d rather have this medal than the Presidency of the United States.”
Nearly 150 persons, including Mrs. Eisenhower, witnessed the presentation of the DSM, which Mr. Truman said was for “conspicuous service to the United States and to the peoples of all the United Nations.”
Gen. Eisenhower is not eligible for the Congressional Medal of Honor as that highest of U.S. awards is given for exceptional bravery above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy.
At the luncheon, Gen. Eisenhower made many an eye moist by describing “the feelings of a soldier on returning home.”
Pointing to the officers and men who came back with him, he said that they had been “in France where we didn’t understand the language” and in Germany where “the people were sullen.”
He said:
Now, we have come home. Coming home means seeing friends, seeing those who speak our language. All in all, it means America.
All of the three million fighting men [Americans in Europe] have just one longing – to return home to you.
He said that if his reception here indicated the feeling of Americans for their fighting men, he had “no fear of the future of my soldiers.”
But when he faced the Congress, General of the Army Eisenhower, the hero of as great a military campaign as was ever fought, had nothing to say about himself except:
I am summoned before you as the representative – the commander of those three million American men and women to whom you desire to pay America’s tribute for military victory. In humble realization that they, who earned your commendation, should properly be here to receive it. I am nevertheless proud and honored to serve as your agent in conveying it to them.
Speaking for those millions, Gen. Ike said there was “no slightest doubt that our people’s spirit of determination, which has buoyed us up and driven us forward in Europe, will continue to fire this nation through the ordeals of the battle yet to come.”
He said:
In this spirit, we renew our pledge of service to our Commander-in-Chief, President Truman, under whose strong leadership we know that final victory is certain.
Gen. Eisenhower talked of the American soldiers who faced every hazard the Nazis could conjure up and “conquered them all.” He talked of our Allies, the magnificent fighting men of Russia, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.
Tribute to Roosevelt
And he paid a special tribute to the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and to Prime Minister Winston Churchill – “these two God-given men.”
“To those two all of us recognize our lasting obligation,” he said.
Gen. Eisenhower said much of the U.S. ground, air, naval supply, and merchant marine forces.
He thanked civilian America on behalf of the millions he led for the weapons and the “confidence and sympathetic understanding” which he said made victory possible.
But he spoke at even more length about the Allied unity which never faltered when the fighting was hardest.
“Often,” he said, “have I thanked a Kind Providence for these staunch Allies.”
He thanked the British for their hospitalities and the sacrifices they made for the common cause.
He especially lauded the struggle of the peoples conquered by the Germans and said, “Those countries still need, and deserve, our help.”
Plea for future
But Gen. Eisenhower’s real message, a message he said was “imbedded deep in the hearts of all fighting men,” was this:
The soldier knows how grim and dark was the outlook for the Allies in 1941 and ’42. He is fully aware of the magnificent way the United Nations responded.
To his mind the problems of peace can be no more difficult than the one you had to solve more than three years ago, and which, in one battle area, has now been brought to a successful conclusion.
He knows that in war the threat of separate annihilation tends to hold allies together; he hopes we can find in peace a nobler incentive to produce the same unity.
He sees the United Nations strong but considerate; humane and understanding leaders in the world to preserve the peace he is winning.
This is the capital’s day to let Gen. Ike know what it thinks of him. Tomorrow will be New York’s turn.
On Thursday, Abilene and Kansas – his hometown and state – will welcome their best-loved son.
Because he is what he is, Ike Eisenhower couldn’t take today alone. In Europe recently, he said he looked forward to his homecoming “with fear and trembling.”
So winging home with him today were 55 other returning warriors, 26 of them enlisted men, to share his honors.
Before coming here, Gen. Eisenhower had been feted and honored by the British, the Russians and the French.
London made him an honorary citizen and gave him a sword. Britain’s King George VI awarded him the rarely-bestowed Order of Merit. He was the first American to receive it.
Soviet Marshal Gregory Zhukov presented him the Order of Victory, a view of the Kremlin framed by a star of rubies and diamonds. Gen. Charles de Gaulle gave him France’s highest honor, the Cross of Liberation.
Rapid rise
The triumphs that have come to Gen. Eisenhower have come in a brief span of years. Less than four years ago he was a colonel, hardly known outside the Army.
He was a major general when he went to Europe on June 16, 1942.
The story of his subsequent rise to supreme command of Anglo-American forces in Europe is a familiar one.
‘Son of America’
The consequences of his military genius, his organizing skill and tact, his decision and calm confidence – these are history.
Prime Minister Churchill said last week that Gen. Eisenhower had proved “not only his capacity to organize and regulate movements of armies but to stir men’s hearts; he also has shown a capacity for making great nations march together more truly united than they have ever been before.”
But it was the Russian Zhukov who captured the Kansas farm boy most completely in the fewest words.
“Ike Eisenhower,” the Russian said, is “a son of the American people.”