For all these purposes, as well as for a peace that will endure, we need the partnership of the United Nations. The first problem in time which we must cope with is that of saving life and getting resources and people back into production. In many of the liberated countries economic life has all hut stopped. Transportation systems are in ruins and therefore coal and raw materials cannot be brought to factories. Many factories themselves are shattered, power plants smashed, transmission systems broken, bridges blown up or bombed, ports clogged with sunken wrecks, and great rich areas of farm land inundated by the sea.
People are tired and sick and hungry.
But they are eager to go to work again, and to create again with their own hands and under their own leaders the necessary physical basis of their lives. Emergency relief is under way behind the armies under the authority of local Governments, backed up first by the Allied Military Command and after that by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. That job must be done otherwise, and it must be started soon. The main job of restoration is not one of relief. It is one of reconstruction which must largely be done by local people and their Governments.