Proclamation 2654—Flag Day, 1945

It is our custom each year to set aside a day on which to render special honor to our Flag.

We celebrate Flag Day this year with a fresh sense of our strength as a nation. Solemnly, we accept the responsibilities placed upon us by our power.

We honor the men and women in the armed services and in the factories and homes who, with God's help, have given us our victories. We face the battle ahead with solemn gratitude for the triumphs of the past.

Our Flag has accompanied our fighting men on a hundred battlefields. It flies beyond the seas over the friendly lands our arms have freed, and over the hostile countries our arms have conquered. Our Flag will be planted in the heart of the empire of our last remaining enemy.

As we press forward to final victory, we are strengthened with the knowledge that for millions of people in other lands as well as in our own our Flag is a living token of human integrity and freedom.

Let us observe this Flag Day by raising our Flag and beside it the flags of the United Nations. It is especially fitting that we thus honor our Allies at a time when we are working with them to lay a firm foundation for world peace. Let this display of the flags of the United Nations symbolize our unity with our Allies both upon the battlefields of war and under the skies of peace. Let us again dedicate ourselves and our Republic, under God, to the united cause of peace and justice and the brotherhood of all men everywhere.

Now, Therefore, I, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate June 14, 1945, as Flag Day, and ask that the people of our nation on that day do especially honor our Flag, and the men and women of the armed services who have served under it, and that they also pay honor to our Allies of the United Nations.

I direct the officials of the Federal Government and I request the officials of the State and local government to display the Flag of our Republic on all public buildings on Flag Day; and I urge the people of the United States on that day to fly the American Flag from their homes, and also to arrange wherever possible for joint displays of the flags of the freedom-loving United Nations, whose staunch collaboration has aided us to achieve the victories of war and will aid us to realize our hope for an enduring peace.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington this 28th of May in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and sixty-ninth.

HARRY S. TRUMAN

By the President:

JOSEPH C. GREW,

Acting Secretary of State.