Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Omar Bradley had demanded and, at 11:00 a.m., obtained from German Maj.-General Fritz Krause, along with five other Nazi generals, unconditional surrender. The result was that 25,000 Axis troops and their equipment were surrendered to the Second Army Corps in the area 25 miles southeast of Bizerte.

To the southeast, another 25,000 Axis troops surrendered to the British First and Eighth Armies in and around Tunis.

Thus, during the morning hours of May 9, both Tunis and Bizerte and their surrounding areas were formally surrendered to the Allies.

The British had, meantime, bottled up an additional 80,000 Axis troops in the Cap Bon Peninsula, to the east of Tunis, trying to escape by sea to Italy. A smaller force was trying to escape via Porto Farina 18 miles east of Bizerte.

The Allies bombed Palermo in a 400-plane raid on Sunday as frantic preparations were reported throughout the Axis occupied nations of Europe, from Holland, to Italy, to the Balkans, in anticipation of an imminent Allied invasion. The massive bombing of Palermo obviously telegraphed to the Axis where the invasion was likely to begin.

Allied headquarters released estimates for Axis losses during the African campaign: 435,000 in North Africa, about 325,000 of whom were Italian; 240,000 in East Africa, 200,000 of whom were black soldiers interned into the Axis fighting forces. The Axis had also lost more than 2,000 tanks and 5,000 planes in the long campaign. (It is not entirely clear whether these losses embraced the entire three-year African campaign or only the retreat since the previous October before El Alamein.)

In the Caucasus, the Russian Army continued to close on Novorossisk from three directions. During the previous week the Russian Air Force had destroyed 930 Luftwaffe planes while losing 335 planes of their own. The fighting had become so fierce between the marshes of the Sea of Azov and the Kuban River mudflats, said the reports, that the Nazis were forced to throw into the fight reserves who had been planned for use in a coming summer offensive.

In "neutral" Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, suggesting that it was obvious that neither the Allies nor the Axis could defeat one another, proposed an immediate peace. At last report, he was still awaiting a reply.

On the editorial page, "Of Tomorrow" remarks on the proposals and pitfalls suggested by Ely Culbertson, contract bridge expert, in his short 64-page tract, The World Federation Plan, calling for the creation of a worldwide organization post-war which would prevent the problems ensuing from World War I associated with the long armistice, the League of Nations, the concepts espoused by Clarence Streit in his 1939 Union Now, (proposing a world government with a constitution modeled on that of the United States), and the tendency of the nations to want to "win the war first". The editorial agrees with Mr. Culbertson’s self-evident stance.

The plan suggested a series of federations of countries, the U.S. and Latin America, Great Britain and its dominions, Latin Europe, Middle Europe, Northern Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, India, China, Japan, and Malaysia. Each would give up massive arms and armies, would instead maintain police forces armed only with machine guns. A world government, with the primary job of maintaining peace, and possessed of an army of two million men fairly apportioned from all the nations, would oversee the entire shop.

The primary difference superficially evident between Mr. Culbertson's plan and that of Mr. Streit was that the former only contemplated a world military force while the latter laid out an entire system of world government, with all its implications.

Exactly why it took a bridge expert to make the proposal offered by Mr. Culbertson is not entirely clear, but, not having read Mr. Culbertson's work, we accept Burke Davis’s endorsement of it.

The News was not the only publication showing interest. Time had reported on the project in April.

As with all such proposals, it would find its way into the mix of proposals which ultimately formed the United Nations.

"Soldier's Worry" finds a soldier worrying about the housewives on the home front, not able to feed their families adequately for the sacrifices of rationing to enable the soldiers to have plentiful supplies.

In light of recent hoarding activity reported in advance of rationing, the storming of butcher shops in major cities a month earlier, and reports of thriving black markets in meat since the advent of meat rationing, the piece suggests pointedly reciprocal concern.

Samuel Grafton finds the coal miners and their leader John L. Lewis to be within their rights to demand fair pay in time of war. He finds, however, their stubborn determination to avoid mediation by the War Labor Board to be beyond a recognition of the need for equal distribution of sacrifices, that the risk inherent in submitting to the Board in time of war was no more than that endured by everyone else in the country. By demanding the wage for the miners, Lewis invoked the war; by refusing mediation, Lewis denied the war. He could not have it both ways, as a dim-witted coquette.

The result had been that, in Congress, in the immediate throes of the coal strike, Conservatives had begun to act to propose strong legislation banishing strikes for the duration and seeking to punish labor leaders who violated it. With Mr. Lewis's Tuesday fifteen-day temporary back-to-work directive, pending further efforts at resolution of the impasse with the mine owners, Congressional action had as quickly been quelled to allow milder proposed legislation.

Mr. Grafton finds the two motivating forces, however, similar, at once standing diametrically opposed to traditional positions of each side: that force was being employed by Congress on Labor in support of the role of the War Labor Board, despite the Conservatives' inherent distrust of government oversight of free enterprise, while Mr. Lewis employed coercive measures to attempt to accomplish the ends of higher pay for his union members without recognition of the Board, the latter representative of the New Deal's efforts generally to regulate collective bargaining disputes between management and labor, usually in the past to the benefit of Labor. The whole of it, he offers, was to deny the war and the sacrifice incumbent on all for winning the war.

Raymond Clapper examines Sweden's tenuous, uneasy relations with Nazi Germany and finds it constrained by Germany’s blockade to receive trade from Germany, especially coal, steel, chemicals, and textile machinery, in exchange for Sweden's primary resource of which Germany needed, iron ore.

Gerald W. Johnson writes from The Baltimore Evening Sun of the keystone significance to Allied morale in the taking of Mateur by the American Second Army Corps under General Patton the previous week. This single operation, and the taking of Djebel Tahent on May 1 to enable it, had offset the debacle of Rommel's steady drive from Faid Pass through Kasserine Pass, pushing back the "green" American troops of General Lloyd Fredendall during the third week of February.

Now, those troops, as demonstrated, were no longer "green". And the other Allies, the British, the Russians, could breathe easier with the knowledge that the Americans were not only in the fight but effectively so. It was, therefore, says Mr. Johnson, as much a victory for the British and Russians at Mateur, as it was for the Americans. For it was the other allies whose morale was most bolstered by this singularly important taking of a rail and road junction which opened the way for the quick defeat of Axis forces defending Bizerte by General Bradley's infantry forces during the weekend.

"Comics at War" looks over the comics page of The News and suggests, based on letters from soldiers, that there was much to be learned vicariously of the actual war experience from perusal of these strips as occasional alternative to the non-fiction of the front page.

Notwithstanding the suggestion, we, for the most part, determine to skip the strips. They are much too confusing, complex, and illogical to follow, rendering us dizzy in the process. We set them out for you only when they happen to accompany something of more substance, such as the work by Jan Valtin, Out of the Night, appearing in The News in June and July, 1941, and They Were Expendable by W. L. White, abstracted during January, 1943. We make no apologies for the omission. You will, for the most part, have to get your 1937-45 comics elsewhere. Notwithstanding, sometimes, we admit, they do become quite astounding given subsequent events, albeit not at all "comic".