Site Ed. Note: The front page and inside page report that German broadcasts stated that the grand Allied offensive on the Western Front had begun, as Allied troops had crossed the Roer River to move into the Cologne plain and the Ruhr Valley. There was no word yet from Supreme Allied Headquarters confirming the movement.

The attack had begun with an artillery barrage from the First and Ninth Armies along a 35-mile front from Roermond to Dueren. Bridgeheads had been established at three locations: Birkendorf, a suburb of Dueren, where the Ninth Army moved forward to within 20 miles of Cologne; at Gevenich, two miles east of the Roer and northeast of Linnich, 26 miles west of Cologne, and 16.5 miles from Muenchen Gladbach; and at Selsgersdorf, three miles southeast of Luelich and 22 miles southwest of Cologne.

The bridgeheads had been effected as the current on the flooded Roer River had slowed to three to five miles per hour permitting bridging of the river by Allied engineers.

To the north, the Canadian First Army gained up to 1.5 miles as they slowly occupied Calcar, moving toward the subsiding Rhine River, and Scottish troops advanced a half mile down the Goch-Weeze road.

The drive 55 miles to the north into Goch by the Canadian First Army had diverted some ten crack German divisions from the area of the Roer and so the Allies now faced considerably thinned opposition in that area.

Fog, which had blotted out parts of the battlefield, had cleared to permit good air cover for operations.

The Third Army advanced 2.5 miles to within 4.5 miles of Trier, while forcing a third crossing of the Saar, southwest of Saarburg. In the Prum sector, the two pincer columns of the Army moved to within eight miles of joinder, east of Luxembourg.

To the south, the Seventh Army moved to within 1.5 miles of Saarbruecken, winning two-thirds of Forbach.

Some 1,900 American planes, 1,250 heavy bombers, struck railyards across Germany, from Leipzig to Nuernberg, including Grailsheim, Kitzingen, Ausbach, Neumarket, and Treuchflingen, as bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force struck in the areas of Vienna, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, and Villach in Austria. American, British, and French tactical fighter bombers flew 3,500 sorties along the Western Front.

Some 30,000 planes had attacked the Reich during the prior three days.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians, having nearly encircled Guben, were said to be forming an arc 30 to 50 miles from Berlin for a final push to end the war. The forces had taken Schenkendorf, two miles south of Guben, while other forces reached the Niesse River eight miles north of the town. German reports stated that the Russians had crossed the Niesse. Other Russian units drove to within twelve miles of Cottbus on the Spree River, five miles north of Forst, the Spree being the last natural barrier in the south before Berlin.

Josef Stalin, in an address commemorating the 27th anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, reported that 1.15 million Germans had been killed or captured, of whom 350,000 were killed, during the course of the winter offensive, begun January 12. In addition, 3,000 planes and 4,500 tanks had been knocked out of enemy action.

Stalin assured that, in coordination with the Western Allies, the final knockout blow was imminent as the forces of both the First Ukrainian Army and the First White Russian Army had conjoined on a battle line along the Oder, ready to move on Berlin.

Swedish correspondent Jerje Granberg again reports on the situation he had observed recently in Berlin. He states that the American bombing raid of February 3 had been one of the worst of the war. He had sought shelter with thousands of others in an underground railway tunnel. The walls shook, the lights flickered and finally went black. Pocket torches proved useless amid the cloud of chalky dust which cascaded through the tunnel and made breathing difficult. A group of Russian girls began to sing mass as others sought to bid them quiet. A bomb crashed through the roof of a tunnel just a couple of hundred yards away and caused a rush of cold air to enter the shelter. People in the distance were yelling for doctors as cries for help abounded.

When the all-clear siren came, the occupants of the shelter emerged to find numerous dead above the tunnel. No one took any notice, however, of the bodies. Among those killed was Dr. Roland Freisler, president of the Nazi People's Court. No one either was sad at the news of the Nazi executioner's death.

More than 25,000 persons had been killed in the raid. Some 320 refugees from the East had been killed in a hit on one underground station alone.

For two days following the raid, bombs exploded, either from time-delayed fuses or those thought to be duds. Convicts serving life sentences had been assigned the deadly task of clearing undetonated bombs.

When Mr. Granberg finally made his way to Tempelhof Airfield, it had taken two hours rather than the usual fifteen minutes.

On Iwo Jima, the 28th Regiment of the Marines raised the fateful flag on the 568-foot summit of Mount Suribachi at the southern tip of the island, allowing the well-known frozen in frieze photograph to be taken, that unposed moment which would resonate through the country's morale and eventually be cast as a memorial to the war at Arlington National Cemetery.

The moment came at 10:35 a.m., 97 hours after the invasion which began Monday. Suribachi had provided cover for nests of machineguns and mortars to rain fire on the Americans as they invaded. Its removal eliminated also the threat to the rear of the Marines heading north to the area of the main concentration of enemy troops.

For 28 hours, the Marines had moved up the 45-degree volcanic cliffs against grenades and demolition charges, after the Fourth Marine Division had surrounded the base of the cone. Suribachi had been hit for a week prior to the invasion with naval guns and aerial bombardment. Yet, the stubborn defenders had to be rooted out with flame throwers, grenades, and rifles, hole by hole, and cave by cave.

Conditions on the beaches had considerably improved with the taking of Suribachi, and substantial quantities of supplies were now being offloaded.

The attack was said by Vice-Admiral John Hoover at first to have appeared doomed on Monday. Wrote a Marine correspondent, S/Sgt. David Dempsey, "Death is not a pretty sight, but it has taken possession of our beach."

The battle for Iwo had thus far resulted in 5,372 American casualties, including 644 killed and 560 missing as of 6:00 p.m., Wednesday. During the same period, 1,222 Japanese dead were counted. The toll made Iwo the costliest single period yet of the Pacific war, the previous having been the landing on Tarawa in the Gilberts in which Marine casualties slightly exceeded 3,000 in 72 hours in late November, 1943.

In Manila, the Americans had taken the Manila Hotel, and were also engaged in mopping-up operations on Capul Island to the south of Luzon.

A map on an inside page shows a proposed overland route for a railroad to Singapore from existing Japanese lines to Luichow. Only about 150 miles from that point to the border of Indo-China had not previously been used as a railroad.

To win a seat at the United Nations charter conference at San Francisco, set to begin April 25, Turkey finally voted to declare war on Germany and Japan. The deadline for so doing was March 1.

Also, the inside page reports of Representative Hook, a former wrestler, having apologized to the House for the fracas on the floor coincident with Washington's Birthday the day before. Representative Rankin, a light-weight, who had charged Mr. Hook and sought to strangle him for calling Mr. Rankin a "liar" in response to Mr. Rankin having suggested Mr. Hook to be mixed up with Communists, refused to apologize because, he said, he had not offended House rules by what he had stated, that he had done merely "what any gentleman would do" when so offended by such words, a veritable blizzard of vituperative blatherskite and voluble billingsgate, as uttered by Mr. Hook.

The House membership appeared ready to let the matter slide.

In Los Angeles, as reported on the other inside page, Woof, a Staffordshire bull terrier, had been temporarily spared the death penalty by a judge, originally imposed for the fact of Woof having choked to death a 21-month old infant girl playing with him at the child's home.

On the editorial page, "Washington's Words" remarks on the annual ritual of Congress, the reading on George Washington's Birthday of his Farewell Address which, among other things, warned against the country forming "permanent alliances".

"Off the Track" comments on Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo's questioning of Aubrey Williams, appointed to head the Rural Electrification Administration, regarding Mr. Williams's belief in the divinity of Christ. The Senator, remarks the piece, was in fact engaging in a witch-hunt having nothing to do with the fitness of Mr. Williams for the position to which the President had appointed him.

"Gas Warfare?" asks whether the Germans, with the chips down fatally, would, in desperation, turn to use of gas in the war. Swedish reports had stated that the Germans had warned the population to prepare for gas attacks by the Allies. So far, they had not engaged in any, for fear of retaliation in kind, as the Allies had warned they would.

"Sap Doesn't Rise" comments on a person having stated recently that spring was in the air as he could feel the sap rising. The sap doesn't rise or fall, insists the piece, and the saying thus had no literal meaning. Sap changes its viscosity, thin in summer and thick in winter. The delivery of food to the leaves accelerates in the summer after slowing in the winter. But that was the extent of the change in terms of the flow of sap. The editorial wished, therefore, to put to bed any further nonsensical notion as rising and falling of sap.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico inquiring of Senator Robert Taft of Ohio whether he thought Henry Wallace a Communist, as Senator Taft appeared to have stated during the recent confirmation hearings of Mr. Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce.

Drew Pearson reports of the observations of advisers at Yalta who told of what had transpired behind the scenes between the Big Three when debating the future of Poland. Stalin, for the most part, had maintained his equanimity during the conference until the question of Poland arose, at which point he began to argue vigorously for the Soviet-favored position, that Russia should acquire as a buffer zone to the West all of Poland to the Curzon Line, a line established, with the approval of Lord Curzon of Britain and Clemenceau of France, as being the most sensible boundary between Russia and Poland.

Senator Bridges, however, had not made the mistake, points out Mr. Pearson, of Congressman Marion Bennett of Missouri who had also criticized, in addition to Chips, the giving of the Purple Heart to Jane Froman, the singer who had been severely injured in a plane crash while touring to entertain the troops. Two others had died in the crash. Mr. Pearson suggests that Mr. Bennett owed Ms. Froman an apology.

Mr. Bennett's criticism had appeared in the Congressional Record excerpt of The News just three days earlier.

Marquis Childs, still in Paris, reports that the people of Europe had taken little note of the Yalta agreement, so well received in the United States. It was too remote from Europeans' daily existence amid ruin and near starvation to be relevant. It existed as only a goal and hope; but, opines Mr. Childs, the agreement of three men sitting around a table was not going to necessarily change the abject conditions of Europe.

Samuel Grafton discusses the lonely plight of Argentina, excluded from mention by the Yalta agreement. Five days later, the country had sent a note to Germany, threatening declaration of war.

Hal Boyle, in Germany, reports of tough-minded Private Frank Razzano of Brooklyn. When a 75-mm. shell struck his helmet and bounced off, he returned to work within a week with only head bruises. He had a hard egg.