Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Cavalry and 37th Infantry Divisions on Luzon had captured the northern half of Manila, freeing as many as three thousand British and American civilian prisoners held captive in the Santo Tomas internment camp since May 1, 1942.

Among the released prisoners, mostly women and children, were 69 nurses—among whom, though not reported, was nurse "Peggy", Beulah Greenwalt, made famous in early 1943 by William L. White's They Were Expendable, followed in late 1945 by the movie starring John Wayne as Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert Kelly, named Rusty Ryan in the film, and Donna Reed as the nurse, also again renamed for the part, "Sandy". Robert Montgomery, an actual PT-boat skipper during the war, played the role of Lieutenant John Bulkeley, who commanded the group of PT-boats which took General MacArthur and his family and entourage to safety from Corregidor in mid-March, 1942.

The American forces had entered Manila on Saturday night and had penetrated as far as the Pasig River on Sunday. The First Cavalry had a special incentive because their former commander, Lt. General Jonathan Wainwright, had been in captivity since the fall of Corregidor in May, 1942. They reached the capital by advancing 144 miles in only 60 hours. There was no major resistance offered by the Japanese. The motorized First Cavalry had invaded the Admiralty Islands a year earlier and also had landed in the initial invasion of Leyte on October 20.

A British East Indies naval task force had struck blows against Sumatra's oil facilities, hitting the refinery at Palambang on January 25 and again on January 29.

German radio quoted Japanese press sources that the Japanese High Command was fearful that the Big Three Conference would result in a pact whereby Russia would agree to enter the war in the Pacific. Russia would finally declare war on Japan, but not until the very last days of the war six months hence.

The broadcast went on to warn that Stalin would demand the enslaved labor of four million Germans, maybe ten million, to repair war-damaged Russia, and that the Allies would thrust Germany into starvation and suffering for decades if not centuries.

On the Western Front, Seventh Army and French First Army Moroccan troops cut the Colmar pocket in two, trapping as many as three German Divisions, perhaps 10,000 men, in the Vosges Mountains. The action removed the threat to Strasbourg from the south.

On the central part of the front, the First Army continued its advance into Germany, moving through the last of the Siegfried Line fortifications, gaining three miles to move thirteen miles inside the Reich. German lines had been broken at a point 28 miles from Bonn and 16 miles from Euskirchen. The First had also taken a Roer River dam and high ground overlooking a second dam. Five dams in all controlled the water levels of the Roer.

The Third Army advanced a mile and a half to a point six miles inside Germany and 3.5 miles from Prum on the Siegfried Line.

The night before, several hundred RAF heavy bombers hit Bonn, Nordstern, Osterfeld, Hannover, and Dortmund in Western Germany. American bombers hit targets in Austria as well as Regensburg and in the area of Munich during this day.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians had reached the Oder River at Kienitz northwest of Kustrin, just 35 miles from Berlin. Other forces reached the river south of Frankfurt.

The forces of General Ivan Konev were said by the Germans to have advanced from a position south of Breslau in Silesia, threatening a breakthrough toward Dresden.

The Russians had captured a town 38 miles northeast of Berlin after advancing eighteen miles, outflanking Kustrin, and within 45 miles of Stettin.

In East Prussia, the remaining German resistance continued to crumble, with German-held territory now reduced to 800 square miles from the original holdings of 14,000 square miles.

The Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari to hear the case of 2,700 soldiers who claimed that their absentee ballots were not allowed in a wet-dry local option election in Johnson County, Kentucky, an election which wound up 2,714 to 1,484 in favor of the dry forces.

On this date and the previous day, the Yalta Conference between President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Premier Stalin, along with the Allied chiefs of staff and the Secretary of State and Foreign Ministers of the Big Three, got underway. It would last through the ensuing weekend.

It should be noted that Alger Hiss, as an assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, was present at most of the key meetings, starting on Tuesday. Mr. Hiss would become the object of great controversy in 1948, accused before the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a spy for the Soviets, allegedly obtaining and hiding microfilm of top secret Government documents in a pumpkin on a farm owned by informant Whittaker Chambers, to afford the locus at which the Soviet agents would pick up the microfilm.

Mr. Hiss would be convicted in 1950 of perjury for his testimony before the committee. The case became the cause celebre for Congressman Richard Nixon and the centerpiece of his anti-Communist credentials in his fateful and successful run for the Senate in 1950 against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Mr. Hiss would also be present at the San Francisco United Nations Charter conference in the spring of 1945.

His guilt or innocence of the charge of being a spy remains to this day quite unresolved. He maintained his innocence to his death in 1996.

Maybe the little squib at the base of the editorial column of the day derived from Mr. Chambers.

On the editorial page, "A Field Day" suggests that the Blaze incident and the train-holding incident involving sons Elliott and James Roosevelt had provided ample fodder over which the Roosevelt-haters in the country could become exercised. Adding to these incidents was the controversy over the appointment of Henry Wallace to Commerce, acting as a magnet for all of the pent-up frustrations among conservatives opposed to the New Deal.

"Frank—And George" comments on the convincing argument of University of North Carolina president Frank Porter Graham in support of Federal aid to education, citing the statistics that North Carolina had 28 percent of the nation's population, had to educate 32 percent of the nation's children, but received only eight percent of the national income with which to do it. He urged that if Federal aid could assist the states in building highways, then surely it could aid in educating 26 million children across the country.

"The Other Side" follows up on the column's previous editorial regarding its approbation of the ruling by the Atlanta regional War Labor Board that a Gastonia labor union would be denied the right to strike during contract negotiations, and if the strike continued, benefits conveyed by the existing contract, namely the closed-shop clause, could be revoked by management.

"Coming Storm" discusses John L. Lewis's apparent plan to call another coal strike on April 1 when the current contract expired. He had refused the suggestion of Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes to begin negotiations on wages on March 1 to afford enough time to reach an accord before expiration of the contract.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Democratic Senator Robert Wagner of New York urging the Congress to enable the eventual U.S. representative to the United Nations organization, now but a bit over four months from its founding Charter, to commit a pre-determined force of the United States to resist transgression anywhere on the globe. This action would not be tantamount to a declaration of war, the exclusive province of the Congress, but rather would be distinguishable as an action to enforce treaties and laws of the United States.

Drew Pearson looks at the division in the Democratic Party between the Northern liberals and the Southern conservatives and reactionaries, as exemplified by the fight over confirmation of Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce. Future Vice-President and Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky, while sometimes siding with the conservatives as on the tax bill a year earlier, this time was solidly backing Mr. Wallace. So was Senator Richard Russell of Georgia and Senator Overton of Louisiana, albeit in all three cases premised on the divorcement of the lending authority of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation from the Commerce Department.

Marquis Childs, still in London, discusses the European Advisory Commission which had been sitting for several months considering the terms of surrender of Germany and the occupation. Because the American decision-making process was divided between the Executive branch and the military, the process was slow and cumbersome, frustrating to the British who had approved a plan.

Samuel Grafton indicates that the fast advance by the Soviets on the Eastern Front was causing some Western observers palpitations over the prospect of having the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and not being able to get them out again.

A letter writer thanks News reporter Pete McKnight for his series of articles on the mentally infirm and retarded and the institutions of the State assigned to provide for them. The author discloses that she had a seven-year old son who was retarded and had been informed that, with a year or two in a proper school for the retarded, he might be able to attend public schools. She could not afford, however, the cost of any of these special schools which were exclusively private. She thus questions why the State, with plenty of money on hand, could not afford to provide such facilities.

A piece on the front page the previous week had informed that Mr. McKnight's series had been distributed to the Legislature for perusal in their considerations of the State's mental facilities.

Parenthetically, we note that Mr. McKnight was probably W. J. Cash's closest friend on The News and was the person to whom Mary Cash, Cash's widow, turned first in North Carolina in the wee hours of July 2, 1941 to impart from Mexico City the news of Cash's tragic death. The unpleasant chore thus fell to Mr. McKnight to inform immediately Cash's brother-in-law, Charles Elkins, of the news, who then, the next morning, began informing family members, starting with Cash's sister Bertie.

Another letter writer takes issue, as we did, with the letter writer of the previous Wednesday, who sought to ascribe to alcoholism mental retardation of the offspring of alcoholic parents. The present correspondent correctly asserts that there was no correlation, though, obviously, the mentally infirm might become alcoholics. Mental retardation, however, was not the result of John Barleycorn, she instructs.

Mental retardation, as we now understand better than was understood in 1945, is the product of genetic disorders and, sometimes, problem pregnancies. While it is obviously not good to drink or smoke while pregnant, there is no proven correlation between alcoholism per se and mental retardation.

Three more letters address the Blaze controversy, this time each one going on the attack of the February 1 "Ode to Blaze", which took to task the Roosevelts for having obtained preferential treatment generally for their family and pets.

The first letter finds the author of the Ode to have been unfair in his assessment of the doggie "stink". He informs that there was generally preference for cargo on cargo planes, as the plane in question was, and that servicemen could hitch a ride on such planes only if there was room. Normally, cargo bumped any passenger, regardless of its nature. So, it was actually not the case that Blaze had peremptorily bumped the three servicemen in Memphis. Rather, it would have been likewise had Blaze been Rags, an inanimate doggie-wog.

But, if Blaze had been Blaze Starr, then the whole matter would have been a different thing entirely and letter writers could have properly vented their outrage at Col. Roosevelt for seeking preference for his Estrella cargo. (The author does not cite that example, but we thought we would spice it up a little. After all, if NBC can grab an interview in the last few days with President Kennedy's intern from 1962, fifty years ago, just four months from what would have been the President's 95th birthday, and try to make news out of it, quite without regard to its veracity apparently, we can be expansive a little on Blaze and make him into Blaze Starr, to give the Republican conservatives of 1945 a break and make them seem not quite so insane after all. After all, 1945 was only seventeen years before 1962. And the reticent former intern chose to surface with her bookie-wookie on the subject, it seems, on or right around President Ronald Reagan's birthday. How quaint for such a quiet, private, reticent person to do. It's quite fair game to criticize and assess a President's record in office, but to do what this does, nearly 50 years after the brutal assassination of President Kennedy, is ineffable and truly what the Ode discussed in its most controversial lines. The late Theodore Sorensen a few years ago, in a television interview, succinctly described these sorts of reports by saying that he was with President Kennedy most of his waking hours when the President was not with his family and that he never saw any inkling of impropriety, that such claims were, in his estimate, "bullshit". We agree. If someone had stepped forward in 1914 and contended that she had an affair with Abraham Lincoln, they likely would have locked her up in an insane asylum.)

In any event, there was no issue, therefore, as no preference was provided Elliott Roosevelt's cargo over any other cargo to the exclusion of the three servicemen. They would have been excluded had the box which contained Blaze contained airplane rudders, for instance, or rivets or rubber tires, river rafts, what have you.

But hold. Was one bull mastiff and his carton really equal in volume to the three servicemen he bumped? Since the Congress was investigating the matter, they hopefully obtained some measurements of the bull mastiff and his carton versus those of the three servicemen to determine whether in fact the bump was just or just, instead, a grind.

A 47-year old disabled veteran of the current war, who had two sons fighting in it, was considerably exercised also over "Ode to Blaze", taking the author to task and asking whether he had ever lived in any foxholes. He was tired of the dirty cracks about President Roosevelt.

A third letter on "Ode to Blaze", from a perennial letter writer to The News, sets forth a reply in verse, suggesting that the problem had been deliberately created by someone seeking to embarrass the President through his son. She believed that the incident would encourage Hitler.

But how she got these two lines to rhyme, we are uncertain:

Mr. Hitler will approve;
Thinking it quite in the grove.

While we tend to agree most of the time with this letter writer, her spelling was occasionally a little errant, even if on the previous occasion, after being publicly corrected by other letter writers, she admitted her erroneous orthography as to "Mien Kampf".

Anyway, it's all a pretty grovy haze, the whole shady stir on this bull mastiff Blaze.

Whether, incidentally, instead of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre having been the inspirations for "Fat Man" and "Little Boy", it might have been Blaze and Fala, we may never know.