Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army had advanced to within a half mile of the autobahn northeast of Honnef and had cut the route from use by the enemy. The forces took four new towns and expanded the Remagen bridgehead to an area eleven miles in width by six miles in depth. German reports indicated heavy fighting within the village of Houvel, 3.5 miles northeast of Honnef.

The German report also stated that the newly deployed 15th American Army was engaged in the battle, and that between 100,000 and 140,000 American troops had crossed the Rhine.

Another enemy report stated that the Ninth Army, having crossed the Rhine near Duisburg, 55 miles north of Remagen, had been met with heavy German resistance and pushed back across the river with heavy losses.

Some 1,350 American bombers struck Berlin, including the freight yards at Oranienburg, seven miles to the north.

The day before, the RAF, as part of a concerted American-British 5,000 plane operation, had deployed for the first time an eleven-ton bomb, dropped on the Berlin-Ruhr railway viaduct at Bielefeld, 80 miles east of the Rhine, destroying six to eight of its spans.

During the previous night, the RAF struck Zweibruecken and Homburg, while Mosquitos hit Berlin.

Prime Minister Churchill, addressing for the first time since becoming Prime Minister in May, 1940, the full Conservative Party Conference, predicted victory in Europe before the end of the summer, possibly sooner, at which point, he promised, there would be a general election in the country, the first time for such an election since 1935.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson described the Remagen bridgehead as a foundation for a drive into inner Germany. He reported that 140,000 German prisoners had been taken since February 23. The German Army had issued orders in December to shoot its stragglers and deserters.

He announced that since D-Day, American Army ground force casualties on the Western Front totaled 425,007, of whom 70,414 were killed, 297,547 wounded, and 57,046 missing. Of those casualties, 34,468 had occurred in February, 4,145 of whom had been killed and 26,436 wounded, substantially lower than the 61,962 casualties suffered in January and the 74,768 of December.

Army casualties in all theaters now totaled 746,457 reported through March 7. The Navy had an additional 91,132 casualties. The total had increased by 15,957 since the previous week's report.

A report from Stockholm stated that a Swedish intermediary, acting on behalf of a low level Nazi official, had approached only the British legation with an offer of armistice, tendered on the basis that it should be accepted while Germany remained strong enough to resist the "Bolshevik menace". The British refused to entertain any such entreaty and viewed it as a propaganda ploy to try to create distrust and split the Allies asunder.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians were reported by the Germans to be making sporadic attacks from the mouth of the Oder to the area of Frankfurt, and to have plunged across the Oder River in force.

In Slovakia, the Second Ukrainian Army had captured Zvolen on the upper Hron River.

The Third White Russian Army continued to exert pressure on Koenigsberg, capital of East Prussia.

In the Philippines, the 24th Infantry Division had invaded Romblon and Simara Islands by night, wiping out the Japanese defenders, suffering light losses in so doing. The islands are situated in the central Philippines and their capture had strengthened American shipping between Manila and the United States.

On Mindanao, the 41st Infantry Division captured Masilay and Harlow, north of the Zamboanga airdromes, while patrols seized Tumaga, Recodo, and Mercedes, five miles to the east of Zamboanga.

On Luzon, the First Cavalry Division and the 43rd Division drove eastward from captured Antipolo, as the Sixth Division repulsed several counter-attacks on high ground to the north.

On Iwo Jima, fighting at the northern tip continued as the Japanese reportedly were strapping booby traps to dead Marines to slow the American advance, gaining about 400 yards the previous day.

At the south end of the island, a formal flag-raising ceremony took place to mark the passing of the Volcanic Island formally into American hands. As the new flag was raised, the flag on Mt. Suribachi, frozen for posterity at Arlington, was lowered.

An estimated 20,000 Japanese troops had been killed during the three-week invasion. There was no updated casualty count for the Marines, but it was said to be high. The dead had reached 2,050 by February 21.

The Japanese Government had decided to evacuate all civilians, except war workers, from five major cities, Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.

The front page does not make mention this year, as in the past, of the Academy Awards, which took place this date at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. "Going My Way" swept the awards, winning six of the major categories. In addition to Best Picture, Leo McCarey won for Best Director and Best Story, Bing Crosby for Best Actor, Barry Fitzgerald for Best Supporting Actor, and Frank Butler and Frank Cavett for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Ingrid Bergman, who would be in the sequel to "Going My Way", "Bells of St. Mary's", released in December, 1945, won Best Actress for her role in "Gaslight". Ethel Barrymore won Best Supporting Actress for "None But the Lonely Heart". "Wilson" won for Best Original Screenplay, written by Lamar Trotti.

This won Best Original Song.

"With the Marines at Tarawa" won Best Documentary, providing an account of the landing and heavy losses sustained by the American forces on the Gilbert island in late November, 1943.

On the editorial page, "Couple of Leaks" examines the statements to the Senate Banking Committee by Federal Reserve Board chairman Marriner Eccles, that wage and price controls during the war had restrained inflation, but that grave danger still lay ahead should those controls be loosened. Stock prices, he said, had risen 80 percent during the war and the value of farm land by 60 percent. Price controls had little or no effect, he warned, on speculative investment in land and securities.

"Simon Pure" examines the case of Larry Pearlstein, one of five Brooklyn College basketball players expelled for being involved in betting on games. Mr. Pearlstein, it turned out, did not even attend school at Brooklyn College. He just played basketball at the institution, walked around campus carrying books, but never attended classes.

But, allows the editorial, he at least was not being paid to attend the college.

The column had previously addressed the scandal on February 2.

Maybe he was searching for Elaine.

Ontologically speaking, of course, the facts call into question how he could have been expelled. But perhaps the editorial, somewhere in the darkened print, explores that issue and resolves it satisfactorily, or perhaps Mayor La Guardia did so in the rest of the Time story, which we cannot read but for subscribing to the magazine. In any event, the question is one you may examine and explore in dialectic, with precise extrapolative empiricism, as well as interpolative intuition in tow, on your own, as long as you are of the opinion that your reasoned and intuited, inferential conclusion may be wrong, especially as to the intuited parts, and, recognizing same, that you also might be somewhat correct, because of the inferences, provided the inferences flow in a logical sequence, built on each successive prior step in the inferential process. Then, you will understand, somewhat, by way of analogous imagery, what it is like to attend a university.

Well, let us hope that there are no such players on the court in the present NCAA tournament in 2012, that they all at least attend school at the institution for which they suit up. And, assuming it proves itself to be the case, we can at least say that progress has thus been made in that area since 1945.

Always remember that the last one leased is the forced one lost in the fourth.

And also recall the words of Coach Bobby Knight: A good offense-defense is better than losing the game.

"What Is Freedom?" discusses the effort to bring the American concept of freedom of press to the world. The American Society of Newspaper Editors was about the attempt in Moscow. But, points out the piece, the disparity between the American conception of free press and that in Soviet Russia was marked, and set the two systems poles apart.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo reading a letter he had written in opposition to the nomination of Aubrey Williams to be director of the Rural Electrification Administration, based on his being a "Negro-lover". Senator Bilbo explains to his colleagues that the term was used by Southerners to refer to anyone who sought to break the color line.

The editors present a compilation of figures on North Carolina's hospitals and medical care facilities by county, showing that the poverty of the black population and that of the western and coastal portions of the state were the factors primarily responsible for North Carolina's low-standing nationally in health care, as well as in other social and economic indices. The piece provides a table of the state's hundred counties, showing the relative standing of each in health care, as delineated by race.

Dorothy Thompson looks back at the career of Adolf Hitler since his days as a lance corporal in Flanders, when he was suddenly stricken with shell-shock and temporary blindness resulting from it, landing him in a hospital. By the time he recovered, the Armistice of 1918 was a fait accompli. Hitler never got over the surrender and emasculation of Germany.

Samuel Grafton finds again a strange dichotomy at work among the opponents of the Bretton Woods proposal for an International Monetary Fund, while at the same time appearing to favor an international organization which would take into account the interests of the smaller nations. These critics of Bretton Woods also criticized power politics which they perceived to be operating among the Big Three with respect to the smaller nations.

Drew Pearson examines the unfairness of recent Senate confirmation fights, as exemplified by the confirmation hearings on Aubrey Williams to become head of the Rural Electrification Administration. Scurrilous and untrue charges were leveled at him, even attacking his war record from World War I, though he had volunteered for the French Foreign Legion before the United States had entered the war. All four of his sons were fighting in this war.

Finally, Mr. Pearson relates of Congressman Earl Wilson of Indiana—best known for having urged a curfew for Government-employed females in Washington while complaining that they took too long on coffee breaks—having been reading a speech to an empty House, save for Speaker Sam Rayburn and Congressman Jerry Voorhis of California, who was sitting at a desk correcting remarks which he had earlier made. Speaker Rayburn summoned Mr. Voorhis to the Speaker's dais to suggest that he make his corrections in the cloakroom so that Mr. Wilson would be without any listeners at all. Mr. Voorhis complied and Mr. Wilson rattled on for another five or ten minutes with no one present save the Speaker. When he had finished his remarks, a member moved for adjournment.