Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Third Army closed, with two columns moving in an arc, to within five miles of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim, fighting inside Mainz, wiping out most of the German First and Seventh Armies, consisting of 100,000 men. The Third Army, alone, had captured 30,000 Germans during the previous 48 hours, while the Seventh Army had produced traps which might ensnare another 45,000.

The Third Army took Kaiserlautern, Worms, Voelkingen, Zweibruecken, Homberg, and St. Ingbert, as the German hold on the west bank of the upper Rhine dwindled to 35 miles between Karlsruhe and Ludwigshafen. It appeared doubtful that the Valhalla Line east of the Rhine, already being shelled by Third Army artillery, could be defended by the remaining remnants of the fleeing armies.

The 78th Division of the First Army drove north to Bonn in the Rhine bridgehead, taking more than seven miles of the southern bank of the Sieg River, extending from the Rhine to Niederpleis.

Some 2,000 Allied heavy bombers and 5,000 fighters hit Germany from both England and Italy, the latter striking Austria. Some 2,000 American bombers and fighters in the morning hit nine airfields in northwest Germany and a tank factory at Plauen. RAF planes struck Bremen. In the afternoon, another wave of American planes struck the Ruhr in clear weather. The Fifteenth Air Force hit the jet-plane facility at Neuburg, 50 miles north of Munich, and oil refineries in the vicinity of Vienna.

A controversial attack by 30 RAF planes took place on Copenhagen, hitting the Gestapo headquarters at Shell House. The Danish press reported that the Germans had been holding 26 Danes as hostages since the RAF had destroyed Gestapo headquarters at Aarhus on October 31, 1944.

While the raid had been requested for several months by the Danish underground, its execution, carefully planned in advance, had gone awry when a Mosquito flying at low level for accuracy, had its wing strike a lamppost causing it to crash into the Jeanne d'Arc School. Other RAF planes, seeing the flames, thought it to be the main target and erroneously dropped their bombs on the school, killing 83 schoolchildren and 18 adults.

The raid on Shell House, however, was successful, destroying the headquarters and killing 55 of the Gestapo and another 47 Gestapo employees. Eight hostages were killed but 18 were freed. Six RAF planes were lost in the raid.

The raid had departed from Fersfield in England, the same airfield from which Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. had departed in his ill-fated mission the previous August 12.

On the Eastern Front, the First White Russian Army, in possession of nearly the entire east bank of the Oder from the Baltic to its confluence with the Niesse, brought siege artillery to the edge of Stettin. Additional troops of the First Ukrainian Army were being moved into the Niesse River line southeast of Berlin.

The capture of Altdamm, suburb of Stettin, announced the previous day, had revealed dead German deserters hanging from makeshift gallows. They bore signs in German, saying, "Hanged because I fought badly." Some executed civilians had signs which read, "I was hanged because I evacuated." The same scene had been found in Kolberg the previous week.

It was announced the previous day by Josef Stalin that General Ivan Cherniakhovsky, commander of the Third White Russian Army, had been killed and been replaced by Marshal Alexander Vasilevsy.

A thousand American carrier-borne planes of Task Force 58 of the U.S. Fifth Fleet had attacked on Monday a part of the Japanese Fleet in the Inland Sea, destroying at least seventeen warships, including a 45,000-ton superbattleship of the Yamato class and eight aircraft carriers. The American planes destroyed 475 enemy planes and damaged another hundred. No ship of the American armada was lost; one suffered serious damage and others, minor damage. American air losses were described as light.

The 45,000-ton Musashi had been sunk the previous October in Leyte Gulf, and the sister ship, Yamato, seriously damaged and forced to withdraw.

On Panay, the Americans entered Iloilo, the capital, where heavy fires were burning, capturing the airdrome and the bridge over the Iloilo River, as another column of the 40th Division drove 25 miles north from the invasion beachhead.

On Luzon, Filipino guerillas took the northern port of San Fernando, northern terminus of the Manila railroad. Troops of the 33rd Division captured Bauang after driving ten miles up the Lingayen Gulf coast, six miles south of San Fernando. The Sixth and 43rd Divisions moved deeper into the secondary enemy lines of the Sierra Madre, east of Manila. In Southern Luzon, the 11th Airborne Division took San Jose Hill and the western slopes of Mt. Macolod, southeast of Lake Taal.

On Mindanao, the 41st Division repulsed an enemy counter-attack near San Roque and occupied Isabela. Basilan Island, just south of Mindanao, also was fully secured following Friday's invasion.

In Washington, the National Labor-Management Committee of the War Manpower Commission, chaired by Paul McNutt, issued a statement with which Mr. McNutt did not join, stating that the troubled New Bedford, Mass., plan for transference of labor, which had been defied, had been a "guinea pig" to the "cat's paw" of WMC to provide ground for national service legislation.

Cranberry sauce.

The North Carolina Legislature adjourned its session after appropriating a record 232 million dollars while maintaining a balanced budget. The report is confusing as to whether the Senate ultimately agreed to withdraw its action in splitting a House-passed appropriation for one million dollars for indigent health care at a dollar per day. The Senate had added an amendment to split the appropriation such that a half million would go to indigent care and a half million to construction of rural hospitals. The report states that the Senate did withdraw the amendment, but also states that it refused to reconsider its refusal to withdraw it.

The South Carolina Legislature recommended through committee the adoption of a law setting up an Alcohol Control Board to rule with a "mailed fist" control of liquor in the state.

We hope that it was done other than as knights-errant fighting windmills.

On the editorial page, "It's Old Stuff" remarks on the President's declaration of May 20 to be "I Am an American Day", celebrating all new American citizens, and the happenstance that it coincided with the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, putatively signed May 20, 1775--though its bona fide origins remain somewhat doubtful.

"No Haven Here" tells of seven Charlotte teenagers between 15 and 17 who had been for some time getting away with major delinquency, prime among the acts having been joy-riding, often ending in an accident. In one case, they had committed highway robbery.

But, as to the latter case, Solicitor John Carpenter, it opines, should have alerted the Judge that the services were not taking delinquents with serious prior records of criminal misconduct. To prove the case, the News contacted the Navy Recruiting Station and was informed that the Navy and Marines did not want such personnel. They could not get into the services unless the prior record was only misdemeanor conduct.

The editorial finds the policy only sensible.

"The New Joshua" finds Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York challenging the midnight curfew ordered by the Office of War Mobilization against nightclubs and entertainment facilities, to save fuel and rubber and overloading of public transit.

"The Dolphin Boys" gives praise to the men of submarine duty, despite their unsung status in the war and lack of awards, relative to the other services, especially the Air Forces, to sport on their breasts.

Submarines, it points out, had sunk 1,072 enemy vessels, 117 of which were warships, warships designed to hunt down and destroy submarines. In the Pacific, they operated alone and at long distances from help, ventured into Japanese home waters for both reconnaissance and destruction of shipping, often did not return and were presumed lost. It was hazardous duty and invaluable duty to be praised by the home front.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Noah Mason of Illinois explaining to the House that neither President Roosevelt, nor Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, nor Senator James Murray of Montana, each champions of the concept of full employment, had been the creators of this ideal. It had come from Sir William Beveridge of Great Britain in his tract published two years earlier, "Full Employment in a Free Society". Mr. Mason warns that Mr. Wallace had intended to use the 40-billion dollar resources of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to accomplish this Utopian end.

Drew Pearson reports on the trip to Germany of former OPA administrator Leon Henderson, made at the behest of the White House to report back on economic conditions and the prospect for the economic structure of Germany following the war. He had criticized in his report to the President the negligence of the Army, the State Department, and the Anglo-American-Russian Commission in London for not having put forth more concrete plans for the transition and occupation of Germany. U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, John Winant, had not been doing anything, reported Mr. Henderson, to contribute to the economic planning for Germany.

Marquis Childs, continuing to report from Cologne, tells more of the grim conditions within the Gestapo-controlled prison. Typhus had begun to spread prior to the liberation. DDT powder was employed by the Americans, on the belief that it was harmless to humans but deadly to lice, to spray the prisoners.

Samuel Grafton tells of Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan planning to attend the San Francisco United Nations Charter Conference beginning April 25, saying that he would carry with him a guiding light from Justice.

The editors compile a digest of facts on the first free elections held in liberated Europe, those being in Finland the previous week. The polls had closed Sunday and the full returns had been disclosed on Tuesday, showing, not surprisingly, given the country's pre-Nazi history, that the Social Democrats had come in first and the Communistic Democrats, second. The Russians militarily occupied Finland at the time but had kept hands off the electoral process. Nevertheless, there was some implicit influence as the Soviets had forewarned that the results would show whether the Finns had broken free of Nazi influence.