Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that American Marines and Army infantry had on Sunday invaded Okinawa on the Ryukyu island's western shore near Katena. The point of invasion had caught the Japanese by surprise for the fact that for ten days the target of bombing had been the eastern shore. It was estimated that there were 60,000 to 100,000 Japanese defenders on Okinawa and it was believed that they would fight tenaciously to hold it, just 340 miles from the home islands of Japan.

That would prove to be understatement. The campaign for Okinawa would wind up taking until June 21 to complete and would cost 12,000 American lives, three times the number of the most costly campaign to date in the Pacific, that on Iwo Jima, completed in March. Casualties would run to an additional 39,000 wounded and 33,000 non-combat losses. The Japanese would suffer in excess of 95,000 killed and about 10,000 captured.

The 10th Army had moved rapidly across the southern portion of the island to take Katena and Yontan airbases during the first few hours of the operation, encountering only weak opposition.

The half million civilians remaining on the island, despite leaflets having been dropped by the Americans urging evacuation, had proved to be thus far no hindrance to the invasion. They did not offer to fight in opposition and did not appear to be committing suicide either.

On the Western Front, the First and Ninth Armies had trapped 110,000 German troops within the Ruhr, as the British Second Army drove 20 miles northeast of Muenster, to within 122 miles of Hamburg and 217 miles of Berlin, seeking to entrap another German Army group, which, if done, would deplete German strength in the West by two-thirds.

Trapped Germans in the Ruhr sought to break out of the trap between Paderborn and Siegen near Winterburg but were stopped by the First and Ninth Armies. Among the trapped German armies was the Fifth Panzer, the last of the tank armies in the West. The Ruhr contained five enemy tank, ten infantry, two parachute, and four other divisions, the latter comprised of Volkssturm and Volks Grenadiers. The last of the escape routes had been closed on Sunday by the Second and Third Divisions.

American and British troops entered Muenster, while the British cut the Dortmund-Ems Canal in at least two positions, at Reisenbeck and to the east.

The British Second Army captured Rheine and Enschede, and moved into the suburbs of Gronau.

The Third Army was driving hard across central Germany, into Kassel and Fulda, moving almost at will, within 155 miles of Berlin and 195 miles of Russian lines.

On the Eastern Front, The Russians had advanced to within 20 miles of Vienna. Other columns had moved to within 8.5 miles of Bratislava in Slovakia.

James Byrnes resigned as the Office of War Mobilization director. He would, in late June, be named Secretary of State by President Truman. President Roosevelt had convinced him in the fall to remain as War Mobilization director until the end of the European war. The fact that he resigned at this point was a further indicator of the optimism in Washington that V-E Day was near. Future Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson, having just been named to head the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, was named as the successor to former Justice Byrnes.

On the editorial page, "The Molehill" comments on the charter worked out between CIO, AFL, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce regarding labor-management relations, specifically on that part of it which declared that the rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining had to be maintained as sacrosanct against any legislative interference.

"D-Day for Peace" discusses the revelation by Secretary of State Edward Stettinius of a secret agreement at Yalta whereby the proposed Security Council vote would allow three votes to Russia, six to Great Britain, and three to the United States, a weighted system.

"In Perspective" comments on the statement recently by Admiral Ernest King, chief of staff of the Navy, that the war in the Pacific was going well, albeit not, strictly speaking, ahead of schedule for the fact that there never had been a schedule.

"OPA's Own Panics" criticizes the standard operating procedure followed by the Office of Price Administration in establishing changes in rationing point values, announcing them three or four days before they went into effect, thus creating stampedes at the market for hoarders to buy up at the older point values the goods to be changed.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Robert Rich of Pennsylvania, in debate over the Water Treaty with Mexico, still displeased with regard to the procedure whereby points of order were being waived, and asks his colleagues what they would tell their constituents after allowing the Subcommittee on Appropriations to write the legislation.

Drew Pearson comments on the consternation of the Army Air Forces on the plans after the war to maintain a large ground force but relatively small air corps, leaving vulnerable, if carried out, remote bases once again, as at the start of the war with Japan. The planners wanted an air corps of about 18,000 following the war, its size in 1936. At the same time, peacetime conscription was being pushed, Undersecretary of War Patterson being a major proponent of the idea.

Marquis Childs urges the home front to realize the many benefits America enjoyed as opposed to Europe, from which he had just returned from a two month visit. The talk at home urged release of price controls, but he counseled that it was time to encourage discipline rather than loosening of restraints. The soldiers abroad had endured discipline for three years and more.

Samuel Grafton comments that it would be a "strange twilight" between the winning of the war in Europe and the winning of the war in the Pacific. In the interim, the old isolationism would have a chance to creep back into American life, criticizing Great Britain and Russia, calling for an end to price controls, desiring a new automobile, resentful of sending food to Europe.

And, finally, former Vice-President Walter Mondale's question to Senator Gary Hart, addressed during the Democratic presidential debates of 1984, has been answered—or had already been answered in 1945. (For those, incidentally, too young to recall, Senator Hart's reference to "Mr. Chancellor" was not to President Reagan, but rather to moderator John Chancellor of NBC News.)

The vice-president of Armour & Company explains fully the answer to the question, "Where's the Meat?" even if the inquiry in 1984 was directed only to beef.

Among the quotes of the day: "These people will rejoice when the Americans are back again. They won't say it openly, but one can gather this attitude from their praise of the Americans, of whom they say that they always behave like gentlemen." –Unmailed letter on a German captured on the Western Front.

We congratulate the University of Kentucky basketball team, incidentally, for the school's eighth NCAA championship and a season well played. You were the best team in the country and you deserved to win it.

But, we have to tell you, your fans are a bunch of beer-swizzling rednecks from hell. And, for those stuck somewhere in an alcoholic haze, thinking perhaps that may be a compliment, it isn't. It was funny onscreen, you see, when John Belushi performed such antics as an actor in a role, but, in reality, it is rather boorish and sophomoric behavior. That is why it is funny in the context of a movie. But not in reality.

We have seen as much in reactions by fans of professional teams, who include all levels of society in large urban settings. San Francisco's redneck idiots who did as much in the wake of the 1982 Super Bowl victory come immediately to mind. But that is a large city, full of all types of people. We have to blame a university for allowing an atmosphere of alcohol and greater emphasis on basketball, and sometimes other sports, than on academics, for the kind of displays which went on in Lexington during the Final Four, even resulting in a man, not a student, being shot and having his foot amputated in the melee following the championship game.

To some degree, such celebrations go on across the nation's campuses after major sporting events, and school spirit is a good thing, as is, we suppose, some level of venting from the rigors of academic life, even if, for decades, too much emphasis has been placed on such antics at the expense of disciplined academics, the true spirit of college life and the true gift of college life, the time to spend thinking and considering, the spindle which will shape and influence one's thought patterns for the remainder of adult life. We do not expect on college campuses rioting over sport, any more than we expect shootings on college campuses, whether involving sport or otherwise.

There is something very wrong, and increasingly so, in our culture these days, something welling up from the most primitive instincts normally tamped down in mankind, tamped down the greater in those in college. It derives from frustration, we posit, from too much daily control of our lives generally, too many metal detectors and security lines and the like, too much police authority and presence, too little trust in each other. Perhaps, in college life, it is the result of too many strictures on curricula, a movement since the 1980's steadily away from allowing college students to set their own course to some degree in determining in the first two years which courses they can take outside their major, one of the great creative endeavors which used to be allowed in college, during the 1960's and 1970's, and which encouraged individual responsibility. We write from hearsay and intuition on the point, without any pretense of firsthand knowledge of the latter era.

Perhaps, in microcosm, that welling frustration is evident in these riots in Lexington, Kentucky, following victories in basketball, where the culture of basketball and sport long ago reached absurd levels of emphasis. Perhaps, one involved in such antics, if a student, ought to consider that college is for learning, not to have a big party and be fools, at the expense of the rights of others and property. If you were protesting the Iraq War a few years ago with that kind of resolve, at least there would have been some reason behind it. But this display is simply that of uncultured behavior, not counterpoint to the otherwise gentlemanly beau sabreur of the classroom during the week.

It is obviously unfair to blame all Kentucky fans and students for such a foolish demonstration. We understand that such celebrations draw many people from outside the community and the University, who have never set foot in a college classroom. But, nevertheless, the culture is one which is ultimately attractive of that sort of anti-scholar and must be held accountable, a culture which mindlessly considers winning or not a basketball game as the beginning and end of the world.

It is fun and only fun. It should be neither a business nor a Roman chariot race. Why don't we try to maintain that perspective? And, try to do so, whether you have ever attended your favorite college or not. If you adopt a college team as your own, then you have a responsibility to that team and institution to behave in celebration of victories by that team as the players and coaches, and the students and administration, urge you to behave, by both speech and example, both on and off the court or playing field, not to use it as an excuse to let loose your frustrations and inhibitions.

In this instance, creative judges and prosecutors might use those caught for the criminal conduct not so much as punitive examples, as long as restitution for property damage is made, but rather, as a condition of dismissal of criminal charges, providing opportunity to make, in written and verbal form, to be published in the campus newspaper, thorough explanation to their fellow students as to why they behaved as they did, and then doing so in a serious campus gathering, not to celebrate and behave foolishly, but rather to realize the national disgrace such behavior brought upon themselves as students, their fellow students, the community, the University, and the fine basketball team which represented it in NCAA play. The students' education might be thus put to work to reflect upon such behavior in a serious vein and offer some serious suggestions to the society to avoid, not only this sort of behavior, but the more serious kinds of behavior evident occasionally on college campuses, and before someone is killed in one of these "celebrations".

So, again, congratulations. We don't mean to dampen your enthusiasm, Kentucky, but if things hold true to form, they may vacate your season. After the performance of the fans, candidly, no one would care.

If you are going to participate in felonious conduct, try at least to emulate the more decorous forms of it, such as that displayed by your drunken brethren on other campuses, replete, in the instance cited, with some level of a collegian's inevitable symbolic content, we suppose, even if possibly escaping the conscious input of the celebrants at the moment of intersection of time and space.