Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Third Army had captured Kassel and Suhl and moved into the Thuringian plain in the heart of Germany to within 140 miles of Berlin and 58 miles of Czechoslovakia. The Fourth Armored Division had cleared Gotha, 22 miles north of Suhl.

German reports stated that the Third Army had reached Arnstadt, 110 miles from Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, site of the Skoda munitions works, still in German hands, though bombed several times.

The Fifth Armored Division of the Ninth Army, capturing 13,000 German prisoners the previous day, had reached the Weser River, traveling quickly along the autobahn, threatening Hannover, moving to within 179 miles of Berlin. The 75th Division crossed the Dortmund-Ems Canal and reached Waltrop in the area of Muenster. The Second Armored Division moved in six places through the Tuetobergerwald, a dense forest, also heading toward the Weser.

The First Army, along with the Ninth, had diminished the Ruhr pocket to a perimeter of less than 190 miles, trapping some 150,000 German troops under the command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.

The British Second Army was moving quickly toward the North Sea, reaching the Ems, 45 miles northwest of Osnabrueck, while the Canadians menaced Arnhem, moved to within twenty miles of the Zuider Zee, threatening to capture the last of the "rocket coast" held by the Germans.

To the south, the Fourth Division and Twelfth Armored Division of the Seventh Army, flanking the Black Forest, were racing each other to Nuernberg, having reached a position within 34 miles of the birthplace of the Nazi Party. The Tenth Armored and 100th Divisions fought inside Heilbronn on the Neckar River. Other units were bearing down on Heilbronn from below captured Odheim, five miles to the north. The 42nd Division fought into the heart of Wuerzburg and troops were moving across the Main River at three points, in Wuerzburg, nine miles to the southeast, and two miles to the north.

The French First Army captured Karlsruhe, six miles east of the Rhine.

Across the front, Kassel, Karlsruhe, Muenster, Osnabrueck, Fulda, Aschaffenburg, Siegen, and Bruchsal were captured. The fall of Wuerzburg, Gotha, Hamm, Wuerzbach, Engelo, and Zutphen were imminent.

On the 300th day since D-Day, General Eisenhower declared, "The end is not far off."

Some 1,400 American heavy bombers, with an undisclosed number of escorts, hit the U-boat pens at Kiel and Hamburg, as well as several airfields in northern Germany.

A large force of British bombers hit the Western Front at Nordhausen, 35 miles east of Kassel and the Third Army's position, clearing the path to Berlin for General Patton.

The previous night, RAF Mosquitos again attacked Berlin, as well as Plauen.

On the Eastern Front, the Second Ukrainian Army, along with elements of the Third, following a twenty-mile advance in two days, had captured Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, 24 miles east of Vienna.

The Third Ukrainian Army had advanced to within six miles of Vienna, to Velm, capturing Wiener Neustadt, Neunkirchen, and Gloggnitz, 187 miles east of Berchtesgaden—where Hitler and the high Nazis were said now to be holding camp. The action had severed the main Vienna-Venice Railroad and a trans-Alpine highway connecting the arsenals of Austria and Czechoslovakia with Northern Italy.

A series of photographs on the front page vividly demonstrates the level of animosity held by former Russian captive laborers toward Nazis. Shown is a laborer, by fortuity, running into his old boss in Allied-captured Bonn, and letting the old boss know that the new boss had arrived, not the same as the old boss.

On Okinawa, American drives continued to the south toward Naha, the capital, encountering the first major Japanese resistance since the landing on Sunday. The 77th Infantry Division was within six miles of the city, moving along the west coast. Advances had thus far been swift and easy, permitting capture of forty square miles of territory. The Japanese defense line appeared to run north of Machinato airstrip, five miles north of Naha, to Tombaru airstrip, six miles east of Naha.

General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the Tenth Army, which included Marine units, announced that the landing operations had been successfully completed without opposition. General Roy Geiger, commander of the Marine Third Amphibious Corps, stated to a reporter that the operation had developed so rapidly that plans had to be changed, and that it appeared the Americans were "out of the woods".

Unfortunately, the forces were yet to enter the woods on what would become the bloodiest of Pacific islands. In so forming a strategic trap of the Americans by letting them land without the Japanese suffering loss of any of the 100,000 defenders of the island, the Japanese in fact slit their own throats. For had Okinawa been taken with the same ease with which operations began, inevitably, the American forces would have been emboldened soon to undertake invasion of the home islands, a bloody task to be sure. Had that occurred in, say, early June, it would have obviously been problematic, though not impossible, to deploy the atomic bombs against Japan, the first test of which at the Trinity Site in New Mexico would not occur prior to July 16. Thus, had the timetable not been delayed until latter June in taking Okinawa, only speculation may determine how the course of the Pacific war might otherwise have run.

It was reported that Navy Task Force 58 was moving southward to support the British Royal Navy in its attacks on the Sakashima Islands, a good distance to the southwest of Okinawa, and from which the Japanese appeared to be operating their air attacks against Okinawa.

Some 300 B-29's again hit Japan, striking the Tachikawa aircraft works 20 miles west of Tokyo, the Shizuoka aircraft plant, 85 miles south of the capital, and the Kolzumi plant, 20 miles north of Tokyo. One Superfortress was missing. Little opposition to the raid had been encountered.

By capturing on Monday, in the face of little resistance, the Japanese naval base of Tawitawi on the southern tip of the Sulu Archipelago, the American Eighth Army moved to within 30 miles of Japanese-held Borneo, the Dutch East Indies strategic petroleum and rubber reserve, one of the key elements of the original Japanese plan for domination of the Pacific rim under the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere. The 41st Division, aided by guerillas, also captured neighboring Sanga-Sanga and Bogao Islands, likewise without opposition.

The Navy had reduced its May draft call-up by half, to about 16,000, from the originally slated number. June was expected to see further reductions as the Navy anticipated reaching its peak strength of 3.6 million men in service by July 1. Following that time, only replacements would need be drafted.

The Senate immediately confirmed unanimously Fred Vinson to succeed James Byrnes as War Mobilization director. About 14 months hence, Judge Vinson would become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

A report from London on Bernard Baruch explains his mission, in his own words, as holding "the big stick over the big boys to make damn sure they're not going to foul up the peace." He was an advocate of de-industrialization of Germany so that it could not again make war, and a proponent of maintaining in check the slave-labor countries so that they could not flood the market with cheap products—such as those transistor radios of the latter 50's, labeled "Made in Japan". And the little cars.

Mr. Baruch predicted that there would be so much post-war prosperity in America that none of the returning servicemen would need worry about jobs.

Toward the end of the interview, the Prime Minister called on the telephone. Mr. Baruch addressed him simply as "Winston".

The report originated from the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, based on an interview conducted with Mr. Baruch by Victor Lasky—subsequently a conservative columnist and early critic of President Kennedy, publishing in 1963, before the assassination, a cheap-shot book questioning the President's war record and specifically the claim of his hero status in relation to the PT-109, a natural outgrowth of the author's pro-Nixon stance developed in 1950 when he co-authored a book with Ralph de Toledano, which accused Alger Hiss, who had been in the State Department delegation at Yalta and would be likewise at San Francisco, of treason for providing microfilm containing secrets to the Russians out of the Pumpkin on Mr. Chambers's Animal Farm, a book finding Nixon confidante and Animal Farm owner Whittaker Chambers completely trustworthy.

In 1977, incidentally, Mr. Lasky, still not done with cheap shots against the Kennedys and not lost of his labor in his love affair with President Nixon, sought to minimize the Watergate scandal as, more or less, business as usual in Washington, for which Mr. Nixon happened to get caught, the President's own favorite line of defense, one scarcely, however, available when pinned against reality.

Whatever one may conclude about other misdeeds and abuses of government prior to Watergate, no Administration had broken into the opposing political party's headquarters, itself, the tip of the iceberg in the catalogue of Nixon Administration sins. In the case of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Mitchell, however, we posit that they were desperate to find out what former Kennedy aide Larry O'Brien had on President Nixon which J. Edgar Hoover, a month and a half in his grave at the time of the break-in, could no longer hold in check by threat of release to the press of his own "secret files"—which, if you believe the assumptions about their contents, were hardly very much secret.

Mr. Lasky also co-authored a book, published in 1970, along with song and dance Senator George Murphy of California, a self-serving testament to the former actor, turned politician, the Republican forerunner out of Hollywood to Ronald Reagan, who had defeated former Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger for the Senate seat in 1964.

On the editorial page, "Let 'Em Go" advocates the abandonment of the chase policy of liquor violators still in effect in the City and County police departments. Two County officers had recently given chase to a car suspected of transporting liquor on York Road. Eventually another joined the chase and, after the car moved into the city limits, a City car forced the liquor car to the curb. They found nine cases of liquor. The driver was charged with violation of liquor laws and two counts of hit-and-run, having struck a parked car and one moving vehicle, then was released on $300 bond.

Our question, however, is simply whether the liquor car was a Ford or Chevy, or maybe a Dodge or Plymouth.

"The New Broom" comments on Governor Gregg Cherry's appointment of the new Board of Control for the State mental hospitals. The new board was representative of the people, its members coming from several different walks of life, the Governor reducing the number of doctors from six to two, and leaving only five of the previous Board in place.

"The Beasts Again" writes of the legend of the werewolf having been especially attractive to Germany prior to the origins of the legend of Siegfried, as Hun tribes roamed Northern Europe and witches were found amid the elms and oaks of the dark forests.

That in twenty-six days, Hitler and Goebbels would choose Walpurgis Night, the witches' sabbath, as presented in Goethe's Faust, on which to commit suicide is not surprising.

That this piece, choosing this theme, would happen to appear twenty-six days before that climactic event of World War II is fairly remarkable.

We have asked it before, in conjunction with the editorials which W. J. Cash wrote for The News, and we ask it again: Did the Nazis, known to have agents still at work within the country, albeit in much lower profile than in earlier days, read The Charlotte News? And precisely because, initially, Cash had been so adept at predicting what they would do.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Arthur Miller of Nebraska—not the playwright who wrote The Crucible—suggesting that the President immediately remove Chester Bowles as head of OPA for his failure in price controls, causing reductions in the available supplies of food and other items desired by the citizenry. Mr. Miller accused Mr. Bowles, a former advertising man, of doing a good sales job to the country but following too much the advice of experts and issuing too many unnecessary regulations and controls on prices, confusing the flow of goods and the producers of them.

Drew Pearson provides the basis for credits which the Army would tabulate to determine for each individual soldier the order of release from the Army at war's end in Europe. Credits would be provided for length of overseas service, with special credit for combat duty being awarded only to those who had been decorated, down to a Purple Heart or Bronze Service Stars for battle participation. Other credit would be provided for dependents under eighteen, up to three children. No provision for credit was given for the age of the soldier.

Samuel Grafton finds fool's gold in the belated declaration of war on the Axis by Argentina, as the Allied Armies were moving through Europe with the speed that only General Patton could properly describe. At the same time Argentina's Farrell-Peron Government had declared war on the Axis, it maintained in prison political prisoners representative of all the democratic parties which had existed in the country, imprisoning therefore the very types of persons the Government now contended to want to liberate in Europe.

Marquis Childs addresses the petty differences emerging over greater meat rationing within the United States than in Canada just on the eve of the San Francisco United Nations charter conference, set to begin April 25. Such differences threatened to upset the accord worked out at Dumbarton Oaks and refined at Yalta. It was also ignoring the greater problem of having to feed 52 million people in Europe. To provide those Europeans with a 25 percent increase in their diet would mean the difference between well-being and near starvation. It would require only a ten percent reduction in the food intake of Americans for the ensuing year to accomplish the feat. He cautions that, without it, the resulting hunger in Europe could lead to new revolutions and new wars. A little food sacrificed for a short time at home might save a future generation from having to fight another war in Europe.

A piece by the editors discusses the provision to which agreement was made at Yalta, whereby the British Empire would receive six votes in the Security Council of the proposed United Nations organization, while the United States and Russia would each receive only three. (The piece does not mention the change of policy announced by the President the previous day, abandoning the three-vote condition and settling for the United States having only a single vote, apparently to assure to the smaller nations to be gathered at the San Francisco Conference U. S. commitment to parity among nations, to make the chances of successful agreement at San Francisco the greater.)

One of the quotes of the day: "As this war is ending, we can see the shape of the next one. We know now that rockets can be fired great distances with tremendous effect, and that similar weapons will create a robot war on civilians..." –Ellen Wilkinson, British Labour Member of Parliament.