Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions and the 77th and 96th Infantry Divisions of the Tenth Army were locked in a fierce battle with thousands of Japanese troops along the entirety of the four-mile front before Naha and Suri Fortress, the latter in the center of the line, involving a total of between 50,000 and 100,000 combined enemy and American soldiers. Both sides charged each other with bayonets. The 1st Division fought for the position in the west before Naha, while the 77th fought for the center of the line, gaining hilltops dominating Shuri.

During the fighting, American forces poured large quantities of gasoline down slopes into cave entrances and ignited it.

Lt. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the Tenth Army, stated that there would be few spectacular advances but many enemy killed and gradually the Japanese forces rolled back.

Admiral Nimitz announced that Navy losses during the previous week were 1,302, 6,882 for the entire Ryukyus Campaign since its inception March 26. The latter figure included 1,283 killed, 3,527 wounded, and 2,072 missing.

Thus far, 39,462 Japanese had been counted as killed on Okinawa, double the number killed on Iwo Jima.

On Mindanao, Japanese garrisons were reported by General MacArthur to be isolated from one another and cut off from outside aid. American troops of the 40th Division had been landed on Thursday at Macajalar Bay on the north coast, to the surprise of the Japanese garrison in Bukidnon Province. This garrison had been retreating northward to escape the 31st Division approaching from the south. The 40th cut off the retreat. Resistance continued within Davao while the 24th Division made gains against the enemy.

Guerilla forces had landed two weeks earlier at Butuan Bay, about 60 miles northeast of Macajalar. Further to the northeast, other guerilla units as well were harassing the enemy.

On the southern end of the island, the Japanese were caught in a pocket in the Sarangani area.

To the west, most enemy troops had been cleared from the Zamboanga Peninsula, onto which the first American landings had taken place. A second landing had occurred at Illana Bay. The new landing at Macajalar was the third.

On Tarakan at Borneo, the Australian and Dutch forces had been stopped by the enemy from taking Djocata oil field in the central portion of the island. The "Diggers", as the troops were called, moved two miles south, to within 1.5 miles of the southern tip of the island.

The Japanese, according to Tokyo radio, had a nickname for the B-29, "Bee Ko" or "Mr. Bee". Other nicknames included "Dried Sardine" for the P-38 and "the Bumblebee" for the Grumman fighters.

We note parenthetically that apparently what the Japanese meant to convey by "Bee Ko" was child bee, if properly translated strictly to Japanese, as "Mr. Bee", to the extent we can determine it, would have been Beesan. But, as with "semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower", we cannot say definitively what was intended, except that it was the B-29 which was delivering, as the headline read Wednesday on the eve of the record 400-plane raid on Japan, the "Kayo". So, it may not have been Japanese at all, but rather a vague reference to Bee 11:15, having something to do with Shangri-La.

In Rangoon, the Fifteenth Indian Corps liberated 39 American officers and enlisted men and 29 British officers from a Japanese prison camp. They had been left behind as being unfit to march when, on April 25, the Japanese evacuated. The Japanese took with them 460 prisoners, of whom 75 were Americans. It was believed that the British had already rescued most or all of these prisoners.

Treatment for the previous three years was described by some of those liberated as having been "subtle torture". New arrivals would be deprived of water until too weak to obey orders, at which point atrocities would begin. In three years, a thousand prisoners had died of dysentery and bari-bari.

The Japanese left a note behind for the prisoners, effectively apologizing for the shabby treatment.

Chiang Kai-shek held a tea party to celebrate V-E Day and stated that it would not be long before Japan would meet the same fate as Germany. Present were U. S. Ambassador Maj.-General Patrick Hurley and British Ambassador Sir Horace Seymour.

In Europe, Soviet Army forces continued to battle resisting German troops in Czechoslovakia, the Germans still trying to escape the clutches of the Russians and surrender instead to the Third Army.

Other Russian forces had effected joinder with the Third Army at three places. The First Ukrainian Army linked near Rokycany, nine miles east of Pilsen; the Second Ukrainian Army, occupying Gemuend and Zwetti in Austria, established two links, one in the latter area and the other below Prague northwest of Budejovice.

At Linz, on Monday, General Patton would meet with Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin. The Russian and American staffs would break bread together after a review of the troops.

Even inside Berlin, some Germans held out and fires were being set nightly. Hundreds of civilians were being dragged from flooded subway tunnels following the Nazis' last-ditch efforts to stop the Russian occupation of the city.

The Russians had captured 500,000 German prisoners on the former Eastern Front during the period Wednesday through Friday. The bag included 45 generals.

General Nicholaus Von Falkenhorst, a German commander in Norway, told his captors, the American First Army, that Germany had fought "the most insane war in history".

In Austria, the Nazi Party was banned and all persons who had belonged to it during the span of the Reich were required to register with the new provisional Government. Those who continued to belong to the Party or worked on its behalf would be subject to execution and loss of all property.

A series of four photographs shows the execution by firing squad by the U.S. Seventh Army of a 36th Volks Grenadier German spy who had infiltrated American lines dressed as a Pole in civilian clothes. Richard Jarczck had even volunteered to be the AMG governing representative at Bruckweiler. He admitted that his purpose had been to commit acts of sabotage, to kill American soldiers during the night, and obtain military information.

The dead give-away came when he was asked to change a lightbulb at Allied headquarters and he did not know how.

The American occupation zone for Germany was stated in the unofficial Army and Navy Journal. It would consist of Wurtemberg and Thuringia, with a supply corridor from Bremen. The French would control a large section of the Rhineland. The zones for Great Britain and Russia were not indicated.

CBS reported that Heinrich Himmler had been captured, having been held by Admiral Doenitz in the Flensburg area under house arrest. Doenitz was believed to have handed over Himmler to the British.

The Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary which had carried, during three years, over a million soldiers across the Atlantic to the European theater, were going still to be utilized to bring troops and wounded home.

At San Francisco, the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Charter Conference had reached a tentative agreement on how to resolve the impasse among its delegates with respect to enabling regional blocs to meet emergent concerns regarding aggression while preserving the general authority of the Security Council. The regional blocs could take immediate action under the proposal in emergent situations. The Security Council would retain authority to take control for the long term. The proposal sought to strike a balance between the concerns of the small nations over potential dilatory response by the Security Council and preservation of the power of the Security Council to resolve hostilities wherever they might erupt.

Rumors of a new meeting between President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and Premier Stalin had begun to circulate in the wake of the European victory. Cited as primary reason was the confusion regarding terms agreed at Yalta, as Stalin had reportedly written to Churchill complaining of broken pledges by the West. Neither 10 Downing nor the White House had any comment anent the rumors.

The Potsdam Conference between the Big Three would not convene until July 16. Clement Atlee would become Prime Minister during the conference, on July 26.

In France, Dr. Henry Petiot, accused of murdering 85 persons and cremating their bodies, had his defense, that he was part of the Resistance and that his victims were actually collaborators with the Nazis, undermined by police who stated that he had never been associated with the underground. Presumably, he was the same doctor being sought by Vichy a year earlier, before the liberation of France, unless there was an outbreak of psychotic doctors in France. Well, you would've been, too.

The first 2,500 combat veterans already stateside, who had seen service in both North Africa and Europe and had been recuperating from the fighting, were discharged from the service this date. All servicemen with both North African and European combat service were to see no further fighting in the Pacific. It was estimated that 216,000 soldiers stateside were eligible for release. Two million men would be released during the ensuing year. It would be another 48 days before a determination was made as to who would be discharged from the European theater.

The 30 combat operations which qualified a soldier participating in them for a single point each are listed on the page.

Study it closely, soldier. Gold Bricking is not on that list, nor the Gambling or Drinking Campaigns.

On the editorial page, "Traitor Band" discusses the sudden and unceremonious end, on April 30, of the shortwave radio network of Herr Doktor Goebbels, with its 30 powerful stations which had beamed propaganda worldwide for twelve years. A brief musical interlude had come on the air and then all went silent. The Russians were in town, knocking at the door.

Attention turned to the small band of Americans who had been aiding these broadcasts. Robert Best of Sumter, S.C., formerly a correspondent in America, had been the most verbal anti-Semitic American on the waves, shouting constantly of the imminence of "Christocracy".

Another was Jane Anderson, once an advocate stateside for Franco. Douglas Chandler of Baltimore was an avowed Roosevelt hater who tried to dissuade Americans from buying war bonds and instead to put their money in land as a hedge against inflation to come.

Otto Koischwitz, a former college professor in New York, Florence Drexel of Philadelphia, Fred Kaltenbach, an Iowa school teacher, Edward Delaney, a vaudeville comedian, and Donald Day, formerly a correspondent in the Baltic, all joined the list of traitors.

They had all helped to spread the Goebbels poison around the world. The editorial expressed the hope therefore that all would be arrested and brought home for quick trial.

Best, having been indicted for treason in absentia with the others named, in 1943, would be convicted in 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in prison in 1952. Douglas Chandler was convicted of treason in 1947 and sentenced to life.

President Kennedy, as part of Cold War diplomacy, commuted Mr. Chandler's sentence to time served in 1963 on condition that he leave the United States and never return. Mr. Chandler was released August 9, 1963 and went back to Germany.

Edward Delaney, the comedian, captured by the Russians in Prague, was turned over to U. S. authorities and in 1947, with too little evidence on which to proceed, the charges against him were dismissed. Likewise was the case against Jane Anderson, who had ceased her propaganda broadcasts shortly after Pearl Harbor. Florence Drexel also had the charges against her dismissed for want of evidence.

Kaltenbach was captured in Berlin by the Russians and was never heard from again. Koischwitz had died in Berlin the previous August, from the usual Nazi heart attack. He had reportedly changed his mind about Nazism, a fatal disease in Nazi Germany.

Poet Ezra Pound, not mentioned in the editorial, had been indicted for treason for his propaganda efforts in Italy during the war, having delivered pro-Fascist broadcasts several times over Rome radio. He had been taken into custody by Partisans on May 2 at Rapallo and turned over to U. S. authorities. He would be arraigned on the treason charges on November 25 and, based on psychiatric reports, committed to a psychiatric hospital. He would remain there until 1958, when released by the same Federal judge who had committed him, at the urging of his attorney, former Asssitant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, who had been urged to take the case by former Assistant Secretary of State, appointed by President Roosevlt in late 1945, also a poet, Archibald MacLeish.

"Priority and Pay" reports of the raising of textile production priority from number five to number three, ranking the industry with with planes, tanks, and bombs, demonstrating how badly cotton, wool, and rayon were needed. With the shift from Europe to the Pacific, the troops being transferred would require new uniforms and equipment.

"One from Four", a day after the column had called for the sacking of Edward Kennedy for releasing early the story of surrender, now finds it improper that Supreme Allied Headqaurters was continuing censorship, bordering on violation of freedom of the press, following the end of hostilities in Europe.

Whether, incidentally, the title for the piece was intended as subtle reference to the number central to the previous day's piece is to be left to the reader's imagination to determine.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Edward Moore of Oklahoma denouncing the principles of the Office of Price Administration as anti-Americam for its conception of control of prices—even if it was an emergent resort of the Government to prevent runaway inflation, potentially harmful to the war production effort, the great lesson gleaned during and in the aftermath of World War I having been the primer for stimulating the creation of OPA.

Drew Pearson discusses the possibility, now that the European war was over, that Russia might cooperate in the war against Japan. Russia had just renounced in late March its treaty of non-aggression with Japan, that it would not renew it. But, technically, the treaty did not expire for another year from that point.

As proof of their new-found friendship, however, Foreign Commissar Molotov had learned to say "OK" and "alrighty", while Senator Vandenberg had learned "Amerikansky Delegatsia", as well as "koroshaw", the latter meaning "good", to be distinguished from "horror-show". Both laughed at one another when they heard the other's use of their native language.

Finally, Mr. Pearson notes that the Russians had been most adroit in outwitting the Americans at the conference. Molotov had deliberately staged the public debate on admission of Argentina to the conference, knowing he would lose the vote, in order, Q.E.D., to show that the 21 American republics attending the conference would always vote together against the Soviet Union. It gave him ammunition, given the nature of the issue, the admission of a fascist dictatorship, for his continued advocacy for the unilateral veto power of each of the permanent Big Five members of the proposed Security Council. The smaller nations wanted to alter this rule.

Samuel Grafton observes that the San Francisco Conference should never have taken up the question of admission of Argentina as if it were being admitted to the world organization, especially in defiance of the Russian position. The objective of the conference was to set up the framework for a world organization to maintain peace, to provide the basis on which nations could vote to ratify the treaty or not. It was acting as if it were a body which already existed as a world organization.

Dick Young writes of the good idea of the City Manager to have locations of city sewer and other utility lines identified to builders when they obtained a building permit. Often, after construction had begun, it was discovered that the sewer line was above the level of the planned bathroom facilities of the house and thus unable to connect without an expensive pumping system.

He also reports of the City Hall janitor, Willie Brown, having washed the faces of the city's previous 35 mayors and shined their name plates on their portraits in preparation for the inauguration ceremonies, probably on a pair o' ponies.

Tom Jimison checks in with a traditional piece on Mother's Day, saying he was within sight of Haywood County wherein his mother's remains had been buried for the previous 30 years. He tells of the hardship borne by her in raising nine children while working alongside his father in the fields, hoeing corn and potatoes, milking the cows, cooking, washing, and the rest.