Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that on Okinawa, the First Marine Division had advanced 800 yards through heavily defended ravines and draws against incessant mortar fire to the crest of the last ridge before Shuri fortress. Tanks led the assault with flame-throwers until the terrain prevented them from advancing further, after which the infantrymen began engaging in hand-to-hand combat, cave by cave.

The 77th Infantry Division advanced to within 900 yards of Shuri from the northeast, repelling three counter-attacks. Elements of the 96th Division moved to within 1,600 yards of Shuri. The Sixth Marines advanced eastward toward the fortress city from the suburbs of Naha.

The town of Shuri below the hilltop was a pile of rubble. Maj. General John Hodge informed that the enemy firepower appeared to be slackening as a thousand fewer artillery and mortar rounds were being projected into their positions each night.

Lt. General Simon Bolivar Buckner told the Tenth Army via radio that the enemy attempts to bring up supplies to their trapped troops had met with "disastrous failure".

Admiral Nimitz reported that enemy dead on Okinawa now totaled 48,103 through the previous Thursday.

Combined American casualties in the campaign had been 30,526, with 4,332 soldiers and Marines killed and missing, 18,256 wounded. Of the Navy, 3,978 had been killed, including the pre-invasion carrier attacks on the Ryukyus and Japan. An additional 3,958 had been wounded.

Chinese troops had launched a sudden offensive in Kwangsi Province, recapturing Hochih on the Kawngsi-Kweichow railroad, 95 miles west of Liuchow. On the east China coast, other Chinese troops had occupied Mamoi, reaching the vicinity of Lienkong, twenty miles north of Foochow. Diongloh on the Min River, fifteen miles southeast of Foochow, was taken on Saturday. It appeared the Japanese were clearing out of coastal positions in China from Hangchow Bay to Hong Kong, a distance of 650 miles.

An inside page reports that President Truman, in an unprecedented setting, before a joint session of Congress, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to the 100th infantryman in United States history to receive it, T/Sgt. Jake W. Lindsey of Lucedale, Miss. Sgt. Lindsey had, while wounded in the knee, engaged eight Germans in hand-to-hand combat, killed three, captured three, knocking out two machineguns and capturing two others.

Between 12:40 p.m. and 1:00, when the House ceremonies were to begin for the award ceremony, the Senate was reported to be a quiet chamber, with no one wishing to speak. Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire suggested that the unusual moment of Senatorial quietude be recorded for posterity.

A poignant picture of a Marine crying for his dead buddy on Okinawa appears also on the page.

A report states that the Southern Democrats had successfully blocked in the House Rules Committee the bill to make permanent the Fair Labor Practices Committee. Efforts were underway to circumvent the action by petition and get the bill to the House floor for a vote, but the necessary 265 signatures were wanting, only 100 having been accumulated in three weeks of effort by House Rules Committee Chair Mary Norton of New Jersey.

Meanwhile, Southern Senators were threatening to filibuster the bill in that chamber.

A report from Supreme Allied Headquarters indicated that fear of assassination of General Eisenhower during December at the height of the Battle of the Bulge had run so high that a double had been employed, Lt. Col. Baldwin B. Smith of Chicago. The resemblance was said to be striking and no one could tell that Col. Smith was not General Eisenhower when the former entered the General's four-star marked car. Col. Smith had volunteered for the duty. The Germans had made threats of killing General Eisenhower, but eventually they were dismissed as a hoax to bolster German morale.

Hitler's personal photographer, captured by the Seventh Army in Rosenheim, Germany, had two complaints, that he had been provided no champagne in a week and that his negatives had been destroyed in the bombing of Berlin.

Germans were returning to Berlin by the thousands, arriving in carts, wagons, on bicycles, and on foot. Electricity had been restored in some of the districts and water and sewage services were operating in others. The railway system and some buses, street cars, and part of the subway were also once again functioning.

Correspondents reported that the Palace of Sans Souci, once the residence of Frederick the Great, had been stripped of its furniture and art by the Germans.

Hitler's seven secretaries informed that Hitler had been especially upset during the latter stages of the war, especially during the February, 1944 RAF and American offensive against German fighter production, at the superiority of American, British, and Russian air power. The disparity with the Luftwaffe had caused tension to develop between Hitler and Goering such that Hitler removed from Goering's oversight the fighter production and transferred it to the Ministry of Munitions and Armaments. Goering blamed Albert Speer's Production Ministry for low production.

Hitler wanted a light, fast, high-altitude flier comparable to the British Mosquito, but Goering insisted on continuing to stress the Messerschmidt 109 and the Focke-Wulf 190. Hitler had reportedly become so distraught that his physician ordered him to bed for a week.

Edward Dietze, former head of German Anti-Allied Propaganda and boss of Lord Haw Haw, had been captured by Canadian counter-intelligence agents.

The Army reduced the age from 42 to 40 for available discharge upon request, or within 90 days if a replacement was not immediately available. WAC's with the requisite year of service who were 40 were also allowed to request discharge.

The Interstate Commerce Commission ordered freight rates for the West and South equalized to those of the East. It was considered the most important decision in the agency's 58-year history. The commission also directed that the nation's carriers simplify rate-making through a system of uniform freight classification for the whole nation.

The Yugoslavs under Marshal Tito were removing their forces from Austria, as the British Eighth Army provided trucks for their transport. A Yugoslav-controlled newspaper in Trieste adopted a conciliatory tone toward Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander after his remarks on Friday condemning, as being reminiscent of Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan, the use of military force by Tito to occupy Trieste and southern Austria. Reports predicted that matters would also be amicably resolved with respect to the occupation of Trieste.

In San Francisco, Secretary of State Stettinius announced that the Big Five had agreed on the regional bloc plan, as the Russians finally approved the provision on Sunday with only minor alterations. The statement provided that any member State or group of States of the United Nations would be permitted to resist aggression in self-defense, with or without Security Council approval. The approval cleared the last major issue from the conference as the Latin American countries, being satisfied with the move, withdrew their objections to the proposed Security Council with unilateral veto power for each permanent member.

In Los Angeles, the 2,300 volunteer members of the street light blackout crews were disbanded by Mayor Fletcher Bowron. The crews had turned out the lights six times since Pearl Harbor during air raids.

The Ford Willow Run plant near Detroit was reported twenty months ahead of schedule in turning out Liberators, having built 8,500. Its record had been 462 in the month of March, 1944.

Judge Sam J. Ervin, Jr., had sentenced a purportedly married couple to prison, charged with bigamy, the man to three years and the woman to eight to 24 months for having invalid divorce decrees from Nevada, following the invalidation by the United States Supreme Court of the decrees in Williams v. State of North Carolina 325 U.S. 226, based on six weeks of domicile, for failure to have established adequate residence in Nevada before obtaining it.

The Court decided the case 6 to 3, with Justice Felix Frankfurter delivering the majority opinion. Justice Hugo Black wrote the dissent in which Justices William O. Douglas and Wiley Rutledge joined. The dissent was based on the cloud which the reversal would cast over the lives of large numbers of persons who had obtained such Nevada decrees with apparent validity under the law. The dissenters also believed that the decision would render uncertain all uncontested decrees of divorce.

Justice Frank Murphy, writing a majority concurrence, stated that uncontested decrees were as safe as ever, that only decrees obtained by fraudulent domiciles were being attacked by the decision.

A 1942 decision by the Court in the same case had held that North Carolina must recognize a valid Nevada decree, but no challenge in that case had been made to domicile.

On the editorial page, "There's a Source" recommends ABC stores for Charlotte as a basis for broadened revenue to pay for planned civic improvement projects. Other counties had raked in $250,000 to $400,000 annually from their ABC stores. It had been estimated that Mecklenburg would take in a half million dollars, enough to pay for the library within one year and the proposed War Memorial within four to five years.

"The Taxing Men" discusses the diametrically opposite views on taxation held by Senator Walter George of Georgia and Congressman Bob Doughton, chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, from North Carolina. Mr. Doughton proposed holding the line on taxes while Senator George wanted drastic reduction with the end of the war in Europe. These two opposing camps occupied the field.

"A New Emancipation" praises the I.C.C. determination to eliminate freight-rate differentials between the East and the West and South. It removed a considerable barrier to industry coming to the two latter regions and could end the dominancy of the East held on the basis of the lower freight rates to ship to and from the region.

"Duel with Russia" posits that men from Mars looking down through telescopes would conclude that Russia, the United States, and Great Britain were at war with one another as tensions steadily mounted between the Big Three powers. Trieste, San Francisco, the borders of Germany where American correspondents were halted, London, with the Polish government-in-exile, considered by Russia "a sworn enemy", were all among the trouble spots exhibiting the potential for enmity.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman Frank Keefe of Wisconsin debating the Executive Branch appropriations bill with Representative Louis Rabaut of Michigan, asking how much was to be allotted for the State Department commissary from the Department's budget of 8.4 million dollars.

Drew Pearson suggests that had Secretary of State Stettinius not insisted on putting his own name forward to be sole chairman of the San Francisco Conference, in derogation of the plan put forward by V. M. Molotov to have rotating chairs among the Big Four, a plan seconded by British Ambassador Lord Halifax, tensions between the Russians and the West might have been considerably eased at the conference. The Russians tended to become generally suspicious whenever they perceived a double-cross on the little things.

Marquis Childs writes from Fontana, N.C., of the building by TVA in just three years the fourth largest dam in the world, two years ahead of schedule. The result was that for $6 to $9 per month, farms were receiving electricity with which to do the heavy work.

Samuel Grafton questions what had happened suddenly to Prime Minister Churchill such that he had stated to Commons the previous week that Germans should administer Germany and had not made any strong protests against the administration of Admiral Doenitz in Flensburg, even though Doenitz was about to become a prisoner of war. The Prime Minister inevitably meant Junker professional soldiers when he referred to German administration, portending the organization of the British zone of occupation of Germany.

A regular letter writer voices her disapproval of the gentleman who had written cursorily a letter the previous week exhorting the News, instead of "fighting the Civil War", to do something about the plight of ruined Southern resources, about which he had been reading, suggesting that everyone across the country already knew that fact but that the question was what to do to arrest the process. The author of the response found him "brazenly insulting" and not representative of his native Baltimore, says that if everyone knew about neglect of Southern resources, then there would have been no reason for experts, who had assembled in Chapel Hill the previous week, to have announced the fact.

"Anything Goes" prints some snippets from the American Mercury while under the editorship of H. L. Mencken, telling of the seasick cat aboard ship who was quieted by a reading from Science and Health, went to sleep, woke up no longer blind and bumping into things.