Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Omar Bradley had declared that the Allied Armies could now effect crossing of the Rhine almost anywhere along its banks at any time they desired. It was no longer necessary, he further stated, to maintain the Remagen bridgehead in a confined status. The First Army at Remagen had been held back deliberately until the Third and Seventh Armies had completed their tasks below the Moselle River. The clearing of the Rhineland had proceeded much faster than anticipated.

Between February 8 and March 22, General Bradley further confirmed, the Allies had captured 203,010 Germans in the Rhineland, not including 30,000 just captured by the Third Army.

The largest number of Americans killed on any one day along the Western Front between February 22 and March 21 had been 269 killed February 28, a day when the First and Third Armies captured 3,101 Germans. The least number of Americans killed in a day during that period had been 80, on March 1, a day when the First and Third Armies captured 3,996 enemy troops.

The First Army captured Neuwied on the Rhine, eight miles northwest of Coblenz, lengthening its hold on the Rhine east bank to 31 miles.

The Third and Seventh Armies were drawing the battle for the Saar and the Palatinate to its end, as the 90th Infantry of the Third Army cleared Mainz of enemy troops and captured Landau. The Tenth Armored Division advanced west of Bad Duerkheim in the Palatinate. The 71st Infantry Division captured Pirmasens on the Siegfried Line. The Sixth Armored Division had reached the Rhine and the 103rd Infantry Division had advanced northwest of Wissembourg Gap.

The Germans reported that the British Second Army, the Canadian First, and American Ninth had opened an artillery barrage along a 65-mile smoke-covered front facing the Ruhr.

For the third straight day, thousands of Allied planes hit the Ruhr in strength, concentrating on the industrial area east of the Rhine. Some 1,250 American bombers attacked eleven railyards. The RAF struck a bridge at Bremen. German radio reported more Allied planes over the Reich during the afternoon.

RAF Mosquitos struck Berlin for the 31st consecutive night.

The raid of the previous day on nine German Army camps, each of which had been destroyed, dropped 3,250 tons of bombs.

During the previous three weeks, the Allies had dropped more than twice the tonnage of bombs on Germany that Germany had dropped on England since the start of the war. The bombing had effectively isolated the Rhine plain and the Ruhr from the rest of Germany.

In Italy, the Fifth and Eighth Armies encountered patrol skirmishes, the former near San Ansanao at the entrance to the Bologna road, the latter northeast of Cotignola on the Senio River line, as well further south at Faenza.

On the Eastern Front, the First Ukrainian Army continued to advance along an 80-mile front in the new Silesian offensive, threatening Frankenstein, Neisse, Ziegenhals, Leobschuetz, and Ratibor in the Bohemian Passes of the Moravian Mountains.

Draculum and Wolfenmensch reportedly would soon fall under the Allied guns as well, as would Muenster on the Western Front.

German reports declared, without Soviet confirmation, that the forces of Marshal Zhukov had started moving in concert from their Oder River bridgehead at Kuestrin, 38 miles east of Berlin.

An inside page provides a map of the Eastern and Western Fronts.

In the Philippines, the 40th Division seized Little Guimaras Island, across the strait from captured Iloilo on Panay. The forces encountered no enemy opposition. Bombing proceeded for the third successive day on Cebu, one of the last major islands in the Philippines still held by the enemy.

On Luzon, the 33rd Division advanced to within ten miles of Baguio, summer capital of the Philippines.

On Iwo, a relief shipment of fresh vegetables had arrived from the Marianas, including a ton of watermelons, radishes, onions, and tomatoes, the first such food the troops had received since the campaign for Iwo had begun February 19.

A report indicated that the March 9 raid by the 300 B-29's on Tokyo had destroyed 20 percent of the city's industrial production capacity for a period of at least three months and five percent of it for a year, taking out 3,000 plants and between 200,000 and 250,000 buildings, leaving 1.2 million factory workers without homes.

It was announced that 170 B-29's had been lost since the beginning of their operations in mid-June. Of those, 84 had been lost in combat and 86 from accidents.

An Associated Press compilation on the inside page tells of the varied reports being provided the Japanese by their home press and radio, as well by Premier Koiso, on the one hand bracing them for attack and invasion in the home islands, on the other telling them that a major new offensive was planned to take back Iwo, Saipan, and Guadalcanal.

The Navy and Army personnel maintaining vigil at Pearl Harbor could relax for the nonce.

The Senate rejected the nomination of Aubrey Williams to be head of the Rural Electrification Administration, by a vote of 52 to 36, Southern Democrats joining with Republicans to make up the majority.

Mr. Williams had been falsely linked to Communists, but, in the end, was simply too liberal for the Southern reactionaries of the Democratic Party because he favored equality of job opportunities for blacks in war industries.

It was the first presidential nomination rejected by the Senate since 1939 when a nominee for Nevada U. S. Attorney had been turned down. Other nominations, however, had been withdrawn prior to a vote.

The House unanimously passed a one-year extension of the Selective Service Act, extending the draft to May 15, 1946. The bill now proceeded to the Senate where it was also expected to be approved speedily. The Army had expressed a need for 405,000 inductees by July 1, after which it was expected that the draft rate of 135,000 per month would drop to 93,000.

A practical joke in Philadelphia by a welder turned deadly when he sought to give his fellow welder a "hotfoot", lighting a piece of paper beneath his foot, which then caught his greasy pants on fire, inflicting serious burns from which the welder died several weeks later.

The practical joker pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and received a five-month prison sentence.

On the editorial page, "Stewardship" compliments the Mecklenburg County delegation to the Legislature for its record in the just concluded Legislative Session, fully representative of the interests of the county and its communicated desires.

"The Youngsters" finds encouraging the attendance by 2,700 community schoolchildren of the matinee performance at the Armory by the Cleveland Orchestra. The evening performance for the adults, with selections by Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, and Rimsky-Korsakov, was thus anti-climactic. The fact that the younger people of the community had developed such an appreciation for fine music bode well for the future of Charlotte culture and showed a maturation of interest in the fine arts.

This process of maturation would, of course, continue to manifest itself into the 1950's and beyond, until no one under twenty years of age listened to anything except long-hair music.

"Worlds Apart" examines the polar approaches of the bills coming out of the House and Senate with regard to settling the war industry manpower issue. The House bill was in the form of work-or-jail, punishing the employee with fines or jail should he not comply with orders to work in assigned war industry. It was to be administered by Selective Service. The Senate version put the onus on the employer to monitor the employment and penalized the employer for failing to comply with the Government directives on employment. It was to be administered through the War Manpower Commission.

"Quick & Clean" comments on the statement in Commons by the Archbishop of York that war criminals should be shot on the spot to avoid prolonged spectacular trials. The editorial suggests that the attitude would find great support within the Allied world. The fear of the Archbishop was that, as the war ended and the post-war period began, the Allies would grow tender of heart and forget the horrible atrocities committed by the Nazis, just as had been the case with the Germans at the end of World War I when the German war crimes tribunal wound up trying only a small number of war criminals.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Bob La Follette of Wisconsin discussing with other Senators, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, Robert Taft of Ohio, and Hugh Butler of Nebraska, Senator La Follette's proposed amendment to distinguish between permanent and temporary employees of the Government in allowing for appropriations.

Drew Pearson tells of Britain's Ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, addressing one and two-term Republican Congressmen and holding them at rapt attention as he described the relationship of the executive department in England to Parliament. Parliament could deliver a no-confidence vote to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and, though not required by law to step down, the tradition had always been kept. The Prime Minister could not by-pass Parliament as the President could sometimes by-pass Congress to issue executive orders. Lord Halifax contended that Great Britain had a more democratic form of government, therefore, than the United States.

Marquis Childs, writing from Cologne, states that Germany was finished as a modern industrial nation for at least 30 years, given the destruction he had witnessed in Aachen, Duren, Eschweiler, and other towns of the Roer and Rhine valleys, including Cologne, where 70 to 90 percent of the industry had been destroyed. It was not a matter any longer of determining whether a hard or soft peace was to be imposed on Germany: the bombing campaign had determined the question by dint of total destruction of the country's infrastructure.

Mr. Childs did not foresee, however, the extensive exports of German automobiles to America by the latter 1950's and early 1960's, as well as other manufactured goods, which helped to speed the process of putting West Germany back on its feet. The Cold War and restraints on trade imposed by the West on products from Communist-occupied countries would retard the rejuvenation of East Germany.

Samuel Grafton once again addresses the issue of the supposed food shortage in the country, this time concentrating on the coincidence of a supposed shortage, according to the meat industry, each of the past two years in spring, at just the time Congress was taking up price controls. The truth was, he concludes, that there was no food shortage, even if four resolutions taken up in Congress to investigate the supposed shortage made it seem that there was. These resolutions had come about within days of President Roosevelt stating that America, with its superior capacity, should undertake to feed the liberated countries at war's end.

The editors describe the importance of the Saar Basin to the Reich as having been one of its three major coal producing areas, along with the Ruhr and Silesia. Now, the Saar was in Allied hands, as was Silesia. The Ruhr was being daily bombed and would likely fall into Allied hands within the near future.