Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, amid bright sunshine, four Allied Armies, the British Second, the Allied First Airborne, the American Ninth, and elements of the Canadian First, had won nearly all of a 25-mile stretch of the Lower Rhine north of the Ruhr Valley, and pushed up to four miles deep beyond the Rhine.

The Ninth had crossed the Rhine two miles south of Wesel and advanced three to four miles northeast of the river, while the Second and portions of the Canadian First fought into Wesel and Rees, capturing 1,500 German prisoners.

The First Airborne landed northeast of Xanten in the largest airborne invasion in history to this point, from a train of planes stretching 500 miles, landing up to 30,000 troops. Casualties were reported light and German resistance spotty, at least in the initial phases of the establishment of the bridgehead.

All tolled, the Allied attacking force, including these four Armies and the First, Third, Seventh, and Fifteenth American Armies, plus the French First Army, now consisted of one and a quarter million men.

An unconfirmed report from Brussels stated that the French First Army had crossed the Rhine in the area of Rastatt, fifteen miles below Karlsruhe.

Wes Gallagher, accompanying the armies across the Rhine and then, via Cub scout plane, viewing the airborne drop, described the feelings of the men and officers involved as being uniformly consistent, that it was the beginning of the final major battle of the war in Europe.

He describes how British Commandos lay within less than a mile of Wesel, while 300 RAF Lancasters plastered the town with bombs, after which the Commandos rushed the burning ruins and quickly subdued the remaining German parachute troops left alive.

Transport planes carried the gliders through areas thick with flak and dropped the airborne troops. Sometimes the transports returned to base in flames, sometimes not at all.

The battle had begun the previous afternoon with the Ruhr enveloped in smoke, some of it from Allied smudge pots and some from burning buildings. After darkness fell, the Second and Ninth Armies came to life and began crossing the Rhine.

Birnam Wood was fast approaching Dunsinane.

The men, not with displaced hope this time, expected the Allied onslaught to bring a quick end to the fighting.

Hitler and Herr Doktor Goebbels, indeed, had but 37 days left to live, a date with destiny, in the end, set by their own calendar.

The Third Army rapidly continued to expand its bridgehead on the Rhine, established the night of March 22, beginning at 10:25 p.m., via assault boats moving across the river by moonlight. The crossing so took by surprise the Germans that not a single volley of enemy fire was encountered during the crossing. The first resistance occurred two hours later with artillery being fired at the American troops, countered, however, by American artillery, described as being superior in strength by a ratio of a hundred to one. By late the previous day, the Germans were shelling the point of crossing but the damage had already been accomplished by the swiftly moving Third Army troops sweeping across the river.

The largest concerted air attack in history, including 3,500 planes out of England, the largest force flown from that base, took place this date in support of the Allied Armies. Some 10,000 planes, including the air transports for the First Airborne Army, struck German positions out of both England and Italy. About 1,900 American heavy bombers and fighters hit 12 German airfields. Heavy bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force struck Berlin in a 1,600-mile roundtrip mission, the longest escorted such operation flown in the European theater thus far.

Following the attacks, the Munester box north of the Ruhr was described by correspondent Henry B. Jameson as "a land of death, with towns blazing like funeral pyres".

RAF Mosquitos hit Berlin for the 32nd night in a row.

On the Eastern Front, it was reported by the Germans that Marshal Zhukov's Russian troops had moved to within 31 miles of Berlin along their Oder River bridgehead to the east, reaching Golzow, a movement still not confirmed by Moscow.

Moscow did confirm a new offensive drive in Hungary, stating that it had advanced southwest of Budapest 44 miles along a 63-mile front, taking key communications positions, including Szekesfehervar above Lake Balaton.

The Soviets also stated that, to the north, Zoppot had been captured, severing Gdynia from Danzig.

Japanese reports indicated that carrier-borne planes continued to attack Okinawa in the Kyukyus between Japan and Formosa.

Admiral Nimitz disclosed that during the campaign for Iwo Jima, the Japanese had sunk a small American carrier on February 21, causing injury or death to 300 of the 1,500 men aboard. The carrier was the Bismarck Sea, ironically named, perhaps deliberately targeted for its symbolic content. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea two years earlier, in early March, 1943, had been, to that time, the most decisively lopsided victory for the Americans over the Japanese Fleet.

The Mississippi River was being deliberately flooded via the Bonnet Carre spillway, to lower its waters, sending the deluge into Lake Ponchartrain instead of onto surrounding lowlands, as would have been the case in the past. It was the second time in its 10-year existence that the spillway had been utilized to avert a major flood on the river.

On the editorial page, "The Final Days" communicates the scuttlebutt from Europe that the Third Reich was in its last days. Even a deeply buried statement from Supreme Allied Headquarters had stated that "the German High Command soon will cry quits." American officers were reportedly betting that the end would come within 60 days. A Nazi prisoner reported that a Nazi general had committed suicide regarding the disarray of the Wehrmacht west of the Rhine.

"Abstract" tells the simple maxim for understanding the reasons for Mayor La Guardia having refused to implement the Government-ordered midnight curfew in New York until one o' clock: (1) Fiorello; (2) Knows; (3) Best.

"How Much Truth?" quotes an American sergeant, under age 30, who was a newspaper man and author, stating that the country was fertile ground for starting World War III because it had not understood World War II, even as it approached its conclusion.

Thus, criticize the Warren Commission as we will for its seeming lack of sense in its investigatory focus, placed almost solely on proving the guilt of Lee Oswald while ignoring the obvious pointing of the evidentiary finger in many other directions, we might not be here had President Johnson not agreed with J. Edgar Hoover and then instructed the Commission to so limit the investigation for the expressed purpose, in discussing the matter with Earl Warren and the other appointees, of avoiding promotion of the stimulus to the right wing, ever geared up for the "fireworks show" of nuclear war just off the coast of Florida, to push for the thing, a war wherein, in consequence, as President Johnson suggested, as many as forty million Americans would inevitably have been killed.

Having said that, we are quite mindful that some have posited, speculatively, that the reason for President Johnson's eagerness to direct the investigation in one and only one direction was because he, himself, was involved in the conspiracy. But that is so much nonsense as to deserve no comment.

Why did he state, as he did after leaving office, that he had come to believe through time that there was a conspiracy?

We recall our sixth grade teacher remarking the following year after the assassination that one of her students the preceding year had arrived in class on Monday, November 25, 1963, to announce that he knew who had killed President Kennedy: it was Vice-President Johnson.

Our class of sixth graders uniformly laughed accordingly.

That sort of logic thus finds its audience, perhaps somewhere around the second grade wing of the school.

For why would Lyndon Johnson have exposed himself to death that day and been present in the motorcade, together with Mrs. Johnson, while gunmen attacked President Kennedy? Would anyone trust a gun-wielding maniac, willing to shoot the President in broad daylight? Would they stop with the President, just to land a Texan in the White House?

Richard Nixon, however, also in Dallas through that morning and during the previous day, for a speech to the Pepsi people, knowing full well that the newspaper reports of his simultaneous presence in Texas would light the fires of remembrance of the bitter 1960 campaign and the result, perceived by many Nixonites at the time as a stolen election, and thus inflame the already present discontent in Texas among Republicans and conservative Democrats with Kennedy Administration policies in an already unstable environment, is another circumstance entirely. Why did not Mr. Nixon postpone his trip just one week, to avoid fueling hatreds known to be present in Dallas?

Who planned the Bay of Pigs thing?

"The Hottest Money" comments on the presence of so much liquidity within the public that, despite confiscatory taxes, free spending was inevitable. With prices kept down by controls, the money was being waged in the betting world. With racetracks closed for the season at the request of the Government, the betting had reached the Brooklyn College basketball team, and had also invaded the professional golfing world, as attested by the golfers who had just left Charlotte after the tournament.

"Sock 'Em" recommends that the Internal Revenue Service crack down on major tax cheats, those concealing large amounts of income from the Government, and put them in jail. Some sleuthing had taken place at Florida resorts among high rollers and had nabbed a few. But most, it was safe to say, were getting away. There was also a move afoot to register $1,000 bills and up, to determine who wound up with them.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee commenting on the nomination of Aubrey Williams to be head of the Rural Electrification Administration, a nomination having already been defeated during the week.

Drew Pearson comments on the difficulties encountered by former New York Governor Herbert Lehman, head of the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration, since the previous summer when the Lublin Poles had requested that a relief mission be sent to provide aid. Governor Lehman had drafted a reply but the U.S. Censorship Office had disallowed its transmission as communicating in uncoded language the movement of supply ships. The message was then relayed through the State Department to Moscow's Foreign Office, with the intent that it would transmit the reply to the Lublin Government.

Marquis Childs , still reporting from Cologne, tells of a celebration by troops from the divisions which had captured the city, taking place five days after its fall to the Allies.

Dick Young compliments the Lions Club for its effort in soliciting $400,000 for a new veterans' memorial park, the first of its kind in the city. Mr. Young comments that in his 41 years of residence in Charlotte, he had never seen any great eleemosynary outpouring on the part of wealthy Charlotteans until an anonymous donor recently had provided $50,000 for this park.

Dorothy Thompson announces her intention to take a month off from the editorial column so that she might tour Europe as a reporter to understand better what was going through the minds of soldiers and civilians alike, following the lead of Marquis Childs, pursuing the same end since late January prior to Yalta. Ms. Thompson comments that she had been holding down her column for two years straight without such a trip and felt it time to inform her commentary with first-hand accounts from the field.

Perhaps her first stop to test civilian opinion might have been in Charlotte, judging by the confused pen of a perennial letter writer who thought that Ms. Thompson was being unduly charitable to the Germans, asking the News permanently to discontinue her "seditious column". The letter writer believed that Ms. Thompson favored lenient treatment of the Germans post-war, quotes Tennyson that the human race, "Moves upward, working out the beast," excepting, she believes, the German race which had not and would not unless the German nation itself were permanently destroyed and permanently occupied by the four major Allies.

The author references a Life article penned by Ms. Thompson, appearing in the December 6, 1943 edition of the magazine, in which, contends the correspondent, Ms. Thompson had apologized for the generation of Germans which had started the war and sought to explain how they had come to be—a bit akin to Greeks condemning Pheidippides, not for bringing news of Athenian victory over the Persians, but for having gone a step too far in explaining how the Persians had landed in the first place, to avoid future recurrence.

The letter writer apparently did not understand that Adolf Hitler, himself, had ordered Ms. Thompson to leave Nazi Germany in 1934 for what he deemed unacceptable criticism of his young Reich.

Ms. Thompson, periodically in her column during the prior eighteen months or so, had only commented that an unduly harsh peace, a so-called Carthaginian peace, which did not discriminate between the Nazis and the anti-Nazi Germans would only serve to alienate Germans and give ground for the seeds of Fascism or Communism to take root from the remnants cast off in economic want and desolation, leading to internal fractionalization and finally civil war--not unlike the conditions preceding the rise of Nazism, as a Junker-perceived controllable faction to resolve the weak power vacuum left at the center confronting these militant factions, arising both in the economic and social chaos of the early twenties and that of the late twenties and early thirties, the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Nazis. A weakened Germany, with its substantial pre-war industrial base and natural resources, would also have a similar ripple effect economically and thus politically throughout Europe. The trick was to enable Germany to rebuild and form a stable economic, social, and legal existence founded on democratic principles, while extirpating all vestiges of Nazism from the society.

There is a quote from The Tempest which the correspondent might have better consulted and then imparted.