Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army, having moved 125 miles in just five days, the fastest advance of the war, had entered Paderborn, 185 miles west of Berlin, cutting off the Ruhr from the rest of Germany. The Third Armored Division led the way in the rapid advance, with the Seventh Armored Division and the 104th Infantry following. Paderborn was on one of two rail routes from the Ruhr to Berlin, the other being at Bielefeld, 25 miles to the north. The drive encountered little opposition and was within 65 miles of junction with Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery's forces of the 21st Army Group, whose precise whereabouts were being maintained in blackout status for the nonce.

The Germans contended that the First Army had reached Bad Windungen, 20 miles southwest of Kassel, 170 miles from Berlin.

The Ninth Army moved along the northern rim of the Ruhr.

The British Second Army was veering northward toward Hamburg, Bremen, and Wilhelmshaven. Infantry units had moved 18 miles in a day and armored units moved unimpeded along the autobahns of the sector. The British were reported to be 40 miles beyond the Rhine.

Air raids were limited along the front because of bad weather.

Some 1,400 American heavy bombers, escorted by 900 fighters, the largest force sent out by the Eighth Air Force thus far in 1945, struck Bremen, Hamburg, and Wilhelmshaven, intended to cut off seaborne transport of supplies to the Germans in the north and prepare the way obviously for the British Second Army.

German broadcasts exhorted Germans to continue to fight, even in the face of hopeless odds, on the premise that they would be little more than slaves in Allied hands.

Stories relayed through neutral countries told of attempts on the lives of high Nazi leaders. Nazis were reported making plans to enter the Bavarian Alps and some reportedly had fled to Mainau Island in Lake Constance.

On the Eastern Front, Moscow confirmed that Russian forces had made a 31-mile advance in two thrusts into the Austrian frontier, moving to within 42 miles of Vienna. The drive also aimed at Bratislava in Yugoslavia. The Russians had crossed the Nitra River, taking Komarno, Ersekujvar, Surany, Komjaty, Verebely, and Poerful along a 34-mile front from the Hron River to the Nitra. The German Army was retreating on the verge of panic as the fast-moving Soviet tanks rolled forward. Soviet planes cleared the way for the advancing armor. The Russians reported having taken 18,000 German prisoners in the previous two days.

Graz, communications hub between Austria and the German forces still in Croatia and Slovenia in Yugoslavia, had been outflanked by spearheads from Szombathely, 102 miles north of Zagreb.

To the north, Danzig was captured by the Soviets, the site of the beginning of the war in September, 1939.

The Fifth Fleet bombardment of Okinawa in the Ryukyus continued for the seventh straight day and was being supplemented by a British task force, including the King George V and the carrier Illustrous, as well as other battleships, carriers, cruisers, and destroyers, becoming the first British unit to attack so close to Japan, 350 miles from the home islands. The British task force was commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings. It was currently positioned off of Ohama and was assigned the task of shelling that town.

In the Philippines, new landings had taken place by American soldiers on Mactan and Cauit Islands, a half mile from Cebu. Mactan contained the largest coconut oil refinery in the Philippines. The factory had been set afire, however, by the Japanese demolition crews on Monday at the American landing on Cebu. Cauit was a former seaplane base.

On Cebu, enemy resistance remained disorganized as the American forces took two airfields.

On Luzon, two airfields were captured near Lipa in Batangas Province by the 11th Airborne Division, which reached the outskirts of Lipa. The Japanese had set fire to the town of Talisay on Lake Taal.

Another B-29 raid, a relatively small one, had struck Nagoya in Japan. Berlin reported a contingent of 150 B-29's having hit Tokyo this date but no confirmation had come from Allied sources. Another B-29 raid flew from India against Singapore.

A new Japanese drive of 80,000 men in China had reversed recent good news from that front, as another American airdrome had to be abandoned, and Chungking and Sian were both threatened.

On the editorial page, "Vacancy, Close-In" comments on a pamphlet, "Tomorrow's Cities", prepared by five city planning experts, focusing on transportation. They uniformly had opined that the movement to the suburbs would, if unabated, cause more traffic into and from cities each day than the present systems could accommodate. They had recommended that cities rehabilitate neighborhoods within walking distance of city facilities to save the future a lot of problems.

"A First Shot" discusses the recent assassination by German parachutists of the Allied-appointed burgomeister of Aachen, Franz Oppenhof. He had been an honest German, sincerely anti-Nazi, and wound up paying for it with his life.

"The Textile War" finds the textile industry maintaining the philosophy of low wages to promote high production, coupled with high profits. OPA head Chester Bowles had complained that the industry had reaped a windfall of 120 million dollars in profits during 1944 at the expense of the growers. The president of the Cotton-Textile Association contested this statement, saying that the growers had received parity throughout the period and that only 64 percent of cotton consumed by the industry had been subject to price ceilings.

"New Combine" gives praise to the new understanding attempted by the coalition of the CIO, AFL, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce under the leadership of Eric Johnston, seeking rapprochement between business and labor.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Robert Rich of Pennsylvania, in support of a cut in appropriations for the Department of Agriculture, asserting that the Democrats wanted to spend and so should be blamed when it became necessary to tax the people to pay for that spending. He then offers into the record a poem titled "Taxes", by an author whose name he did not know.

Tax his "Henry," tax his gas,
Tax the road that he must pass.

Who Henry was, we do not know. Maybe he was the same fellow who was summoned quickly to bring the Flit.

One thing is clear through time, protestations of the Republicans to the contrary notwithstanding: Spending, though the ends might be somewhat different between the parties when either controls the purse strings of the Congress, remains high, no matter who controls the Government. In point of fact, it was a recent Democratic Administration which decreased the size of the Government and Government spending to the lowest levels since the Kennedy Administration, only to see everything go through the roof during the ensuing Republican Administration, just as it had under the "Conservative" guidance of the Reagan Administration during the 1980's, a tax-and-spend Conservative era, the spending being devoted almost entirely to defense at the expense of the needs of the people. Let the people go to hell so that the armament manufacturers may continue in their wealth and Government-sponsored corporate welfare, paid for, in fact, by the poor of the society, and so on and so forth, as a stuck record.

Drew Pearson once again addresses the issue of the quick-release parachute, much safer than the standard issue triple release, but still delayed in being supplied the troops in Europe. Recently, an Army lieutenant had drowned during maneuvers in Virginia when he was unable to disengage his parachute quickly enough on landing in a river. He had been able to unfasten one release, indicating that he was still conscious long enough to have disengaged from the quick-release parachute had he been so equipped.

Back from Europe, Marquis Childs reports on the Soviet censorship extant in liberated countries in Eastern Europe, far exceeding the relatively free transmission of information from the liberated countries in the West. He relates of his experience in seeking to send a story from Yugoslavia regarding the insecurity and uncertainty faced by Tito and the Partisans into the future, based on the seeds sown by Nazi propagandists during occupation, meant to foment discord between the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The Yugoslav censor approved most of the story, but not that part regarding the insecurity of the future. He based his refusal on the fact that Field Marshal Alexander had given a speech two nights earlier in which he stated that there was a democracy in the country, and so, according to the censor, it had to be so.

Samuel Grafton reports of the apathy shown by both the French and Italians, resultant of having nothing to do during the period of liberation. Tasklessness did not give rise to a spirit of democracy. The Southern Italians had not been invited to the San Francisco Conference and so it was no wonder that they did not appear in a celebratory spirit with regard to it. Moreover, the terms of armistice concluded in September, 1943 had still not been published and so it was difficult for the Italians to become excited over a secret. The Allies had said, "Nhh! Nhh!" to the Italians in terms of any motivation to conduct their own political affairs, run their economy, or even to get rid of the native fascists.

The editors present a piece on the freight rate controversy whereby the South was charged higher rates to move goods into the Northeast than was the Northeast to move the same goods to the South. The same discrepancy held true between the North and the West as well. The Supreme Court had on Monday agreed to hear the suit brought by Governor Ellis Arnall of Georgia, claiming collusion on the part of the railroads to set the rates in the discriminatory pattern. A similar suit had been brought earlier by the Attorney General against Western railroads alleging the same form of collusion and was expected to proceed to trial in May. The difference in the Arnall case was that he had sought an evidentiary hearing in the first instance before the Supreme Court, a highly unusual circumstance but one available when the suit involves a State as a party.