Site Ed. Note: The front page, following the lifting of the temporary news blackout, reports the detail of the taking at 3:50 p.m. Wednesday, by a task force of the 27th Armored Infantry of the First Army, of the 1200-foot span of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen and then crossing of the Rhine thereon by the "B" Force of the 9th Armored Division. The bridge had been scheduled by the Nazis for demolition at 4:00 p.m., just ten minutes later. Superficial explosions began as the first troops crossed, but the wires on the other side of the bridge to the charges were quickly cut and repairs were immediately begun, even as the bridge remained under fire from the east bank hills. The flow of American traffic across the bridge then began immediately.

The first men to cross were expecting the bridge any moment to be blown. That would have been par for the course. Only the bridge at Nijmegen in Holland had been captured intact.

Erpel, on the east side of the bridge, was quickly captured as tanks and infantry moved into the Balsatic cliffs and Rhineland hills beyond. The town only contained 600 wounded Germans and a few American prisoners by the time the troops overran it. A bridgehead ten miles wide and five miles deep was quickly established.

It was the singularly most momentous event of the war in the West since the Normandy breakout in July. The war in Europe had now entered its last scenes of the final act of Gotterdammerung of Der Ring des Nibelungen. There would be no deus ex machina this time to save Der Fuhrer. His shape-shifting shield had lost its flavor on the bedpost overnight.

Hal Boyle provided an on-the-scene account from the Ludendorff Bridge. There had been few American losses in the taking of the bridge, though it was protected by sporadic German artillery fire. Generally, the Germans had been caught flat-footed in an attempt to evacuate as many of the 15th German Army as they could prior to blowing the bridge.

There followed a general traffic jam as Allied vehicles and men sought to make the crossing of the Rhine. The infantry moved at a snail's pace in drizzling rain. M.P.'s sought to clear traffic jams with little success. The men joked in the face of danger but nevertheless wanted to be among the first to cross the river. Yet, they understood that the march to Berlin was not going to be uncontested or without death. The general view was the old adage of the Army: "Hurry up and wait."

The men took little note of the surrounding beauty of the countryside, for it was strewn with dead Germans and burning and crippled vehicles, and the men were muddy and tired, wanted just to get on with getting the war done.

It was not, of course, that the Germans had given up out of the goodness of their little Nazi hearts, but rather that they had not enough gasoline left with which to fight, were needed on the Eastern Front, and were running low on ammunition and supplies, thanks to the two years of relentless bombing of Germany by the brave Western Allied crews manning the Flying Fortresses, Liberators, and their fighter escorts.

Feel no pity for any goddamned Nazi. These were not good ol' boys. They gave no pity to the millions they slaughtered ruthlessly, the extent of which, though revealed in the abstract in third party press accounts, was yet to be driven home to the Western Allied troops visibly and firsthand. It soon would be. The results of the atrocities the troops had observed during the Ardennes offensive would soon pale beside that upon which some would lay eyes within the ensuing two months. Of course, the poor little German would feign ignorance of the worst of atrocities, cloaked in a downy little security blanket provided by the Fuehrer and singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Us", tomorrow and tomorrow. Feel no pity for the goddamned Nazi. They started the war. They deserved death from it.

The Third Army had won domination of the Rhine north of Coblenz, taking Andernach and Bruehl, the latter eight miles south of Remagen.

A thousand American bombers hit rail yards and two tank manufacturing plants at Kassel, after a night raid by the RAF hit Hamburg and Berlin. The Fifteenth Air Force out of Italy struck targets in Hungary, at Komarom, twenty miles in front of advancing Russian forces.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians had moved into Kuestrin for the second time, after it had been penetrated a month earlier. The Russians had not yet confirmed the crossing of the Oder River.

The Russians were also preparing to cross the Dammascher Lake east of Stettin, seeking to outflank the Baltic city and enable a northern advance to Berlin. There was some speculation that the lake crossing had already taken place. Stolp, ten miles from the Baltic in northeastern Pomerania, had been captured, according to Moscow.

German radio stated that Hitler had visited the Oder front on some unspecified date, perhaps four years earlier, but, regardless, he left his odor for all to smell.

On Iwo Jima, the Marines of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Divisions, while having split the enemy forces in two, were able to effect only small gains in their attempt to eliminate the remaining pockets of Japanese resistance at the extreme northern tip of the island. The Marines were facing heavy mortar fire as they sought to clear pillboxes and caves in which the remaining enemy troops were holed up.

According to Tokyo radio, American forces on the previous day had landed at Zamboanga on Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines. The report indicated that the landing was effected by thirty ships.

On Luzon, the American forces were closing in on Baguio, summer capital of the Philippines.

In Chicago, a man was found crucified, nailed to a cross, with a minor razor wound to his left breast, and a crown of rose bush thorns placed on his head. The cross was affixed to a pillar of an elevated railroad on the near north side of the city. The victim's palms had 10d nails driven through them and his feet were bound to the cross by ropes. A sign at the top of the structure stated:

The 43-year old man was alive and was taken to the hospital, eventually placed in the county jail hospital after the detective became dissatisfied with his apparently inconsistent responses to questioning. He had initially contended that he was lured by a man to the scene, claiming that an accident had occurred and that the victims needed assistance.

Whether he would later be taken before Judge Pilate, who would consult the crowd outside the courtroom for final determination, was not indicated.

Whether the nails were common or finishing also was not related, an important part, perhaps the most important part, of the story. We don't think they had the galvanized in 1945.

On the editorial page, "Hocus-Pocus" finds discordant operations afoot between the chambers of Congress, the House having voted to draft nurses between ages 20 and 44, while the Senate had defeated a bill to compel men between 18 and 45 to engage in war work or be drafted. The piece wonders what had caused this distinction to be made, drafting nurses while giving a pass to men.

"Passing On" suggests that it was bollocks to the poll tax in the South, that it soon would be no more. There had been eight states still possessed of it at the start of the year. Georgia, under the leadership of Governor Ellis Arnall, had already abandoned the invidious practice. And two other states, Virginia and South Carolina, appeared in the process of repealing it. Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, had been key in Virginia's battle to abandon the tax. The South Carolina Legislature appeared ready to do likewise, to establish a referendum to clear the way for a free election in 1948.

As we have commented several times, it would finally take a Constitutional Amendment, passed in 1962 and ratified in early 1964, to rid the nation of this pernicious evil, enabling exercise of the free franchise, plainly established by the Fifteenth Amendment in the immediate wake of the Civil War.

"The $2 Question" asks why the Federal Government should be asked to aid North Carolina in hospital and medical care as well as education, when North Carolina's budget was flush and its debt nearly retired from the abundant surplus accumulated during the war. University of North Carolina president Frank Porter Graham had advocated that the Federal Government do so.

"Bob-Tailed" addresses the trimming down of former Governor Melville Broughton's proposed hospital and medical care program to its bare essentials under new Governor Gregg Cherry. The new program would consist of a commission, authorization for a medical school at the University plus a 400-bed hospital, and dollar per day indigent health care services. The only money requested other than operating expenses of the commission was $50,000 for student loans.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana debating the work-or-fight bill, positing that it would be serving the philosophies of Hitler and Stalin to pass such legislation. He believed that it would be tantamount to establishing a military dictatorship in the country to allow men to be sent to jail should they not be willing to go to work in a war industry.

Drew Pearson relates of the unfortunate episode already set forth in the Congressional Record excerpt appearing on the page on Tuesday, in which Representatives John Jennings, Jr. of Tennessee, Harold Earthman of Tennessee, and James Morrison Morrison of Louisiana were not allowed into an OPA meeting with the Strawberry Growers Industry Advisory Committee. The strawberry growers wanted the Congressmen present because the growers were contending that OPA price levels imposed on Louisiana and Florida strawberries were too low. Some believed that OPA price directors, one formerly of A & P and another from General Foods, were determined to protect the processors at the expense of the strawberry growers. The retail price had been substantially higher than the wholesale 32 cents per quart set for the farmers.

This episode, in fact, when boiled to brass jam jars, may serve to unravel every single mystery which has occurred in the world since 1945, an enormous task but one which, when undertaken, will, no doubt, prove fruitful, if bloody.

Samuel Grafton remarks of the role of Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan who had the task of scouting out the proposals of the Allies at Dumbarton Oaks, in preparation for his attendance as a GOP representative at the United Nations charter conference, to be held in San Francisco starting April 25. Former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, a commander in the Navy in the Pacific, now returned stateside, was also going to attend as a Republican delegate.

Marquis Childs, reporting from Belgrade, tells of three posters hanging in the main square, one depicting FDR smiling, another showing Churchill looking grim, and a third with Stalin appearing in stoic pose. Until recent weeks, the people had hoped that the Americans and British would enter Yugoslavia in force and restore pre-war order. That hope had now all but vanished.

Of course, perhaps after the British example set in Greece with respect to the ELAS/EAM, they might have thought differently.

Thank you. Just say, "Fly The Charlotte News".