Site Ed. Note: The front page and inside page report that the First White Russian Army and the First Ukrainian Army had tightened their encirclement of Berlin, moving southeast of Brandenburg and east of Potsdam. More than a third of the city was in Russian hands, as Germans on the northern and eastern edges continued to resist. Tanks had cracked the city's inner defenses, permitting the capture of the Metropolitan Gas Works, but eight blocks from Alexander Platz at city center. The Russians had also taken a major factory which had been manufacturing parachutes and another which produced airplane engines. The Germans reported ongoing battles a block and a half from Friedrichstrasse and Unter Den Linden, at Friedrich's Park and Koenigs Gate. Fires were raging in the Weissensee District, taken by the Red Army.

Additional suburbs captured included Birkenwerder, Hennisdorf, Helligensee, and Tetlow, the latter south of the capital.

Civilians reported that it was hell inside the city, with fires everywhere, officers fighting with enlisted men. One division commander shot his driver when the latter had suggested surrender.

Female members of the Red Army were stationed at numerous street corners directing Army traffic, some being American trucks.

Soldiers reported seeing white flags flying from windows along Berlinerstrasse, leading to Wilhelmstrasse.

To the south, the Russians had moved in Austria to Eisenerz, 87 miles from Linz and 85 from Salzburg, 89 miles from Berchtesgaden and 155 miles from the Third Army.

On the Western Front, the Third Army advanced eighteen miles, to within eight miles of Regensburg, and three miles west of the Danube in another position. Other Third Army troops were 93 miles from Linz and Salzburg, and 105 miles from Berchtesgaden, roughly the same distances as were the Russians.

A junction of the American and Russian Armies was expected anytime, a French report stating that the two forces had already met at Eilenburg, nine miles northeast of Leipzig, presumably referring either to Ninth or First Army forces, or a combination thereof.

The Seventh Army and the French First Army captured Ulm on the Danube following a ten-mile overnight advance. Captured enemy documents showed that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had died October 14 at Ulm from wounds received in the strafing incident on his staff car in Normandy several weeks earlier.

After the war, a different story would be told, that he was coerced into suicide by the fact of Hitler's belief in his complicity in the July 20 plot, that he was given a choice of suicide or standing trial before the People's Court with a foregone conclusion.

The Seventh Army was moving the last 50 miles toward Munich. The 44th Division crossed the Danube at Ehingen, 117 miles northwest of the Brenner Pass. Infantry and armor of the Third and Fourth Divisions widened the bridgehead at Dillingen. The 12th Armored took an airfield at Kicklingen, plus the towns of Gumbremmingen, Altenbraindt, and Sontheim.

The 100th Division captured a V-bomb plant still intact and in operation through the previous Friday.

The French First Army moved close to the Austrian border.

To the north, the British continued the siege of Bremen and tightened its arc around Hamburg.

The Canadians took Wagenborn, fifteen miles east of Groningen, and also Appingedam. The Army had taken 28,000 enemy prisoners in the previous month since crossing the Rhine.

All along the 275-mile Western Front, the Allies had scored substantial gains, with the First, Third, Seventh, and French Armies now consisting of 375,000 men. The nine Western Armies had captured more than a million German prisoners during the fateful and decisive month of April, 2.3 million since D-Day.

A report indicates that along the Elbe, three German soldiers had shot in the back three American prisoners from the Ninth Army and then took their uniforms. The Germans then headed to the rear of the lines in a jeep. There was no word on whether they had been captured.

Marshal Henri Petain, France's World War I hero, now considered as the traitor who helped to sell out France to the Nazis, entered Switzerland from Germany and declared his willingness to stand trial in France. King Leopold of Belgium, in a similar status, also reached the Swiss border this date. The primary traitor to France, Pierre Laval, reached Liechtenstein, but was denied entry. M. Laval had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in absentia by a court in Marseille.

The trial of Marshal Petain for treason was scheduled to begin May 17. General De Gaulle had stated his opinion that he thought Petain would be shot. Otherwise, his subordinates could not be convicted and sentenced likewise to death. The prosecution would seek to prove that the formerly venerated hero of Verdun had been in contact with the Nazis before the war and that he had personally directed the activities of the collaborationists at the fall of France in spring, 1940.

While the 89-year old Petain would be spared his life in deference to his age, despite conviction and sentence to death for treason by the tribunal, Pierre Laval would be executed in October.

According to information received in Paris, Hitler and the rest of the German High Command and Government had fled to Berchtesgaden, were not in Berlin as contended by German radio reports out of Hamburg the day before. An underground radio station of the Werwulfs claimed that Hitler had left Berlin, but that Herr Doktor Goebbels remained to direct the Volkssturm. A third report from Free Dutch radio claimed that Hitler had gone to a northern redoubt in Mecklenburg Province, next to Denmark.

A story on an inside page tells more of the warnings to the Germans being made by the Allied military commands, the heads of State of the Big Three, and by Congress that they refrain from further atrocities.

Another report tells of a forced death march of American prisoners from Saalfeld in Thuringia, by Germans fleeing the approach of the Third Army, leading the captured troops toward the Bavarian redoubt, possibly to use them as hostages. According to an airman who had escaped, those among the prisoners who had collapsed were shot. About 12,000 American Air Corps officers were being moved to Moosburg prison camp near Munich. Some of the prisoners were left sterile, apparently by the Nazi practice of putting substances in their food which counteracted the presence of vitamin E.

William Frye reports firsthand from the liberated concentration camp at Belsen that the previous day, 1,600 corpses had been buried. It was the first day during the previous week, since the British had first entered the camp, that burials of the dead outnumbered those who had died on a given day. Still, 300 to 400 persons per day were dying of starvation and disease. Yet, progress was being made to clean up the camp and make it fit for human habitation.

In Italy, the Fifth Army had moved across the Po River to pursue fleeing German troops while the British Eighth Army captured Ferrara northeast of Bologna, against continued heavy fighting. Also taken were Bondeno and Finale, west of Ferrara, along the immediate approaches to the Po. On the west coast, the Fifth Army captured La Spezia and Modena, the latter a junction on Highway 9. The new offensive had resulted in capture of 40,000 prisoners.

On Okinawa, the 24th Corps employed flame-throwers along the southern coasts, while the 27th Division made small gains on the west coast, and the 7th captured two crags along the east coast, moving slowly toward problematic Hill 178, where the Japanese were replacing machine-guns as fast as the Americans could knock them out. Each of the 36 emplacements around the hill had been silenced during the day, only to have each gun replaced and ensuing reinvigoration of the nests.

Japanese batteries fired 650 artillery rounds into the 96th Division lines at the center of the island. Overall net progress in the six-day push toward Naha, the capital, had still amounted to little against what had been dubbed the Japanese "Little Siegfried Line".

The Third Amphibious Corps Marines had virtually completed operations at the northern end of the island.

Secretary of State Stettinius had arrived on this morning in San Francisco, the day before the start of the historic United Nations Charter Conference, which would last for nearly two months. The determination of the Polish government and how it was to be constituted remained unresolved between the Big Three, posing the major obstacle to final unity at the conference.

At the start, the Big Four, including China, would have complete control of the conference and could, at will, therefore, implement the entire Dumbarton Oaks proposal reached the previous October in Georgetown. The conference was set to begin Wednesday at 4:30 p.m., PWT (the equivalent of PDT, today). Set your watches accordingly, so as not to miss any of the action.

On the editorial page, "Two Peace Fronts" reminds that with the start of the San Francisco Conference, it had nevertheless to be borne in mind that only the broad principles for the future preservation of the peace could be stated, that the final preservation would actually be done, insofar as the role of the United States, in Washington in time to come.

"After You, Ivan" states that there was no shock in the report on April 13 of the withdrawal of American troops from Berlin's suburbs. Drew Pearson had revealed that it was at Stalin's insistence to accord a part of the Yalta agreement, that the Soviets would be the Army to capture and occupy Berlin.

"The Left-Overs" discusses the dilemma faced by Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace in fastening on how to dispose of the war surplus property, estimated to be worth between 15 and 30 billion dollars, without flooding it into the markets at home and causing prices of goods to drop accordingly. With food, if the surplus were to be dumped on Europe, it would spoil the prospect of having three million Americans involved in foreign trade; but if dumped at home, it would slow post-war production and complicate the creation of the targeted 60 million jobs.

"A Useful Sojourn" comments on the transfer of a minister, Dr. John A. Redhead, from the Second Presbyterian Church of Charlotte to the First Presbyterian Church of Greensboro. He had fulfilled his duties energetically and without stuffiness, had made many friends in the community, did not preach hell-and-brimstone, yet had managed, along with others of his type, to create something of a revival in the religious spirit of the community.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan recommending extension of the Lend-Lease bill for a year or such shorter period as the Congress might direct. He then extols the many virtues of Lend-Lease through the war since its passage in March, 1941.

Drew Pearson reports that Harry Truman had two meetings with Republicans in the space of a week, one before he became President and one afterward. In the former he had stated candidly that he was a partisan in the role of Vice-President, a member of the Administration. But, as Speaker of the Senate, he was strictly non-partisan and asked the Republicans to correct him should he stray from that mean while serving in that capacity.

In some degree of irony, the meeting had taken place at the same hotel in which President Roosevelt had, in September, addressed the Teamsters Union in the most memorable speech of the 1944 presidential campaign, necessarily truncated by the desire of both candidates not to tread on the progress of the war at that critical juncture.

Marquis Childs discusses the death of columnist Ernie Pyle, praising him for having been able to use his deft eye for humanity to translate his observations into words in simple array, providing a description of the war for the people at home as well as for the soldiers on the front.

Mr. Pyle had always been out on the lines with the soldiers, not supping with the brass.

Mr. Childs suspects that he was gloomy about his own success and that it was that gloom which had led to the sense that he would not return from the Pacific theater, as he had communicated to friends.

"There is no substitute for experience—for the kind of hell that hundreds of thousands of Americans are going through. Not all our modern technique of radio and motion picture can halfway bridge the gap. But the shy little man whom people all over America spoke of as Ernie came as close to it as anyone has."

Samuel Grafton enunciates his sympathy for the sentiments being expressed suggestive of tit-for-tat reprisal for German atrocities against war prisoners, that for each such atrocity, a German would be selected from the nearest town and executed, the town razed. But, he adds, though fulfilling of a need for retribution, it would likely do no good.

So, concludes Mr. Grafton, the punishment should not be an eye for an eye, but rather to supply to the Nazi a new eye, so that he might comprehend into the future the difference between right and wrong.

Dorothy Thompson, returning to her column after a month spent in travel to tour the Western Front, writes from London that the death of President Roosevelt had cast gloom on the city. FDR had represented a friend to the British, one who could effect the peace along with Prime Minister Churchill. It was Roosevelt to whom they attributed the greatest weight of accomplishment in effecting amity with the Russians.

Mr. Zorin, on October 25, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Russia's Ambassador to the United Nations, would receive the famous retort from U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, that the latter was prepared "to wait...until hell freezes over" if necessary for the answer to Ambassador Stevenson's question of Mr. Zorin as to whether he denied that the Soviet Union had in fact placed in Cuba long-range offensive missiles. This exchange would become one of the pivotal moments in the thirteen-day crisis, which nearly led to World War III. Mr. Stevenson having backed down Mr. Zorin before the Security Council, in the face of presentation of aerial reconnaissance photographs of the missile installations, turned the tide of world opinion to the side of the United States and provided the public drama necessary to place the Soviets on the defensive politically and diplomatically. It proved a decisive moment in the history thus far of the United Nations Organization, acting as a galvanizing force for maintaining and enduring further the chilly peace in that coldest of Cold War crises.