Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Second Armored Division, the so-called "Hell on Wheels", had advanced five miles past the Weser River to within eighteen miles of Hannover, as the British Desert Rats of the Seventh Tank Division were within 25 miles, a late BBC broadcast saying that Allied forces had reached to within two miles of the city.

A German broadcast stated that the Third Army had advanced 40 miles beyond Schlotheim, possibly by deployment of paratroops and light tanks landed by air in the area of Eisleben, within 90 miles of Berlin. But this movement was unconfirmed by Supreme Allied Headquarters.

The 30th Division of the Ninth Army fought against heavy opposition through the streets of Hamelin on the Weser, while the 83rd Division had completely subdued Hamm, opposition having collapsed so suddenly that the Americans believed it a Nazi stratagem. The Second Armored Division was probing the hills beyond the Weser, searching for the shortest route to Berlin, 150 miles away. Half a dozen new bridgeheads had been established across the Weser as the Germans retreated toward the Elbe. A contingent of the Ninth crossed the river south of Hamelin, threatening Hannover from the south.

The First Army initiated a new thrust, moving 32 miles to the east beyond the Ruhr pocket, through the Hessian Gap, into the upper reaches of the Weser, ten miles northeast of captured Kassel, and were involved in battle at Muenden. Half a dozen villages surrendered by telephone. The tank and infantry divisions drove both east from Paderborn, reaching Bruehhausen, four miles west of the Weser and 164 miles from Berlin, and to the west, following a much needed respite in action.

The British were within 35 miles of Bremen in the north.

At least 28,000 Germans had surrendered the previous day.

—Dead horse smell bad, meat taste worse. Time to surrender.

Some 650 American heavy bombers, accompanied by 600 fighters, hit Halle and Leipzig, as well as other targets.

Reconnaissance disclosed that recent Allied attacks on Wilhelmshaven, Bremen, and Hamburg had sunk or destroyed 21 merchant vessels and warships, including eight U-boats and one cruiser, and damaged many others.

On the Eastern Front, the Second and Third Ukrainian Armies closed on Vienna, a tank-led force of the Third advancing to within 4.5 miles of the center of the Austrian capital from the south, reaching the city limits, capturing Ober-Laa and Unter-Laa, two suburbs, and the two Armies together being within 46 miles of completely encircling the city along a 33-mile siege line. The forces also reached the suburb of Schwechat and captured Laxenburg, six miles to the south of the city, establishing a wedge two to three miles wide through the Wienerwald.

The Russians were within 13 miles of Tulin, ten miles northwest of Vienna, a strategic point which controlled the communications to the west along the south bank of the Danube as well as the Vienna-Prague railway.

The Second Ukrainian Army moved from the southeast, east, and northeast toward the capital, gaining seven miles along both banks of the Danube, capturing Bruck on the south bank after crossing the Leitha River, and breaking the defenses of the Bratislava Gap, capturing as well Hainburg opposite the confluence of the Danube and the Drava. Also taken was Lamac, four miles northwest of captured Bratislava.

A new battle had also begun 25 miles from Graz, indicating new gains in southeastern Austria.

Military analyst Max Werner assesses the importance of the Soviet Union's denunciation of the neutrality pact with Japan, finds it the "most important act of World War II" since Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. He foresaw the threat of the Soviet forces to Japan once they were released from the European theater, with the fall of Germany plainly imminent. The Soviets could deploy a land army which would trump the land force superiority of the Japanese in the Far East, especially in Manchuria and North China.

It had been speculated earlier that the Japanese might shift the center of their operations, even transferring the seat of government, into Manchuria, to afford a less vulnerable land bastion against the approaching American forces to the mainland of Japan.

While the Soviet denunciation could have become an important development, as the Soviets would finally declare war on Japan in late July, the deployment of the atomic bomb made Soviet help in the Pacific unnecessary. To what degree its threat impelled the final decision of the Japanese to surrender in the wake of the total destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with more such destruction promised, is not clear, but it is likely the threat of further atomic blasts was the sine qua non which finally brought the Japanese to the point of complete surrender, not the threat of Soviet intervention militarily.

As separately reported on the page, speculation ran that President Roosevelt had obtained from Stalin an agreement to enter the war against Japan subsequent to denunciation of the neutrality pact, and that this commitment would grease the skids for agreement at San Francisco on formation of the United Nations organization.

On Okinawa, the primary battle lines were now forming four miles north of Naha, as the Japanese were holed up within caves, gullies, and ridges. Admiral Nimitz announced continued gains by the ground forces and continued low casualties, 175 men having been killed and 796 wounded during the first four days of operations since Sunday. Japanese casualties were not provided but were believed much higher.

The 24th Corps of the Tenth Army gained 3,000 yards, but found much stiffer opposition as the enemy had congregated its forces in the southern area of the island, around Naha.

In the northern section of the island, the Third Marine Amphibious Corps was able to gain 4.5 miles, overrunning the island's narrowest isthmus, three-mile wide Ichikawa, then moving into the town of Kin, also invading the Yabuchi Islands off the east coast.

Japanese home guardsmen had attacked American lines on several occasions, utilizing makeshift weaponry.

Japanese planes had attacked the American lines with the heaviest air assault yet since the invasion.

At home, General Marshall asked for understanding and support from the public for the re-deployment of forces then fighting in Europe to the Pacific at the point of termination of hostilities with Germany.

General Marshall also separately informed the Senate Military Affairs Committee that the quickest and most decisive way to end the war in Europe would be to kill or capture Hitler.

General MacArthur was assigned the role to lead the Allied forces in the final assault on Japan. Admiral Nimitz would command all Naval forces. The general planning for the Pacific war, however, would be retained by the Joint Chiefs.

The talks between the UMW and the mine owners had collapsed after five weeks, and the confreres were going to report the impasse to the War Labor Board, which had extended the current contract through April to try to avert a strike.

Yesterday, incidentally, we had not yet included the inside page in the initial version of the note, for its having been mislabeled by someone as instead belonging to this date; and so it is now properly corrected, as we discovered when reading this day's print, in case you read the early edition of The News.

On the editorial page, "Power of Veto" reports on the ill-fated brainchild of a doctor at Memorial Hospital who wanted to have a slope on the grounds graded and planted with grass to act as a place for polio patients to sun themselves. He looked around for the labor supply to accomplish the project and found none available in the private market, finally resorted to the War Manpower Commission, who approved tentatively use of German prisoners of war from Camp Sutton, conditioned on approval by the Charlotte Central Labor Union.

"Second Thought" comments on the President's decision to withdraw the idea of the United States having three votes to counterbalance the Soviet Union's three votes and the British Empire's six votes in the proposed U.N. organization and at the San Francisco Conference. The piece suggests, contrary to what the President and Secretary of State Stettinius had assured, that it was done to induce the Soviets to void the agreement on their end as well and forgo the three votes, including separate votes for the Ukraine and White Russia. The State Department had stressed that it stood by the agreement otherwise with the Russians.

"The Gum Report" observes that civilians chewed 77 sticks of gum annually per person in the United States, most of which, it suggests, when done being chewed, wound up on the bottom of theater seats. But the men in service chewed 630 sticks per year.

The Journal of Living claimed that gum neutralizes stomach acid, quenches thirst, calms nerves.

The piece concludes: "Gum, we suppose, is anything you chews to make it. And so long as the average civilian is unable to get his share, we're not concerned with its social significance."

Nor cud you bee, too, lest you be rued by the camels in the zoo.

Ah, Juicy Fruit.

"The Russian Way" praises the decision of Russia to denounce the neutrality agreement formed in April, 1941 with Japan, hopes that Russia would not be faithful to its letter, requiring that an additional year pass before it could declare war.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi positing himself as a "quasi-liberal", saying that he found a dinner, attended by Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, plus an unnamed Republican Senator, to assure rejected FDR nominee for the job as Rural Electrification Administration director, Aubrey Williams, to have been out of place. The attendees had suggested that the Senate rejection was not any setback for Democratic liberalism and that Mr. Williams could be assured of a job in Government.

Senator Bilbo, an avowed segregationist, was always known as a "quasi-liberal", unfortunately so quasi as to be unrecognizable as anything beyond a reactionary strumpet to his Party's principles.

Drew Pearson looks at the confused supply situation at the Western Front, blamed for the hold-up of the Allied Armies during the fall, following the liberation of Paris in August. The Third Army under General Patton had been sent as a decoy toward the German border with France to allow the First and Ninth Armies, under the respective commands of Generals Hodges and Simpson, to undertake an offensive in the weaker northwest sector of the German lines, in the Aachen and Arnhem areas.

The report found fault with the "Red Ball Highway", under the command of Major General Frank Rose, finding it insufficient for transport of war goods from the Channel ports to the fronts. Ships had misplaced bills of lading in French ports and the entire inventory had to be retaken before the supplies were unloaded. Often, there were mix-ups in what supplies were shipped to which outfit so that the wrong caliber shells or the wrong type of rations wound up being delivered.

Mr. Pearson predicts that should the Mead Committee in the Senate, the successor to the Truman Committee, start investigating the matter, it would likely be found that the problem was not war production at home, as contended by the War Department during the fall, but instead these issues of transportation across the front.

The column concludes by relating that Attorney General Francis Biddle recently had occasion to be awakened in the dead of night by a car radio left blasting outside his house next to Dumbarton Oaks. The owner had gone into his own apartment and left the radio blaring in the car. The Attorney General went outside, reached into the car, and turned off the offending instrument. When he came back to bed, he had stated, "There ought to be a law against things like that!"

He did not say what was playing. We shall have to use our imaginations.

Marquis Childs again addresses the issue of voting as agreed by the Big Three at Yalta, giving the U.S. and Russia each three votes and the British Empire six. He clarifies that the President had first announced the secret pact to members of the U.S. delegation to San Francisco on March 23, the President stating that he had told Stalin that if he were a member of the delegation at San Francisco, he would favor the weighted voting apportionment for the new United Nations organization.

Mr. Childs concludes by urging the Russians to realize that, while Americans fully recognized the great contribution Russia had made to the war in backing down the Nazis from the fall of 1941 onward, it was not enough, in itself, for world understanding, unless the Russians were willing to move toward common ground diplomatically with the other Allied nations in forming a post-war world structure.

The editors present a piece on the 28th anniversary of the entry of the United States to World War I, April 6, 1917. The country did so without formal declaration of war, but rather by joint resolution of Congress signed by President Wilson, indicating that a state of war existed as a result of the attacks by German U-boats on United States shipping—including, of course, the Lusitania, sunk by U-20, though occurring almost two years earlier, on May 7, 1915, with 128 of 139 Americans onboard having been among the 1,198 dead.

Only six Senators and 50 House members had dissented from the resolution of 1917. Among the negative votes in the House was the Democratic Majority Leader Claude Kitchin of North Carolina. Fifteen of those voting for the resolution were still in Congress in 1945, including Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. Three Senators who had voted for war were also still present, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, Hiram Johnson of California, and Peter Gerry of Rhode Island. Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who was the sole member of Congress to vote against war in 1941, had also voted against the resolution in 1917.

When the resolution was passed, most Americans believed the fighting by Americans would be limited to Naval combat. Few expected that two million Americans would be sent to the Western Front during the ensuing 19 months.

The piece quotes President Wilson's words at the Armistice, on November 11, 1918, indicating the belief that the Germans would not again be able to revive their military caste so as to wage war in the future.