Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Prime Minister Churchill had provided his resignation to King George VI who had accepted it, formally disbanding the five-year old wartime coalition Government formed by Mr. Churchill in May, 1940. Parliament would be dissolved at Churchill's request on June 15. A new government would be formed shortly, at the King's pleasure, by Mr. Churchill to act during the interim prior to the election. Prompting the resignation was the indication by the Labor Party Ministers of the Cabinet that they would take no role in the government until after the general election, breaking asunder the coalition. The day before, the Prime Minister had rejected the proposal of Deputy Prime Minister Clement Atlee, leader of the Labor Party, that the coalition Government remain until the fall on the premise that the rejection of the coalition by Labor had seriously undermined confidence in the Government on the world stage at a critical time. Mr. Churchill, himself, was at the peak of British popularity.

A piece explains the procedure in Britain for selection of the Prime Minister following a general election of Parliament called by the reigning monarch. Typically, it occurs when the sitting Government is defeated in Commons on a major issue or rejected pursuant to a requested vote of confidence. The majority party in the election determines who would be the next Prime Minister, who would then select a new Cabinet, confirmed by a vote of confidence in Commons.

The essential difference between the British and American systems is the separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches in America. In Britain, the Prime Minister and all Cabinet Ministers must be members of Commons and thus are available daily for questioning by the membership.

The British opposition press was already lampooning Mr. Churchill in editorial cartoons, as the campaign was incipiently in full swing. The News Chronicle, a Liberal publication, portrayed him standing in a tophat with a determined expression beside a large dog named "Tory Party". Before the dog was a bone bearing the label "Remains of Beveridge, Etc., Etc." The title of the caricature was "Love Me, Love My Dog".

The Daily Herald, a Labor newspaper, had Mr. Churchill descending by parachute with tophatted "paradroopers", his fellow Tories.

The Daily Mirror found the election a rushed Tory trick, to capitalize on the end of the war, while Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express celebrated the fact that Britons could choose their own government, in contrast to the captured Germans.

On instructions from Supreme Allied Headquarters, British tanks and infantry moved in and arrested the Doenitz Government at Flensburg, ending the remnants of the German High Command and the German Acting Government, which had declared itself as such three weeks earlier upon the news of Hitler's death. About 300 officers and other soldiers and civilians were taken into custody.

Col. General Gustav Jodl and Admiral von Friedeberg, signers of the surrender documents at Reims, were among those taken into custody.

Lt. General Leonard Gerow, commander of the German occupation forces of the 15th Army, had assigned the task of administering the American-occupied sector of Germany to Dr. Hans Fuchs, a Catholic whom the Nazis had labeled a traitor in 1933 and written the word on his home.

He had been Oberpraesident of the Rhine Province since 1922 when stripped of the position by the Nazis. He had worked for the Kaiser and then the ensuing Weimar Republic for over thirty years. Dr. Fuchs blamed the rise of Hitler on the German dissatisfaction with the Versailles Treaty and its impact on the German economy, requiring all German earnings to go back into reparations such that the country could not prosper and rebuild, producing frustration, letting of which was accomplished through Nazi bootheel machinations.

He promised to begin the process of re-education of Germans to rid them of the Nazi stamp on their minds. He believed that the Christian Church would have to take the lead role in that process.

A Russian intelligence report to Supreme Allied Headquarters had stated that Hitler, paralyzed and insane with pain during the last five days of his life, was killed by injection, presumably together with his wife, from a doctor as a mercy killing, whether the Fuehrer being willing or no, not told. Admiral Doenitz had originally reported to Maj. General Lowell Rooks that he had been willed as Hitler's replacement on April 21, placed on the books, and adduced three cables which gave him the right to surrender, by the tablets on the turned tables, Germany and the army of the Reich, that of which many Germans had written on the winds their rabid-lens, girned fables, Cyclopsian in sight.

On Okinawa, the Seventh Infantry Division, after two weeks of rest, had advanced behind the 96th Infantry Division through Yonabaru and a thousand yards beyond it into the hills, flanking and threatening Japanese defense of Naha and Shuri. The pre-dawn surprise attack through rain-soaked and muddy Yonabaru doubled the American lines, adding 4,000 yards, providing some breathing room in which to move and seeking to cut off supply roads into Naha and Shuri by seizing ridges overlooking those roads and cutting the east-west road into Naha. Provided the Seventh could continue its advance south along the ridges, they could dominate the major roads of the island.

On Luzon, flame-throwing tanks were utilized for the first time in support of the 38th Division in taking Woodpecker Ridge in the vicinity of Ipo Dam. The Ridge, named for the Japanese machine-gun nests on it, had been the object of attack by the Americans for three weeks. The flame-throwers burned off trees and other vegetation which had concealed the nests. After the taking of the position, 330 Japanese dead were counted. The 38th had accounted for 16,334 enemy dead since it had opened the Bataan Campaign four months earlier.

Woodpecker was the main barrier to the drive to recapture Wawa Dam.

Paris radio reported that Japanese forces had attacked French forces in Indo-China in the region of the Mekong River, just inside the Indo-China border with Burma. A French airfield was reported lost.

On Mindanao, the 31st Division occupied Malaybalay.

At San Francisco, a division erupted among the Big Five as to the type of veto power to be held on the Security Council. Britain wanted the other four to renounce the unilateral veto when a decision was before the Council regarding international disputes and the necessity to deploy force to resist aggression; otherwise the veto could be applied. Some of the members of the United States delegation were said to be leaning toward the British position.

The potentiality existed that the smaller nations would exert their majority will in committees over the Big Five and force positions on the larger nations which some of them would not accept.

While focus was on Russia, thus far not indicating its stand on the British plan, it was unlikely that the Senate would approve a charter which did not allow unilateral veto by the United States against use of force to counteract aggression in the Western Hemisphere. Latin American nations were being urged to support therefore the unilateral veto rather than the British plan.

An agreement between the Big Three at Yalta in February had provided for a majority rule of seven out of the eleven members of the Security Council, six of whom would be non-permanent positions, to vote on "procedural" questions, but the term had not yet been defined.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Stettinius had returned to Washington to consult with President Truman and would not return to the conference until the weekend.

Among issues being debated in his absence was the complaint by Syria and Lebanon that the French had sent new Sengalese troops into the Levant States, former French mandates which had gained their independence during the war. The French responded that they were within their rights under reservations made at the time of independence. According to the French, they had acted to prevent other powers from moving into the Levant States. Bloodshed had already occurred in Lebanon and Syria, and the two States had appealed to the Arab Federation for assistance and also had asked that the Big Three demand the withdrawal of all troops not essential to the Allied war on the Axis.

John F. Kennedy this date, in his last of ten pieces written from San Francisco for the Hearst newspapers, discusses the problematic strict adherence to the unilateral veto rule and why it had caused the objection of the smaller nations and their consequent gravitation toward regional bloc unity as a device for mutual defense, alternative to the U. N.

He would write one other piece, from London a month later, on why Churchill might lose the election in Britain.

An inside page reports again of the sporadic Japanese balloon attacks on the Western part of North America. Though nearly verbatim from the report on the front page of yesterday, we reiterate it so that you will be sure footed and certain of your step through the woods, to avoid these dangerous devices if spotted. Some may yet not be discovered and YOU, YOU, could be in danger. If you see strangely deteriorated paper things on the ground, DO NOT TOUCH. It could be lethal, a Jap Trap. Especially if it bears markings such as: "Hey, Yank boy, come here. Touch this. It nice and soft."

And, don't miss Herbert Hoover directing the singing at the Central Baptist Church in Charlotte during the coming two weeks.

On the editorial page, "The One Is Twain" comments on the couple who had obtained in Nevada their respective divorces from their former spouses and then believed themselves legally to be capable of marriage to one another, now winding up with Judge Sam J. Ervin's jail sentences for bigamy strapped to them, resultant of the United States Supreme Court, having first in 1942 required North Carolina to recognize the Nevada divorce decrees for each of the couple, now having found the six-week residency requirement of Nevada a sham and invalidated the decrees at the behest of North Carolina.

North Carolina, of course, has, on occasion, through time, adopted a fine tradition of manipulating the laws on the books to accommodate particular defendants or specific factual circumstances, in a dramatic effort to legislate morality or to get at persons of a political stripe not deemed acceptable by the moneyed interests of the state, that is Tobacco—or those who do not shine by the light of the moon in Buena Vista. Morality is that which can only be legislated individually between Man and his God, the Royal decrees of which, by God's self-anointed Agents on Earth, Americans fought a Revolution to be shed of and which should never be in any courtroom of the United States, disserving the law, justice, and the American Constitution, most especially, in the case at hand, disgracing the State of North Carolina.

"Our Labor Record" comments on the good labor record in North Carolina's war industry. Only four major cases had been brought before the War Labor Board, one each from Greensboro, Enka, Durham, and, most recently, the Cocker Machine & Foundry Co. strike at Gastonia.

"US in Germany" comments on the Russian criticism of British-American policy in Western Germany, contending that the West was making deals with Admiral Doenitz and his provisional government—finally just arrested after three weeks in limbo.

"Tar Heel Bands" tells the story of North Carolina's Saxie Dowell, the band leader aboard the U.S.S. Franklin who kept spirits up amid tragedy and had the band play on, even as the stricken ship appeared about to capsize. When the Franklin had arrived at Brooklyn Navy Yard recently still under its own steam, though severely wounded, Dowell's band played "The Old Gray Mare".

It prompted the editors to give thought to the apparent grip on the band market possessed by North Carolinians. The past generation had Kay Kyser, Jan Garber, John Scott Trotter, Skinnay Ennis, Johnny Long, Les Brown and his Band of Renown. And now to that list was added Saxie Dowell.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Chet Holifield of California remarking on V-E Day, that it was not only the enemy who had paid the heavy price of war, but also the victors. The Congressman had visited England and France a few months earlier, had observed the bombed-out ruins, scenes he would never forget.

A letter to the editor from the executive secretary of the Charlotte office of the N.A.A.C.P. voiced considerable concern over the opposition by Repesentatives Joe Ervin and Alfred Bulwinkle to the bill to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee, calling their resistance to it ridiculous and unreasonable.

Drew Pearson reports of a secret communication from chief American prosecutor for the war crimes tribunal, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, addressed to Ed Pauley of the Reparations Commission, opining that it was destructive of the moral position of America in the war to allow Russia and France to utilize German slave labor to rebuild those two devastated countries. He stated that compulsory labor should be reserved for war criminals, which included as a class the SS and Gestapo, but not all members of the Nazi Party. Otherwise, German labor coming out of Russian concentration camps would impart tales of horror, whether true or not, which would elicit strong condemnation in the United States and harm relations with Russia.

Marquis Childs writes of the Republicans in the House, having uniformly stood in opposition to the reciprocal trade agreements bill to allow the President to lower tariffs by as much as 25 percent to effect international trade, now being at work against the Bretton Woods proposal to establish the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. They were stimulated by the American Bankers Association, against the IMF, the backbone of the plan without which the World Bank could do little. The IMF's role was to insure stable currencies, enabling member nations to exchange their own currency for gold-backed dollars up to a certain percentage of the collateral they had on reserve in their own currency, constituting, in the conglomerate, the fund.

The British isolationists, wealthy and entrenched in British society, some in the Churchill Cabinet, assumed that the Americans would not go beyond lip-service in support of international cooperation, that they would manage their economy so badly as to have another depression, impacting world markets, leading again to war. So these British isolationists favored a trade barter system built around the British Commonwealth with its considerable advantage of Empire.

Turning down Bretton Woods, suggests Mr. Childs, would provide fuel for the British isolationists' argument. Bretton Woods was the underpinning economically of the United Nations Organization to come out of the San Francisco Conference. It would work in coordination with the Economic and Social Council of the U. N. to prevent the sort of economic piracy which had led to world war twice in the span of 25 years.

Samuel Grafton, addressing an issue taken up the previous week by John F. Kennedy in one of his reports on the San Francisco Conference, finds the most startling news to come from the conference to be that the American delegation had refused to endorse independence for colonies throughout the world. The Americans had provided "quivers-full" of propaganda weapons to the Soviets, who had come out four-square for colonial independence, by giving instead a mealy-mouthed statement that "progressive development toward self-government" was more important than independence.

Author and historian James Truslow Adams finds that an hour in which the Earth might stand still would be salutary to modernity, to provide it time in silence to contemplate itself and where it might be headed.