The Waterbury Democrat., 1945-03-31

l NdHVuL ny bAlC 4OOe A-AAAAAAeb AAAAA N Army told his captors glumly that the road to Berlin was wide open.
 The officer, whose name was withheld, said no organized German resistance was left in the path of the Allied armies, and he was un- derstood to have volunteered the information that Patton's mem could spend Easter Sunday in Ber- lin if they wished.
 London press dispatches quoted the officer as saying that the Ger man army was deliberately letting the western Allies through while fighting desperately to hold the Russians in the east.
 Only on the U. s. Seventh Army front to the south were the Allies meeting the fanatical resistance that Nazi spokesmen had boasted would face them on every mile of the road to Berlin.
 The Seventh Army captured the famous university city of Heidelberg with relative east, but 30-odd miles to the north they ran into a fero- cious battle along the Main river in the south of Aschaffenburg.
 German regulars, Volkssturm units and even teen-aged girls swarmed back into Aschaffenburg, where all resistance appeared to have ended days ago, and fought viciously from house to house against doughboys of the American 45th Infantry division.
 Hhe motley German defense force also was fighting back hard from miniature Seigfried line of steel and concrete bunkers east of the main river just south of Aschaffen- burg.
 Front dispatches said the Nazis had strong artillery and tank forces in action there, possibly to cover German retreat into the southern mountains of Bavaria.
 Schoolgirls Snipers
 German women and schoolgirls were reported sriping at the aYnks inside Aschaffenburg with rifles and bazookas, and repeatedly hurled grenades down on the heads of the Americans. One 15-year-old girl was shot while trying to fire bazooka at column of passing American tanks.
 Nevertheless, the Seventh Army continued to make steady if un- spectacular progress. The Alneri- jeans regained most of Aschaffer- burg and expande dtheir bridgehead three miles or more east of the Main on a 12-mile front south of the city.
 They cleared Hoffstein, Hausen. ossbach, Worth, and Amorbach and Elsenfeld.
 The battle for Heidelberg was short Lived The Americans tried first to negotiate with the mayor for the surrender of the city. When that failed and the Germans showed signs of fight, the Tanks stormed in from the north and southeast and quickly subdued the enemy forces.
 Late dispatches said Seven Army troops advanced nine miles east of Heidelberg against scattered op- position in the Hirschhorn area. About 1900 German prisoners were bagged in the area yesterday, in- cluding Brig. Gen. Gaede, com. mander of the 719th Infantry d1vt- sion, who was found covering in . pillbox on the west bank of the Rhine.
 The continuing Allied security blackout still obscured the location of the most advanced American and British columns enveloping the Ruhr this morning, but censored front reports made it clear that a decisive breakthrough had been won on the north, west and southeast approaches to the arsenal basin.
 Montgomery's British Secon d army tanks officially were disclosed to have cleared Duelmen, F miles southwest of Muenster, and flood of reports from the Paris, Brussels and clandestine Atlantic radios said they were in and beyond Muenster, 227 miles west of Berlin.
 The American Ninth army's Eighth armored division, just south of the British, cracked through the German lines along the Lippe river and raced ahead 12 miles or more around the northern flank of the Ruhr yesterday
 Tank Location Secret
 The exact whereabouts of the American tanks were not immedi- ately divulged, but it was indicated that they and the British were speeding over Thwestphalian Plains toward an imminent juncture with It. Gen. Courtney H. Hodges Amer ican First army coming up from the south.
 convention has yet been set.
 Waterbury descended en masse on Hartford last week. There were