UNITED KINGDOM: British PM Churchill forms a caretaker government to serve until the elections. This action is due to the withdrawal of the Labour Party from the coalition government.

The general election - the first for ten years - will be on 5 July. The run-up to the contest to decide Britain's post-war future began today with Mr. Churchill going to see the King.

He resigned as prime minister and thus automatically ended the wartime coalition government. The constitutional wheels had been well-oiled. Four hours later the king asked Mr. Churchill to form a new government. He agreed. But would the king then graciously dissolve parliament next month to allow the July election?

The king assented. Mr. Churchill at once started forming a caretaker team in which Labour leaders and most of the Liberals will refuse to serve. Earlier this week the prime minister asked Labour to stay in the coalition government at least until Japan is defeated. Under pressure from party activists Mr. Attlee replied: "We will carry on only until October."

Mr. Churchill said that this was unacceptable for it would herald a period of damaging uncertainty. There is a feeling at Westminster that Labour's vote-gathering organization is in a higher state of readiness than that of its rivals. This explains the tactical manoeuvring over the date.

The Allies reveal PLUTO - the Pipeline Under The Ocean - which supplied them with fuel after the D-Day landings.

Minesweeper HMS Mariner commissioned.

HMC MTB 748 paid off.

GERMANY: Heinrich Himmler now captured by the British, commits suicide between being searched and his first questioning. He died as he was being examined by a British doctor at Second Army HQ, Luneburg. He had been stripped and searched, but when the doctor put a finger in his mouth Himmler jerked his head back and crunched a tiny phial of cyanide. Stomach pumps and emetics failed to save him. He was left in a heap on the floor until he had been seen by a Red Army liaison officer. Himmler, who was 44, went on the run after Germany's surrender. Stopped by a British patrol near Hamburg, he claimed to be a rural policeman called Heinrich Hitzinger, but under interrogation he removed the black eye patch he was wearing and put on the familiar full-moon glasses.

Flensburg: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the so-called Flensburg Führer, was arrested this morning along with members of his "government". The German high command was also dissolved and the officers placed under arrest on the orders of General Eisenhower. Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, who signed the surrender at Luneburg, was allowed to visit the lavatory after his arrest; there he took poison.

Outside the town, at Schloss Glucksburg, Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and war production, was in his bath when an Allied officer told him that he was under arrest. "A good thing too," he said. "It was just an opera anyway."

The Allies were fearful that without a German government acting as a central authority the Wehrmacht units would not surrender smoothly. Now the German surrender is effectively finished.

For some Germans, however, it is a different story. Wernher von Braun and other rocket scientists have been taken to France to be put on board a ship for the US. Reinhard Gehlen, a senior intelligence officer, brought with him the files on German agents in the Soviet Union. He too has been made welcome by the Americans.