Story highlights
Several people have claimed to be the sailor and nurse in the photo
The iconic image appeared inside Life magazine's August 27, 1945 issue
Life's photo editor: "So many people have come forward... So we really don't know."
Editor’s Note: This is one in an occasional series called “Rewind: Where are they now?” It catches up with people who stumbled into the headlines – and then faded from view.
(CNN) —
In a wood-paneled man cave in his basement, George Mendonsa sorts through dog-eared photos and other mementos from his service in World War II.
Above the fireplace is a painting of the USS Bunker Hill, the mighty aircraft carrier crippled by kamikaze pilots in the closing months of the war.
Below, on the carpeted floor, is a statue based on an iconic Life magazine photograph taken 70 years ago today during celebrations marking V-J Day, the end of World War II. It’s a defining image of a turbulent time: a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square.
Getty Images
World War II veteran George Mendonsa, of Rhode Island, claims he's the sailor in the iconic 1945 Life Magazine photo of a couple smooching in Time Square.
For the 92-year-old veteran, those events are closely intertwined.
He’s the amorous sailor in the photo, he’ll tell you – even though the magazine has long said the identity of the couple remains a mystery.
“I haven’t found a person yet that I haven’t convinced,” says Mendonsa, a retired fisherman with a prominent nose on a long face framed by short gray hair.
“And when I get through showing you the photos … if you don’t admit that, I’d say you’re a phony bastard.”
On the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, Mendonsa lives with his wife, Rita Petry, on a quiet street in Middletown, Rhode Island. The sleepy coastal town of about 16,000 is roughly 180 miles northeast of Times Square, where a re-enactment of the famous kiss was held Friday.
Born in Newport to a commercial fishing family from Portugal, Mendonsa joined the Navy in 1942. After a stint in the Pacific, he was home on leave in the late summer of 1945.
His younger sister had recently married. Mendonsa helped prepare a seafood feast for the new in-laws, who visited from suburban Long Island in New York. They brought along a niece named Rita.
“Holy Jesus, she’s beautiful,” Mendonsa remembers thinking. “I turned on all my charm.”
It worked. On August 14, 1945, the young couple was on a date in Manhattan when a clamoring crowd outside Radio City Music Hall interrupted the matinee show, pounding on the doors.
When the lights came on, shouts of “The war is over!” echoed through the music hall. Theatergoers poured into the streets, now filled with thousands of revelers.
Mendonsa and Petry stopped at a bar.
“The booze was flying and I popped quite a few,” he says. “The bartender was filling glasses up and sliding them back and forth… We’re all drinking and raising hell.”
They left the bar and trailed the throngs to Times Square. Millions celebrated the joy of the nation as word spread of the Japanese surrender.
“I saw this nurse coming down,” Mendonsa remembers. “The war is over. The excitement of the war, and the drinking – and when I see the nurse, I grabbed her.”
Mendonsa pauses, pointing to the wall and changing the subject.
“If you go back in time,” he says, “that picture up there is the Bunker Hill.”
Three months before the end of the war, on the morning of May 11, 1945, the aircraft carrier was transporting thousands of crewmen, along with vast stores of fuel and ammunition.
National Archives
Smoke billows above the stricken USS Bunker Hill which was hit by two Kamikazes in 30 seconds on 11 May 1945 off Kyushu. General Photographic File of the Department of Navy.
A pair of kamikazes struck the vessel about 70 miles off the coast of Okinawa. More than 350 crew members perished.
“From the flight deck down to the water was nothing but a curtain of flames,” Mendonsa recalls. “We picked up the guys who jumped off. Some of these guys were hurting bad, real bad.”
Mendonsa was helmsman of the closest vessel, USS The Sullivans, which was named for five brothers who died when their ship was sunk in the Battle of Guadalcanal. A hospital ship arrived later.
“Those nurses went to work on these guys,” he says. “That stuck in the back of my head, I think, the rest of my life.”
Mendonsa returns to The Kiss.
“So we get into Times Square and the war ends and I see the nurse,” he remembers. “I had a few drinks, and it was just plain instinct, I guess. I just grabbed her.”
He adds, “A lot of people say, ‘Well, you grabbed the nurse and you’re with a date.’ I say, ‘For Chrissake, the war is over!’ I remembered what those nurses did out there.”’
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph of an American sailor kissing a woman in Times Square became a symbol of the excitement and joy at the end of World War II. The Life photographer didn't get their names, and several people have claimed to be the kissers over the years. A book released last year identifies the pair as George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman. "Suddenly, I was grabbed by a sailor," Friedman said in 2005. "It wasn't that much of a kiss. It was more of a jubilant act that he didn't have to go back (to war)."
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Charlie Cole/Newsweek
Following a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of student demonstrators in Beijing, a lone Chinese protester steps in front of People's Liberation Army tanks in Tiananmen Squarein 1989. At least five photographers captured the event, which became a symbol of defiance in the face of oppression. Charlie Cole, working for Newsweek, won a World Press Photo Award for his version of the image. The identity and fate of the "Tank Man" remains unclear.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Joe Rosenthal/AP
Joe Rosenthal's 1945 photograph of U.S. troops raising a flag in Iwo Jima during World War II remains one of the most widely reproduced images. It earned him a Pulitzer Prize, but he also faced suspicions that he staged the patriotic scene. While it was reported to be a genuine event, it was the second flag-raising of the day atop Mount Suribachi. The first flag, raised hours earlier, was deemed too small to be seen from the base of the mountain.
Photos: In photos: Syria's civil war
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
AP
A hooded detainee in U.S. custody during the Iraq War stands on a box with electrical wires hooked up to his fingers. The image became a symbol of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal after it was released, among others, in late April 2004. It did what a written report could not do, showing front-and-center what human rights groups had been saying for months: that prisoners were being abused at the hands of U.S. troops. The fallout was immediate, both overseas and at home.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Eddie Adams/AP
During the Vietnam War, Eddie Adams photographed Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese police chief, killing Viet Cong suspect Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street during the early stages of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Adams later regretted the impact of the Pulitzer Prize-winning image, apologizing to Gen. Nguyen and his family for the damage it did to the general's reputation. "I'm not saying what he did was right," Adams wrote in Time magazine, "but you have to put yourself in his position."
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Richard Drew/AP
Richard Drew captured this image of a man falling from the World Trade Center in New York after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. Its publication led to a public outcry from people who found the photograph insensitive. Drew sees it differently. On the 10th anniversary of the attacks, he said he considers the falling man an "unknown soldier" who he hopes "represents everyone who had that same fate that day." It's believed that upwards of 200 people fell or jumped to their deaths after the planes hit the towers.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Shannon Hicks/Newton Bee/AP
In the immediate aftermath of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, local journalist Shannon Hicks witnessed police escorting children out of the school in Newtown, Connecticut. "I knew that, coming out of the building -- as terrified as they were -- those children were safe," Hicks later told Time magazine. "I just felt that it was an important moment." The photograph made it onto the front pages of newspapers, magazines and websites around the world.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Robert Capa/ICP/Magnum Photos
Robert Capa, co-founder of the Magnum Photos cooperative, became known for his 1936 photograph said to depict the death of a solider during the Spanish Civil War. Since the 1970s, doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the image. Many people suggest that it was staged. The International Center of Photography in New York and Magnum, among others, have defended the image. Either way, "The Falling Soldier" remains one of history's most famous war photographs.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Yousuf Karsh
Yousuf Karsh's 1941 portrait of a scowling Winston Churchill -- reportedly reacting to Karsh snatching Churchill's cigar -- graced the cover of Life magazine and cemented the British prime minister's reputation as a "roaring lion." "By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me," Karsh recalled. "It was at that instant that I took the photograph." The Bank of England announced in 2013 that the famous portrait would be featured on the £5 note.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Alan Diaz/AP
During a raid at a Miami home in 2000, armed federal agents confront Elian Gonzalez, 6, and one of the men who helped rescue the boy. Gonzalez watched his mother drown when the boat smuggling them from Cuba capsized. Under international law, U.S. authorities were required to return the boy to his father in Cuba. Alan Diaz's photograph of the saga's defining moment won a Pulitzer Prize. "The cry I heard that day I had never heard in my life," Diaz said a decade later. "A cry like that will haunt anyone forever."
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
John Filo/Getty Images
Mary Ann Vecchio screams as she kneels over Jeffrey Miller's body during an anti-war demonstration in 1970 at Kent State University. Student photographer John Filo captured the Pulitzer Prize-winning image after Ohio National Guardsmen fired into the crowd of protesters, killing four students and wounding nine others. A widely published version of the image was manipulated by an anonymous editor to remove the fence post above Vecchio's head, sparking a major controversy.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
AP
American athletes Tommie Smith, center, and John Carlos raise their fists and hang their heads while the U.S. national anthem plays during their medal ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Their black power salute became front page news around the world as a symbol of the struggle for civil rights. To their left stood Australian Peter Norman, who expressed his support by wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Boston Globe photographer John Tlumacki was near the finish line when 78-year-old runner Bill Iffrig was knocked down by the first explosion at the Boston Marathon on April 15. The bombings left three people dead and injured more than 100. Iffrig got up and finished the race. Tlumacki's image of the fallen runner was widely published and selected for the cover of "Sports Illustrated."
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Matty Zimmerman/AP
Five decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains one of Hollywood's most adored sex symbols. Her sultry legacy is often traced back to the 1954 image of her posing over a New York City subway grate in character for the filming of "The Seven Year Itch." Monroe's then-husband, Joe DiMaggio, reportedly witnessed the spectacle and became enraged with jealousy. They divorced weeks later.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress
Dorothea Lange's photograph of a struggling mother with her children in 1936 became an icon of the Great Depression. Lange was traveling through California, taking photographs of migrant farm workers for the Resettlement Administration, when she came across Florence Owens Thompson. "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet," Lange recalled in 1960. The image was retouched to remove the woman's thumb from the lower right corner.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Pete Souza/White House via Getty Images
President Barack Obama and members of his national security team monitor the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. It was a crucial moment in American history, and White House photographer Pete Souza captured the tension in the room. "It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled," counterterrorism adviser John Brennan later told reporters. A classified document on the table was obscured by the White House.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Alberto Korda
Alberto Korda photographed Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in 1960 at a memorial service for victims of the La Coubre explosion in Havana, Cuba. The portrait, titled "Guerrillero Heroico," has been widely reproduced through the decades, evolving into a global symbol of rebellion and social justice. As a supporter of Guevara's ideals, Korda never sought royalties for the distribution of his image.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Nick Ut/AP
Associated Press photographer Nick Ut photographed terrified children running from the site of a napalm attack during the Vietnam War in 1972. A South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped napalm on its own troops and civilians. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc, center, ripped off her burning clothes while fleeing. The image communicated the horrors of the war and contributed to the growing anti-war sentiment in the U.S. After taking the photograph, Ut took the children to a hospital in Saigon.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Dirck Halstead/Liaison Agency
President Bill Clinton hugs Monica Lewinsky at a 1996 fund-raiser in Washington. At the time their relationship wasn't public, so the image fell into obscurity. But when the news of their affair broke, photographer Dirck Halstead recognized Lewinsky and recovered the photo from his archives. It eventually ran on the cover of Time magazine, and the Lewinsky scandal led to Clinton's impeachment.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Charles Porter IV/ZUMA Press/Corbis
Aspiring photojournalist Charles Porter was working near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 when "there was just a huge, huge explosion." He rushed to the scene and saw firefighter Chris Fields emerge from the rubble holding a dying infant, 1-year-old Baylee Almon. Porter's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the moment became a symbol of the Oklahoma City bombing, which claimed 168 lives.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Sam Shere/Getty Images
In 1937, Sam Shere photographed the Hindenburg disaster while on assignment in New Jersey. The crash killed 36 people and ended the era of passenger-carrying airships, which were once hailed as the future of flight. "I had two shots in my (camera) but I didn't even have time to get it up to my eye," Shere later said. "I literally shot from the hip -- it was over so fast there was nothing else to do."
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Robert H. Jackson/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
Two days after President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin. Photographer Robert H. Jackson, who covered the event's surrounding Kennedy's assassination, instinctively captured the moment and won a Pulitzer Prize. Ruby was later found guilty of murder. He appealed his conviction but died before the start of a new trial.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Kevin Carter/Sygma/Corbis
Kevin Carter's 1993 photograph of a starving child in southern Sudan brought him worldwide attention -- and criticism. Carter said the girl reached a nearby feeding center after he drove the vulture off, but questions persisted about why he didn't carry her there himself. Months after winning a Pulitzer Prize for the image, the South African photographer committed suicide. He was struggling with depression and coping with the recent death of his close friend and colleague Ken Oosterbroek.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
ARTHUR SASSE/AFP/Getty Images
On Albert Einstein's 72nd birthday in 1951, photographer Arthur Sasse tried to get him to smile for the camera. Tired of smiling for pictures, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist stuck out his tongue instead. It went on to become one of the most recognizable images of Einstein, who reportedly liked the photograph so much he asked for nine copies. He signed one of the prints, which sold for more than $74,000 in 2009.
Photos: 25 of the most iconic photographs
PHOTO:
Thomas E. Franklin/The Record/Getty Images
Firefighters George Johnson, Dan McWilliams and Billy Eisengrein raise a flag at the site of the World Trade Center in New York after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. The scene was immortalized by photographer Thomas E. Franklin and has been compared to the iconic image of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. CNN Films' "The Flag" examines what happened to the flag at ground zero and explores its impact in the aftermath of the tragedy.
That day, Petry watched as her date and future husband planted a kiss on the mouth of a stranger.
“I was in the background, grinning like a mutt,” she told CNN in 2005. “So it didn’t matter to me.”
The public’s reaction to the story bothered Petry more than the actual kiss.
“Women tell her, ‘I’d kick his ass out the door,’” Mendonsa says. “She gets annoyed when people try to knock her down by saying, ‘He did that and you were with him?’ She’s not happy when she starts getting that attitude.”
Proof: The couple will celebrate their 69th wedding anniversary in October.
One nurse kissed on V-J Day was actually a dental assistant named Greta Friedman, who saw the iconic photo for the first time in the 1960s. She recognized her figure, what she wore and, especially, her hair, according to an interview she gave the Veterans History Project in 2005.
She remembered walking across town to Times Square after hearing rumors about the war’s end.
“Suddenly, I was grabbed by a sailor,” she said. “It wasn’t that much of a kiss. It was more of a jubilant act that he didn’t have to go back.”
The sailor was “very strong,” she told the Veterans History Project.
“He was just holding me tight. I’m not sure about the kiss… It was just somebody celebrating. It wasn’t a romantic event. It was just … ‘Thank God, the war is over.’”
Friedman, who was born in Austria, lost her parents in the Holocaust, according to Lawrence Verria, co-author of the book, “The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II.” The authors describe evidence they say definitively proves that Mendonsa and Friedman were the people in the photograph.
After escaping Europe, Friedman came to the United States to live with family when she was 15. She later married and moved to Frederick, Maryland, where she had two children.
Friedman, who was not interviewed for this story, now lives in an assisted living facility in Maryland and her memory is failing, according to Verria.
It was 1980 when Mendonsa first saw the photo. A friend called him.
“Where the hell were you when the war ended?” the friend asked, according to Mendonsa.
“Times Square, New York.”
“Well, I know you were.”
“You don’t know where the hell I was.”
“I’ve got a Life magazine here. There’s a sailor kissing a nurse. I know it’s you.”
Mendonsa had a similar reaction when he saw the picture, which was shot by legendary Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.
“I said, ‘Goddammit, that’s me,’” he remembers. “The first thing that caught me … was the hand, the size of the hands. I said, ‘That’s my hand.’”
He holds up his outsized hand and offers other details – a small bump inside the left arm that he says is seen in the photo, a scar from a barroom fight above his right eye.
And he displays another photo of the moment, also shot by Eisenstaedt, of the kissing couple with a grinning young woman in the background. It’s Rita, Mendonsa says.
“My wife kept looking at that picture, and kept saying that’s her,” he says. “She can be identified in that photo probably quicker and easier than trying to identify me.”
’Balloon boy,’ Jessica Lynch, trapped Chilean miners - where are they now?
The V-J Day kiss was captured at the same time by two different photographers: Eisenstaedt and Navy photographer Victor Jorgensen, whose version is lesser known.
Many people have claimed to be the subjects of the image.
“So many people have come forward and said, ‘That was me,’” says Liz Ronk, photo editor of Life. “So we really don’t know.”
One of them, Carl Muscarello, was a former New York police detective.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Carl Muscarello and Edith Shain -- among those who have claimed to be the nurse and sailor in the famous V-J Day photo -- kiss next to a sculpture based on the photo in Times Square on August 14, 2005. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
“It was a lovely, lovely kiss,” he told CNN. “I held her close to me and, when I felt like she was going to pass out from lack of air, I let go of her.”
A retired Los Angeles elementary school teacher named Edith Shain, who died in 2010, insisted she was the mystery nurse.
“We had stockings with seams in them and I always had trouble keeping them straight,” she told CNN. “You see, there’s a little wrinkle there.”
An ex-sailor who lived in Houston, Glenn McDuffie, also staked his claim. McDuffie died last year at the age of 86.
“Glenn McDuffie kissed the nurse,” Houston police forensic artist Lois Gibson told CNN affiliate KTRK in 2007. “Glenn McDuffie is the swabbie that kissed the nurse and celebrated the war is over.”
But according to the authors of “The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II,” facial-recognition technology and high-tech forensic reconstructions proved that Mendonsa was the one.
On August 27, 1945, the famous photo was buried on page 27 of the 10-cent weekly. A ballet swimmer – who would now be called a synchronized swimmer – graced Life’s cover.
Eisenstaedt’s full-page masterpiece was part of a spread with the headline, “The Men of War Kiss from Coast to Coast.” It featured smooching servicemen across the country.
“From city to city and block to block, the purpose was the same but the techniques varied,” the article stated.
“They ran the osculatory gamut from mob-assault upon a single man or woman, to indiscriminate chain-kissing. Some servicemen just made it a practice to buss everyone in skirts that happened along, regardless of age, looks or inclination.”
Eisenstaedt used a Leica to shoot four frames of the kissing sailor and nurse.
“I was very lucky because I found this man … grabbing any and every girl in sight,” he said in a 1983 BBC documentary. “Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, thick… it doesn’t make any difference.”
Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995, added: “People tell me that when I’m in heaven … people will remember that picture: ‘Oh, this is the photographer who took that picture of V-J Day.’”
Bryan Thomas/Getty Images
NEW YORK, AUGUST 14: World War II veterans Ray and Ellie Williams recreate the iconic Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph in Times Square. The Williams, Nav