On August 14, 1945, Alfred Eisenstaedt took a picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, minutes after they heard of Japan’s surrender to the United States. Two weeks later
LIFE magazine published that image. It became one of the most famous WWII photographs in history (and the most celebrated photograph ever published in the world’s dominant photo-journal), a cherished reminder of what it felt like for the war to finally be over. Everyone who saw the picture wanted to know more about the nurse and sailor, but Eisenstaedt had no information and a search for the mysterious couple’s identity took on a dimension of its own. In 1979 Eisenstaedt thought he had found the long lost nurse. And as far as almost everyone could determine, he had. For the next thirty years Edith Shain was known as the woman in the photo of V-J Day, 1945, Times Square. In 1980
LIFE attempted to determine the sailor’s identity. Many aging warriors stepped forward with claims, and experts weighed in to support one candidate over another. Chaos ensued.
For almost two decades Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi were intrigued by the controversy surrounding the identity of the two principals in Eisenstaedt’s most famous photograph and collected evidence that began to shed light on this mystery. Unraveling years of misinformation and controversy, their findings propelled one claimant’s case far ahead of the others and, at the same time, dethroned the supposed kissed nurse when another candidate’s claim proved more credible. With this book, the authors solve the 67-year-old mystery by providing irrefutable proof to identify the couple in Eisenstaedt’s photo. It is the first time the whole truth behind the celebrated picture has been revealed. The authors also bring to light the couple’s and the photographer’s brushes with death that nearly prevented their famous spontaneous Times Square meeting in the first place. The sailor, part of Bull Halsey’s famous task force, survived the deadly typhoon that took the lives of hundreds of other sailors. The nurse, an Austrian Jew who lost her mother and father in the Holocaust, barely managed to escape to the United States. Eisenstaedt, a World War I German soldier, was nearly killed at Flanders.
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Lawrence Verria is the Social Studies Department Chair at North Kingstown High School, and Rhode Island’s 2000 Teacher of the Year. During his twenty-nine-year career as a history teacher, he served as an educational consultant to
Frontline (PBS) and as a spokesperson for The Watson Institute for International Studies’ Choices for the 21st Century Education Program at Brown University. He is the recipient of the Susan B. Wilson Civic Education Merit Award and Rhode Island College’s Evelyn Walsh Prize for excellence in history studies.
Captain George Galdorisi, USN (Ret.) is a naval aviator who began his writing career in 1978 with an article in Proceedings. His Navy career included four command tours and five years as a carrier strike group chief of staff. He has written seven books previously, including the
New York Times best-seller,
Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor, the novelization of the Bandito Brothers/Relativity Media film starring U.S. Navy SEALs. He is currently the director of the Corporate Strategy Group at the Navy’s C4ISR Center of Excellence in San Diego, California. For more information on
The Kissing Sailor and other books by Capt. Galdorisi, please visit www.georgegaldorisi.com. David Hartman was the original, and for over 11 years, host of
Good Morning America. He writes and produces numerous programs about the history of military aviation and space and has earned two national News and Documentary Emmys for writing and the Aviation/Space Writers Association Journalism Award.
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