WWII sailor in iconic photo of kiss
George Mendonsa, who made the most credible claim to being the sailor shown kissing a woman in Times Square after the end of World War II in a photograph that became a national emblem of elation, died Sunday at a nursing home in Middletown, R.I.
Mr. Mendonsa, 95, died after a seizure, said Lawrence Verria, who with George Galdorisi wrote “The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo That Ended World War II” (2012).
The Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt took the picture on Aug. 14, 1945, just after word reached the public that the Japanese had surrendered. Times Square was thronged with people celebrating the end of the war, and Mr. Eisenstaedt’s series of four photos showed a uniformed sailor grabbing a woman in a nurse’s outfit, bending her back and kissing her. The two anonymous people appeared to embody the exuberance of the moment, and the photograph appeared on a full page in Life.
Mr. Eisenstaedt did not record the names of the pair, and their identities have been debated for decades. Three women have made tenable claims that they were the woman; many who have studied the matter believe the woman was most likely Greta Friedman.
In 1980, Edith Shain told Mr. Eisenstaedt she was the woman in the photo, and Life ran it again, asking the sailor to identify himself. Dozens of men came forward, at least 11 of whom made reasonably credible claims that they were pictured, but Mr. Mendonsa was adamant he was the one. He sued Life in the 1980s when the magazine would not definitively acknowledge he was the sailor, though nothing came of the lawsuit.
“How many people in a lifetime do something famous?” Mr. Mendonsa asked in an interview with The Daily Mail in 1995. “… I was not looking for any financial gain. I only wanted the recognition.”
Mr. Mendonsa eventually received recognition from most parties, after extensive testing. Among the efforts, in 2005 his face was 3-D mapped, then reverse-aged, to show that it matched the sailor’s in the photo. Four years later, Norman Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, analyzed the photo and said he could not find a single inconsistency between Mr. Mendonsa’s face and the sailor’s.
“No matter how you look at this, the story he gives, the physical oddities that are unique to him, the fact that several experts in different fields have looked over this case and have come to the conclusion that it is George Mendonsa,” Mr. Verria said in an interview Monday.
In 2014, an article on the website of Time, whose parent company stopped publishing Life in 2000, said that “many people view the photo as little more than the documentation of a very public sexual assault, and not something to be celebrated.”
Ms. Friedman said in a 2005 interview for the Veterans History Project, “It wasn’t that much of a kiss, it was more of a jubilant act that he didn’t have to go back. … The reason he grabbed someone dressed like a nurse was that he just felt very grateful to nurses who took care of the wounded.”
Mr. Verria said Ms. Friedman and Mr. Mendonsa met in 1980 and remained close until her death in 2016. She told The Navy Times in 2012 that the day was so momentous that she understood Mr. Mendonsa’s excitement. “I can’t think of anybody who considered that as an assault,” she said. “It was a happy event.”