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The Mystery Behind the Photo That Ended World War II
Naval Institute Press
May 2012
On Sale: May 15, 2012
224 pages
ISBN: 1612510787
EAN: 9781612510781
Kindle: B008HRMBUA
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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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