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.
