JOIN USTimes Square to re-enact V-J Day kiss
The war ended on August 14, 1945, after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender to the allied forces. The date has been known as V-J Day.
Groups of Americans and certainly some tourists in the crowded Times Square will re-enact the embrace in “kiss-in” demonstrations next to the statue of the sailor and the nurse, Edith Shain, who died in June this year at age 91.
A photographer, Alfred Eisentaedt, a German immigrant, was in Times Square on August 14, 1945, where people were celebrating the end of the war, and took the iconic picture of the sailor grabbing the whited-coated Shain and bending her backwards for the famous kiss.
The sailor was never identified even though a few came forth to claim to be the man in the intervening decades. Shain, who was identified as the woman in the picture only in the late 1970s, said before she died: “I went from hospital to Times Square that day because the war was over, and where else does a New Yorker go?
“And this guy grabbed me and we kissed, and then I turned one way and he turned the other,” said Shain, who worked at Doctor’s Hospital in New York at the time. V-J Day will be celebrated throughout the US as well as on the first national day of remembrance for the generation of Americans who took part in World War II. Programmes call for buglers in some cities to play “Taps” and ceremonies to pay tribute to those who died in the war.