A man identified as a sailor kissing a picture of World War II, Times Square, dies at age 95

Although Mendonsa never persuades Life magazine, which first published the photo of Alfred Eisenstaedt, that he was the man in the photo, several sources over the years – including the authors of "The sailor who kisses: The mystery behind the photo that ended the Second World War" – concluded that the sailor is Mendonsa. The authors cited facial recognition technology and high-tech forensic reconstructions.

In a 2015 interview, Mendonsa told CNN that he had never failed to convince anyone of this fact.

"And when I'm done showing you the pictures … if you do not admit it, I'd say you're a dummy bastard," he told a reporter who was was at his house in Middletown.

& # 39; We drink all and raise hell & # 39;

It was taken on August 14, 1945, soon after the news of Japan's capitulation – known as Victory Over Japan Day or VJ Day – spread through the streets of New York, a prelude to the impending end of the Second World War. World War. Even the Life caption under the photo, alternately known as "V-J Day in Times Square," talks about the sexism tolerated in newsrooms at the time.

Mendonsa was on vacation after a stay in the Pacific, he told CNN in 2015, and was on his first date with Rita Petry, who was linked to her sister's new husband.

In the morning, a crowd in front of Radio City Music Hall began banging on the doors of the theater shouting, "The war is over!" – a cry that echoed through the building.

Mendonsa and Petry went out in search of thousands of partygoers in the streets. They stopped in a bar.

"The alcohol was stealing, and I skipped several," he recalls. "We all drink and raise hell."

After leaving the bar, they found themselves in Times Square.

"So we enter Times Square and the war ends and I see the nurse," he recalls. "I had a few drinks, and it was just an instinct, I guess, I just caught it."

It was actually a dental assistant. While Petry, with whom he would spend more than 70 years in marriage, watched him, Mendonsa planted one on the woman in white.

"I was in the background, smiling like a dog," Petry told CNN during an interview in 2005. "That did not matter to anyone. me."

It was not a kiss & # 39;

It's a feeling that his daughter remembers hearing from his father.

"They came out of the theater and started to party, everyone was kissing everyone," Molleur said on Monday. "He was so grateful to all the nurses who helped all the injured soldiers."

"Suddenly, I was caught by a sailor," she recalls. "It was not a kiss, it was more an act of jubilation than it had to go back."

The sailor was "very strong," she told the Veterans History Project. The smooch was not romantic, she said. It was more than the war was over, she said, and people were so grateful.

"He was just holding me in. I'm not sure about the kiss," she says. "It was just someone who was partying."

Friedman died in 2016 in Richmond, Virginia. She was 92 years old. The photographer Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995 at the age of 96, has also disappeared.