George Mendonsa, Navy veteran identified as "kissing sailor" in photo of World War II, dies at age 95

February 18, 2019, 16:38 GMT

By Erik Ortiz

George Mendonsa, a World War II veteran whose assertions of sailor kissing a nurse with an iconic image was verified with the aid of a facial recognition technology, died early Sunday, said his girl. He was 95 years old.

Mendonsa was living in an assisted living center in Middletown, Rhode Island, and was suffering from severe congestive heart failure, her daughter Sharon Molleur told NBC News. He would have been 96 on Tuesday, she added.

Mendonsa, a retired fisherman, claimed for years that "he was the sailor who stuck to a photo taken on August 14, 1945 by Alfred Eisenstaedt and published in Life magazine as a scene from" VJ Day in Times Square ". That day, the Americans invaded the streets to celebrate the surrender of the Japanese to the Allies and the end of the war.

The photo has become one of the most enduring images of the twentieth century. But when it was published in Life, there was no legend confirming the identity of the pair.

Over the decades, other sailors have claimed that they were the mysterious man of the photo, including a Texas veteran who used a police forensic artist in Houston to claim his identity in 2007.

Mendonsa, however, did not move. In addition to remembering the exact moment of the kiss, he said that physical indicators such as the big hands of the man and the scar on the forehead were proof that it was him.

To get to the heart of Mendonsa's claim, Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi, authors of the 2012 book "The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo That Ended the Second World War", examined the facial recognition technology used by experts from Naval War College. and also conducted interviews to help rule out misrepresentations.

Mendonsa told Verria that he was on leave in Manhattan when the end of the war had been announced and that he was so swept by the time he saw a young nurse that he was on the run. felt obliged to kiss him.

Neither Mendonsa nor the nurse – whose identity was also unknown, but later confirmed as Greta Zimmer Friedman of Virginia – did not know at the time that the random kiss had been captured for posterity. Friedman died in 2016 at the age of 92.

Molleur said his father had never given up his claim to be on the photo and that he was living proudly with the legacy left by the statues and the giant recreations.

"He was very proud of his service, the photo and what it represented," said Molleur. "For many years, this has always been an important part of her life."