Confusion About Kissing Sailor

VA Assist. Secretary Requests that iconic "VJ Times Square" photo be banned

Decades after VJ Day, my grandfather still recalled the extraordinary elation he felt upon hearing the news that his two brothers (fighting in the Pacific) were going to survive the war. He himself was headed home from fighting in Europe and equally relieved that he no longer had to worry about the possibility of being redeployed in the Pacific.

Upon hearing the VJ news, my great grandmother (paradoxically) suffered such nervous excitement that all three of her sons were going to make it home that she was briefly hospitalized. For two years she’d lived in a constant state of tension that was relieved all at once, and she was overwhelmed by it.

I thought of this incident when I saw a Memorandum recently circulated by the VA Assistant Under Secretary for Health for Operations. The purpose of the Memo was to request that Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic V-J Day in Times Square photograph—of a drunk sailer kissing a dental assistant he mistook for a nurse—be removed from all VA buildings.

Reports that the photograph was indeed banned were premature. The Under Secretary’s request has been denied—perhaps as a result of protests after word of the Memo got out.

The sailor in the photograph was a strapping young man from Newport, Rhode Island named George Mendonsa. The “nurse” was a young girl named Grete Zimmer from Wiener Neustadt, Austria who’d emigrated to the US in 1939.

Like my grandfather and great uncles when they heard the news of the Japanese surrender, Mendonsa was overwhelmed with elation. He was also pretty drunk. Walking through Times Square (with his girlfriend trailing behind him) he clapped his eyes on young Grete Zimmer, mistook her for a nurse, and felt an overwhelming desire to kiss her.

As Grete later related the story, she didn’t see it coming. In an instant she was in his arms with her lips pressed to his. Alfred Eisenstaedt, who’d already felt the extraordinary frenetic energy of all the young people in Times Square, sensed that a moment like this was in the offing, and walked around with his camera, looking for it.

And so, to be sure, the kiss was not consensual, and Greta perceived it to have no romantic or erotic quality. Nevertheless, she too felt the elation of the moment, and therefore didn’t take offense. Here is a photo of her in a Fourth of July parade with George Mendonsa in Bristol, Rhode Island in 2009.

Though the senior guys at the VA had sufficient good sense to reject the Under Secretary’s request, the Memo is worth reading as a notable expression of the total weirdos who now infest U.S. government agencies.