As you can see from the coverage of The Kissing Sailor in Toronto, Canada’s flagship newspaper, The Globe and Mail, sixty-five years after this picture was taken, it is not hyperbole to say that interest in this picture, this event, this moment, has not flagged, it has only intensified.
When people finished reading James Bradley’s bestseller, Flags of Our Fathers, they fixed the image of the six Marines raising the American Flag on Mount Suribachi in their minds and they knew what it felt like to fight and die in World War II. Now, just over a decade after reading that book, when people finish reading The Kissing Sailor, they will know what it felt like when World War II ended and the killing and the dying finally stopped. And they will know a great deal more.
They will know that this photo should never have happened. The three principals should have been dead. The photographer’s World War I regiment was wiped out at the Battle of Verdun. The Jewish woman’s family perished in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Hundreds of the sailor’s World War II mates drowned in Typhoon Cobra. Despite forces that plotted to kill them all, somehow they lived to cross paths in Times Square, New York, on the day World War II ended.
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