Luke Judge

NEW YORK — It is a defining image of the American century, one that expressed the joy of a nation at its moment of greatest triumph: On the day the Japanese surrender in World War II was announced, a sailor grabbed a nurse in the middle of Times Square, bent her back and kissed her.

That kiss on V-J Day was captured in at least two photographs — one iconic, one merely famous. And for decades since, there have been debates. Who was the sailor? Who was the nurse? Many people have staked claims, and countless stories have tried to sort them out.

This is not one of those stories.

This is the story of another nurse. Her face appears, small but beaming nonetheless, way off to the side in the less famous of the two photos, nearly out of the frame, perched beneath the W of a Walgreen’s Drugs sign, watching the kissers, transfixed. The woman, Gloria Bullard — vivacious and lucid at 84 and living in South Carolina — still treasures her tiny spot in history: not so much 15 minutes of fame as a few millimeters of it.

Bullard’s account not only provides a window into that remarkable moment whose 65th anniversary falls today, but, if correct, could also alter some long-held cultural assumptions about both the classic photograph by Life magazine legend Alfred Eisenstaedt and the more meat-and-potatoes shot by Victor Jorgensen, a respected Navy photographer, in which Bullard appears.

For decades, the world has believed that the photographs

were taken after — perhaps just seconds after — President Harry S. Truman’s announcement at 7:03 p.m. But in Bullard’s recollection, the kiss occurred hours earlier — before the war was officially over. That amorous sailor, quite possibly, had jumped the gun.

Gloria Delaney, as she was then known, was a 19-year-old nursing student in 1945 at New York Medical College. Like most of her classmates, she also worked full time at the college’s hospital, filling in for registered nurses enlisted in the war effort.

On Aug. 14, a nation hoping for Japan’s surrender after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9 was expecting word at any moment. The streets were filled with people, milling, anticipating, already celebrating. Delaney’s excitement was not just patriotic but also personal — the end of World War II would bring the man she would eventually marry home from the Philippines.

Delaney and her friend Margery Keech were excused a little early from their 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift and headed downtown to join the throngs before catching the train home to New Canaan, Conn. They had the next day off.

They were still wearing their uniforms.

“That was a no-no, but who cares that day,” Bullard said in a telephone interview this week. “We didn’t want to lose any time at all.”

The bus down Fifth Avenue crawled through a sea of humanity. The two friends got off and tried to make their way east to Grand Central Terminal but could not get through the crowds.

“We decided to walk over to Eighth Avenue to take the bus home,” Bullard said. “That’s when we got caught in Times Square.”

The crowded air was thick and loud.

“It was so exciting,” she recalled. “Horns, church bells, all kinds of noises.”

The young women’s white uniforms attracted the affections of the servicemen, who were everywhere in the street.

“My uniform had half-sleeves with cuff links, and by the end my cuffs were hanging off and I’d lost the cuff links, and my sleeves were torn from all the hugging and kissing,” Bullard said.

At the bow tie just south of 45th Street where Seventh Avenue and Broadway meet, Delaney’s eye happened to light on a gap in the crowd, where a sailor had seized a nurse.

“I just saw him grabbing her and then bending over and he kissed her.”

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