Into New York Harbor

For most of the men who fought in Europe, the war ended not on V-E Day but at the moment the Statue of Liberty came up over the bow. The New York Port of Embarkation had shipped more than three million troops out; from the summer of 1945 it began taking them back.

The liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, stripped of their peacetime fittings, each carried some 15,000 men a crossing in stacked bunks. They came up the Narrows early in the morning, and the fireboats and tugs turned out to meet them.

Men crowded the rails and the decks, waving helmets at a statue most had last seen going the other way. Some of them had been gone more than three years. The torch, dark for most of the war, was lit again in May 1945.

The soldiers are painted from behind, so the viewer stands among them on the deck. Every hand and helmet is raised, and the eye follows the arms up and across the water to the statue, which stands small and pale against a sky just breaking into gold. The men are all packs, straps and wet boots on a slick deck; the harbor ahead is airy and light. The picture is built on that contrast.