V Day on Times Square

Crowds had been gathering in Times Square since the afternoon. At seven o'clock on August 14, 1945, President Harry Truman announced that Japan had accepted the Allied terms of surrender, and the city poured into the street: sailors, soldiers, office workers and families, shoulder to shoulder from curb to curb.

The formal surrender came later, on September 2, aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, but for most Americans this was the evening the war ended, after nearly four years of rationing and waiting. In the United States it is remembered as V-J Day, victory over Japan.

The picture puts the crowd at street level: a sailor and a woman in a white dress share a kiss at the center, a band plays at the right, and flags go up on every side, with a woman at the left in a red dress, hands clasped, smiling. The signs overhead glow orange, VICTORY and PEACE, and confetti hangs in the lamplight all the way down the avenue.