Erin

life:

50 Photos That Brought the War Home. It’s Veterans Day and the least we can do.

No single picture from World War II — in fact, arguably, no single 20th-century photograph — is more famous than Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “VJ Day in Times Square.”

On August 14, 1945 — but when this photo appeared in LIFE, countless readers were drawn to the story it told: a man and a woman, both in uniform, both young, in the very heart of America’s greatest city, celebrating the end of a long, brutal conflict with that most unwarlike of gestures: a lingering, “Who cares who sees us?” kiss.