Here’s the fascinating history behind the iconic WWII kiss photo in Times Square

The sailor featured in the iconic Times Square kissing photo from World War II probably should have grabbed a different woman for his smooch seen around the world.

George Mendonsa, 23, had just come back from the Philippines on leave as a Navy quartermaster and was on a date with Rita Petry, 20, when the pair joined the throngs of thousands flocking to the Crossroads of the World in Manhattan on Aug. 14, 1945, to celebrate V-J, or Victory over Japan, Day.

But as the future husband and wife crossed Seventh Avenue at West 44th Street, Mendonsa spotted Greta Zimmer, 21, in a nurse’s uniform — and remembered nurses pulling hundreds of Americans out of the water after two Japanese kamikazes attacked USS Bunker Hill, killing hundreds.

He ran away from Petry, his future wife, and grabbed Zimmer, spun her around, dipped her and kissed her — a now-iconic moment captured by famed “Life” magazine photog Alfred Eisenstaed that came to be etched into the American psyche as a symbol of joy over the end of the war.

“They were just coming off those trains, and everybody was partying,” recalled Sharon Molleur, 67, the daughter of Mendonsa and Petry, to The Post on Tuesday. “All the sailors were kissing [women], everybody was loaded, jumping up in the air. They were having a wonderful time.

“My dad I think kissed a lot of women [that day]. My mother was in the picture, I think he kissed her first,” Molleur said.

The daughter talked to The Post the same day it surfaced that woke officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs banned copies of her dad’s famous snap at agency facilities last month, only to have the edict reversed by their apparently furious boss. The VA higher-ups behind the ban claimed the photo showed a kiss of “non-consensual nature.”

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Mendonsa explained what led up to the famous buss in the 2012 book, “The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II.”

He said he had met Petry only weeks before that day at a barbecue at his family’s house in Rhode Island.

“She was beautiful,” said the former sailor, who died in 2019, three years after Petry and nearly 25 after Eisenstaedt. “I think I fell in love with her the first time I saw her.”

The pair took the train into Midtown that day and saw a movie at Radio City Music Hall — or at least some of it.

“There was pounding on the doors from outside on the street,” Mendonsa said. “They put the lights on and stopped the show and said, ‘The war is over, and the Japanese have surrendered!’ ”

The pair poured out of the theatre along with the rest of the crowd and headed into the nearby Childs Bar, where glasses of booze were lined up at the bar.

“I popped quite a few drinks,” Mendonsa recalled.

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What happened next, the soldier had less recollection of.

Mendonsa said he was too drunk to remember the kiss, but Petry remembered it well and was unfazed, according to the book.

“A lot of people want to know what I was thinking,” said Petry, who died last year . “It was a happy day; I was grinning like an idiot. The kiss really didn’t bother me at all. If I had been engaged, maybe.”

As for Mendonsa kissing Zimmer, Molleur said, “It was totally consensual,” adding that thousands of other sailors were making out with women at the time.

Mendonsa ended up becoming “very good friends with” Zimmer, according to his daughter.

Zimmer, a 21-year-old dental assistant from Queens, had fled to America from her native Austria in 1939.

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When she got word of the end of the war, she walked from her office to Times Square, not knowing that her parents had been killed in concentration camps. She stood in the chaos alone for several minutes before photo history was made.

“I was grabbed,” she said in the book. “That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me.”

Zimmer’s husband suggested that her thumb was sticking out because her arm had tensed up with discomfort, according to the tome.

The photo was buried on page 27 of “Life” when it was originally published — without IDs of anyone involved.

Thirty-five years later, Mendonsa finally recognized himself in the snap and sued Time-Life for not attributing that it was his likeness in the picture.

Zimmer immediately knew it was her in the famed photo, as well.

“The seams in my stockings were perfectly straight — I was always careful about that,” she said in the book. “And it was my figure, and my hairdo. I was carrying this little tapestry purse that I owned.”

The third wheel in the photo — Mendonsa’s future wife — didn’t mind its newfound appeal, even though she was on the sidelines.

“I never gave too much thought to it,” Petry said in the book. “By the time I knew about it, I’d been married for years.”

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