Seven decades ago, Petty Officer 1st Class George Mendonsa and his date were among the hordes in Times Square celebrating Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II when Mendonsa grabbed what he thought was a nurse (she was a dental assistant), leaned her back and kissed her in a fit of emotion. Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured the moment, and as they say, the rest is history. The iconic photo came to represent the relief and excitement over the war’s end, but Eisenstaedt never got his subjects’ names. On the photo’s 40th anniversary, Life asked the nurse and…
Browsing: Photos
The Navy’s operational security program is making a big push for sailors and and their families to lock down their social media presence lately, in the wake of a list of service members posted to an Islamic State group supporter’s website last month. Though no imminent threats have been made against sailors, officials urged personnel to tighten the privacy settings on their social media accounts by making them private or unsearchable, and removing any military affiliation from their accounts. But the internet is a labyrinth of accessible personal information and confusing privacy settings, so the experts at Navy Information Operations…
Halloween is in the rear view, but two very sweet pics arrived in the Navy Times inbox that require sharing. These images show Addie, the 7-year-old daughter of Senior Chief Air Traffic Controller (AW/SW) Kevin Kruse and Wendy McCoy Kruse, decked out in an aircraft carrier costume. Addie, in aquaflage no less, serves as the ship’s island while the rest of the flattop is built around her wheelchair. “The sounds of ‘Anchors Aweigh’ playing as she strolled the neighborhood in the USS Addie made for the best Halloween ever!” Wendy wrote in a message to Navy Times. The Navy spouse…
Four men wearing enlisted service dress blues attended a Las Vegas expo filled with porn stars. And a Utah National Guardsman has the pics to prove it. The picture-taker, a 29-year old specialist who requested his full name not be used and attended the event out of uniform, said he was in the crowd Jan. 19 at the Adult Entertainment Expo at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino when he noticed the quartet. “There’s something wrong with these pictures,” said the tipster who sent the above image — and other pictures, including some less suitable for publication. “It’s awesome that…
Ernie Borgnine was the reason I joined the Navy, though I didn’t meet him until 2003 at the Navy Memorial in downtown Washington, D.C. As a child growing up in the 1960s, one of my favorite television shows was “McHale’s Navy,” with Borgnine playing the part of Lt. Cmdr. Quentin McHale, drawing from his own experiences in nearly 10 years on active duty. “Doing that show was very much like being back in the Navy for me,” Borgnine said. “And like being part of a ship’s crew, we really became very close doing that show and many of us stayed…
Pulled by a beefy ocean-going tug appropriately called Warrior, the 45,000-ton battleship Iowa left its retirement berth with the mothball fleet in the San Francisco Bay area for a new life as a museum ship. As of Tuesday afternoon, the 877-foot-long Iowa was south of the Channel Islands on course for San Pedro, home to the port of Los Angeles. That put the ship a bit ahead of schedule. “The Iowa came in way too fast,” Anthony Broude, whose own historic group, the merchant ship SS Lane Victory, planned a Wednesday escort for Iowa’s early-morning arrival at San Pedro, told the Contra…
The Fleet Reserve Association today announced that it has established scholarships for the children of enlisted Navy medics. The Colonel Hazel Elizabeth Benn Scholarship Fund provides a $2,000 scholarship “to an unmarried, dependent child of those who have served or are now serving” in the Navy “as enlisted medical personnel with the U.S. Marine Corps. ” The Benn Scholarship is available to “qualified applicants” entering their freshman or sophomore year of college. The Benn Scholarship is open to all such children regardless of their parents’ affiliation with FRA, according to a press release. Other FRA Education Foundation scholarships are available…
Every four years, Leap Year adds one day to the calendar to keep our timekeeping in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the sun. I thought it’d be neat to find an event in naval history to highlight and mark the unusual day. Unfortunately, there aren’t any of those major anniversaries that one would normally note — say, one of the World War II island assaults. A web search yielded nothing. Nada. The Navy agrees. According to navy.mil, “There is no Navy historical data noted at this time for Leap Day (Feb. 29).” The Navy’s reference is to the big…
A euphemism is “the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant,” according to Merriam-Webster. An example might be couching a near-$1 billion increase in the cost of the most expensive ship ever in the most innocuous terms possible. My colleague Chris Cavas has a fine explainer story in the print version of this week’s Defense News on the soaring cost of CVN 78, the Gerald R. Ford. Chris notes that the Navy’s recently unveiled fiscal year 2013 budget request asks Congress for another $811 million atop a total price tag of…
Between rolling blackouts and very limited connectivity, the press gaggle I was with out on Wasp and Kearsarge this weekend had a devil of a time getting on line long enough to transmit stories back to land. Timing is everything. I finally managed to get one sent Sunday night from Kearsarge that was posted Monday morning. It was a pretty blustery day out there Sunday — so much so that flight operations were practically non-existent. But as the story notes, it was fun watching the topsiders track some “bad guys” who disembarked early afternoon into a small boat or two.…
