In 1945, while Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill attended the Potsdam Conference in Berlin, Stalin had to use the outhouse. It had been constructed solely for use by the “Three Greats”. Once inside the privy, Stalin saw a big nose, small eyes and small hands chalked on the wall. The nose seemed to peer over a barricade. Next to the doodle stood three words: “KILROY WAS HERE.” Perplexed Stalin asked his aide, “Who is Kilroy?”

James J. Kilroy wrote “KILROY WAS HERE” next to the blocks of rivets he had inspected. Graphic J. Elke Ertle, 2018. www.walled-in-Berlin.com

Although I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this account, it is a fact that during and after World War II someone by the name of Kilroy seemed to have been just about everywhere. On top of that, he seemed to have been there before anyone else. Who was he and how was this possible?

Who was Kilroy?

James J. Kilroy is not a fictional character. He was an inspector at the Bethlehem Steel Company’s Quincy shipyard in Massachusetts during World War II. His job was to check the number of rivets properly completed on the troop ships the shipyard produced. Riveting was a paid on a piecework basis. The more rivets completed, the bigger the riveters’ paychecks. Kilroy got into the habit of placing a chalk mark next to each block of completed rivets on the bulkheads of the ships to indicate that he had inspected them. When Kilroy was off duty, however, the riveters sometimes erased his marks. The next shift’s inspector, not seeing any marks, would count the rivets for the second time, which meant double pay for the riveters. When Kilroy suspected the ruse, he began adding “KILROY WAS HERE” next to his check mark.

How did Kilroy get to be everywhere?

Because of the war, the ships left the shipyard as soon as construction was completed, which left no time to paint over Kilroy’s inspection marks. Thousands of U.S. sailors boarded the ships. At first, the servicemen wondered what the Kilroy illustration meant. As a joke, they scribbled KILROY WAS HERE wherever they landed. As a result, before war’s end Kilroy supposedly had been here, there and everywhere in Europe and in the South Pacific. Servicemen challenged each other to place the enigma in the most unlikely places, such as on the top of Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, underneath the Arc de Triomphe, on the Berlin Wall and just maybe even inside the outhouse used by the “Three Greats”during the Potsdam Conference. Somewhere along line, and it is still not entirely clear when it started, the words became associated with a nose peeking over a barrier. They came to imply, “Kilroy is watching you.”

Will the Real James J. Kilroy please step forward?

The origin of the graphic remained a riddle until the American Transit Association sponsored a nationwide contest in 1946 to located the real Kilroy. Nearly 40 men came forward claiming to be the man with the long nose peering over the fence. Only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, could prove his identity. Although he was the originator of the words, KILROY WAS HERE, he did not add the graphic of the nose peeking over the fence.

For a sneak peek at the first 20+ pages of my memoir, Walled-In: A West Berlin Girl’s Journey to Freedom, click “Download a free excerpt” on my home page and feel free to follow my blog about anything German: historic or current events, people, places or food.

Walled-In is my story of growing up in Berlin during the Cold War. Juxtaposing the events that engulfed Berlin during the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s Berlin visit with the struggle against my equally insurmountable parental walls, Walled-In is about freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. harmony, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.