Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

Raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a famous photograph taken on February 23, 1945 by Joe Rosenthal, which depicts five United States Marines and one US Navy corpsman raising the Flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

Background

On February 16, 1945, as part of their island hopping strategy to defeat Japan, the United States invaded Iwo Jima. The island was heavily fortified, and the invading marines suffered extremely high casualties - it was the only Pacific battle in which the invaders suffered higher casualties than the defenders.

Mount Suribachi is the dominant geographical feature of Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima is a volcanic island, shaped roughly like a porkchop. The island is dominated by Mount Suribachi, a 546-foot (166 m) dormant volcanic cone. Militariy, the top of Suribachi is the most important location on the island. From that vantage point, the Japanese defenders were able to accurately spot artillery on the Americans.

The American effort would concentrate on capturing Suribachi first. Three days after the invasion, on February 19, 1945, Marines captured the top of Suribachi and raised a flag there, to signal others it had fallen.

First flag raising

The famous picture actually captured the second flag-raising event of the day. The first flag raised by Marines was too small to be easily seen, however the raising was captured on film by Sergeant Louis R. Lowery.

The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, had decided the previous night that he wanted to go ashore and witness the final stage of the fight for the mountain. Now, under a stern commitment to take order from Howlin' Mad Smith, the secretary was churning ashore in the company of the blunt, earthy general. Their boat touched the beach just after the flag went up, and the mood among the high command turned jubilant. Gazing upward, at the red, white, and blue speck, Forrestal remarked to Smith: 'Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years'.

Forrestal was so taken with fervor of the moment that he decided he wanted the Suribachi flag as a souvenir. The news of this wish did not sit well with [2nd Battalion Commander] Chandler Johnson, whose temperament was every bit as fiery as Howlin Mad's. 'To hell with that!' the colonel spat when the message reached him. The flag belonged to the battalion, as far as Johnson was concerned. He decided to secure it as soon as possible, and dispatched his assistant operations officer, Lieutenant Ted Tuttle, to the beach to scare up a replacement flag. As an afterthought, Johnson called after Tuttle 'And make it a bigger one'".

The second flag raising

File:Raising of the flag - colored.jpg

A photo colorized to show all six men - Ira Hayes (red), Franklin Sousley (violet), John Bradley (green), Harlon Block (yellow), Michael Strank (brown), Rene Gagnon (teal).

That order made its way down the ranks until the five marines of Company E (2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment, 5th Marine Division) got the order. Along with a Navy corpsman, they raised the U.S. flag using an old water pipe for a flagpost. Of the six men pictured (Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, John Bradley (the Navy corpsman), and Harlon Block) only three (Hayes, Gagnon, and Bradley) survived the battle.

Marine photographer Bill Genaust (who was killed in action nine days after the flag raising ) was shooting motion-picture film during the flag-raising. His film also captures the flag raising, at an almost-identical angle to Rosenthal's famous shot.

Chronology

Following the flag raising, Rosenthal sent his film to Guam to be developed and printed.

Distribution

"One of the first to notice it [the photograph] was John Bodkin, the AP photo editor in Guam. On a routine night in his bureau office,, he casually picked up a glossy print of the "replacement" photograph. He looked at it. He paused, shook his head in wonder, and whistled. "Here's one for all time!" he exclaimed to the bureau at large. Then, without wasting another second, he radiophotoed the image to the AP headquarters in New York at seven A.M., Eastern War time. Soon afterward, wirephoto machines across the country were picking up the AP image. Newspaper editors, accustomed to sorting through endless battle photographs, would cast an idle glance at it, then would stand fascinated. News pros were not the only ones bedazzled by the photo. Nazy Captian T.B. Clark was on duty at Patuxent Air Station in Virginia that saturday when it came humming off the wire. He studied it for a minute, then thrust it under the gaze of Navy Petty Officer Felix de Weldon. DeWeldon was an austrian immigrant schooled in European painting and sculture... De Weldon could not take his eyes off the photo. In its classic triangular lines he recognized similiarities with teh ancient statues he had studied. He reflexively reached for some sculptor's clay and tools. With the photograph before him he labored through the long night. By dawn, he had repliated the six boys pushing a pole, raising a flag" DeWeldon would go on to design and sculpt the Marine Corp memorial that replicated the photograph.

Legacy

The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, located in Arlington, Virginia

Rosenthal's photo (which, oddly enough, he took without actualy looking through the viewfinder on his camera to check the image) won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for best photo, the first and only photograph to win the prize in the same year it was taken.

In 1954, the image was memorialized as a large, bronze statue, the USMC War Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. It was designed by Felix DeWeldon and hundreds of his assistants, who spent three years working on the memorial. The three surviving marines posed for DeWeldon, who used their faces as a model. The other three who did not survive were sculted from pictures.

The photograph itself is currently in the possession of Roy H. Williams, who bought it from the estate of John Faber. Faber, the official historian for the National Press Photographers Association, had received it from Rosenthal. The flag featured in the picture is now part of the collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

The plaque placed on Suribachi by John Bradley's family, shaped like the state of Wisconsin

Following his 1994 death, in 1997 the family of John Bradley went to Suribachi and placed a plaque (made of Wisconsin granite and shaped like that state) on the spot where the flag raising took place. John Bradley's son, James Bradley, would go on to write the story of the flag raisers in Flags of Our Fathers, which has inspired a movie of the same name.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima bears a striking resemblance to Yevgeny Khaldei's Soviet flag over the Reichstag photo from April 30, 1945, taken during the Battle of Berlin. From 1994 until 2004, the NetBSD operating system used a cartoon inspired by from this photograph NetBSD's more abstract current logo retains the flag symbolism.

Staging

Following the (second) flag raising, Rosenthal had the Marines of E-company pose for a group shot, which he called the "gung-ho" shot. . This was also documented Bill Gensaut.

"A few days later" [after the picture was taken]", back in Guam, someone asked him [Rosenthal] if he posed the picture. Assuming this was a reference to the "gung-ho shot," he said, "Sure" ... Not long after, [Robert] Sherrod, the Time-Life correspondent, sent a cable to his editors in New York reporting that Rosenthal had staged the flag-raising photo. Time magazine's radio show, "Time Views the News," broadcast a report charging that "Rosenthal climbed Suribachi after the flag had already been planted. ... Like most photographers (he) could not resist reposing his characters in historic fashion."

As a result of this erronious report, Rosenthal has repeatedly been accused of having staged the picture. For decades that followed, Rosenthal has repeatedly and vociferously refuted claims that the flag raising was staged. Genaust's video also refutes the claim that it was staged.

External links

• History of the Flag-Raising On Iwo Jima