Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal
On February 19, 1945 US Marines invaded Iwo Jima, an eight square mile volcanic island in the South Pacific. The battle for the island lasted a month and was the bloodiest and most vicious of the Pacific War. Nearly 30,000 Japanese and American soldiers died in the battle for Iwo Jima. Five days after landing the Marines captured the high ground of Mount Suribachi on the southern end of the island. A small US flag was raised on the summit but commanders ordered that it be replaced by one that could be seen from the beaches below.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal (http://www.iwojima.com/raising/lflagg.gif) and two Marine photographers Pfc. Bob Campbell and Sgt. Bill Genaust were on the way up the mountain when they met Marine staff photographer Sgt. Lou Lowery coming down. Lowery told them that the flag had already been raised but it would be worth the climb anyway for the view. When the trio reached the summit they saw a group of Marines attaching a second flag to a piece of old water pipe. Rosenthal thought of trying to get a picture of the two flags, one coming down and the other going up, but he couldn’t line it up. (Campbell got this picture http://www.iwojima.com/raising/lflagk.gif ). Rosenthal, who was 5ft 5 inches tall, put his camera down and quickly piled up some rocks to stand on. He set the aperture on his Speed Graphic camera at f-8 or f-11 and the shutter speed at 1/400th sec.
But he nearly missed the shot. “Out of the corner of my eye I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene.” Sgt. Genaust was three feet to the right of Rosenthal and captured the scene in colour on his movie camera (Genaust was killed in action nine days later). Rosenthal shot one frame only but didn’t know if he got the picture. To make sure he had something worth printing he set up a “gung-ho” picture of the group Marines standing under the flag (http://www.iwojima.com/raising/l721flag.gif). He hurried back to the command ship, wrote the captions for the eighteen photographs he had taken that day and shipped the film off to the military press centre in Guam. He was not to know then that his photograph taken on top of Mount Suribachi on 23rd February, 1945 would become the most famous photograph of World War 2. When he heard a few days later about the sensational impact of his picture back home someone asked him if the picture was posed. Assuming that the “gung-ho” picture was the one that had caused the sensation, Rosenthal said “sure”. Out of this reply grew the misconception that the flag raising picture was posed. Genaust’s movie confirms that the picture was not posed.
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When President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw Rosenthal’s picture he ordered that the men who raised the flag be found and returned home to take part in a country wide fundraising war bond tour. Only three of the six soldiers were alive; Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona, (on the left in the picture), John Bradley from Wisconsin (second from right) and Rene Gagnon from New Hamshire (mostly hidden behind Bradley). The three men were feted as heroes and received adulation wherever they went on their whirlwind tour of 32 cities across the US.
But Bradley and Hayes did not think they were heroes. Hayes hated being on the tour. He asked how he could consider himself a hero when 5 men out of his platoon of 45 survived and 27 men in his company of 250 escaped injury or death. Hayes suffered from serious survivor guilt. He asked to be sent back to the front lines, stating “sometimes I wish that guy had never made that picture”. Hayes became an alcoholic, a drifter and a loner and died after a night of drinking and gambling on the Reservation ten years after the Iwo Jima picture. In the intervening years he had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly a total of 51 times. He was 32 years old. Like Hayes, John Bradley also refused to accept the hero status and after the war he refused to talk about his experiences. He kept is secrets up to his death in 1994, after which his son James Bradley, who knew almost nothing of his father’s wartime experiences, spent four years interviewing the families of the flag raisers. Together with Ron Powers he wrote the best selling book Flags of Our Fathers on which Eastwood’s based his film.
Meanwhile, the men who raised the first flag on Iwo Jima and who were photographed (http://www.iwojima.com/raising/lflagi.gif) by Lowery, were forgotten as the glory was heaped on the men in Rosenthal’s picture.
Rosenthal’s picture won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, the only one given in the same year that the picture was taken. Ironically the U.S. Army and Navy had rejected Rosenthal as a military photography because of his poor eyesight. Instead he joined Associated Press and was sent to cover the Pacific War. The picture brought Rosenthal acclaim but not overwhelming success. After the war he spent most of his career as a workaday photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle until he retired in 1981. He said “It might have been any photographer, or perhaps, it might have never been taken, but it was myself. And so, in a sense, I stand for whoever would have, or would be in a position to have taken a picture that gets such a good response.” But, when asked once if he would rather that some other photographer had taken the flag raising shot, he shot back: “Hell, no! Because it of course makes me feel as though I’ve done something worthwhile. My kids think so - that’s worthwhile.” While the picture brought Rosenthal fame it did not bring him a fortune, at least in monetary terms. “Every once in a while someone teases me that I could have been rich. But I am alive. A lot of the men who were there are not. And a lot of them were badly wounded. I was not. And so I dont have the feeling someone owes me for this.”
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