by Owen J. Hurd
Hero was a word they all came to despise. Sure, they had all fought bravely for their country in the bloodiest campaign since the Civil War, but it was their inclusion in the photo that made them heroes in the eyes of Americans living Stateside. To these fighting men, the prosaic act of hoisting a flag was nothing compared to the other things that they and the rest of the marines and navy men had done. They had faced the Japanese enemy, turned them out of their fortified bunkers, and killed or captured them. Doc Bradley had come to the aid of countless wounded and dying soldiers, treating the wounded and easing the pain and suffering of the dying. Together, the U.S. invasion force secured the island of Iwo Jima, a key strategic piece of land in the Pacific, as well as an important symbolic victory.
That’s what these brave soldiers could not seem to get their heads around. That, as captors of Iwo Jima and figures in the iconic photograph of the event, they played essential roles, in both practical and psychological ways. By securing a remote airfield they established a strategic outpost used by thousands of U.S. bombers. In securing the surrounding airspace, they also improved the prospects for the most decisive bombing mission in the Pacific campaign: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In his bestselling book, Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley shares his father’s oft-repeated belief that he was no hero. “The heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn’t come back.” Perhaps suffering from survivors’ guilt and even what would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder, the remaining flag raisers wrestled with their demons for years, especially with every anniversary of the event and of V-J Day. They all resorted to alcohol, but none more devastatingly than Ira Hayes. His excessive drinking actually got him kicked off the bond tour, and he was sent back to active duty. Stationed at Pearl Harbor, he kept on drinking—usually alone—and kept on brooding.
After being discharged from the military, Hayes returned to southern Arizona. Moving back in with his parents, Hayes worked a string of low-paying, mindless jobs. He continued to drown his demons in booze on a nightly basis. Over the years he would be arrested more than fifty times for being drunk and disorderly. In May 1946, Hayes decided to take care of some unfinished business. He hitched a ride east and didn’t stop until he reached the small dusty town of Weslaco, Texas. There he sought out members of the Block family. He wanted them to know that their son, Harlon, was one of the men in the famous photo. It was Harlon, Hayes told them, who was crouched down, back to the camera, guiding the flagpole into the ground, not Hank Hansen. For months, even before she ever met Hayes, Block’s mother would tell anybody who’d listen that it was her son in the photo. Most doubted that a definitive identification could be based on a picture of a man’s backside, but Mrs. Block insisted.
“I changed so many diapers on that boy’s butt,” she said, “I know it’s my boy.”
Analyzing testimony from Hayes, Gagnon, and Bradley, as well as a comparison of other photos taken at about the same time, the government determined that Mrs. Block’s instincts were right after all. Unfortunately, Harlon Block died within hours of Hank Hansen on the same battlefield. Even so, Ira Hayes had set the record straight, and the Block family could derive a sense of satisfaction knowing their son died a national hero.
Over the years Hayes, Gagnon, and Bradley would reunite occasionally for events related to “the photo.” The three retired military men even made their Hollywood debuts in 1949, playing themselves in a reenactment of the flag raising in The Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne.
Like Hayes, Gagnon had a hard time finding good employment. After failing to meet the qualifications for a job in the police or fire departments, he returned to the New Hampshire mill he worked at before the war. Gagnon was thoroughly embittered by the experience, feeling that one of the famed raisers of the flag on Iwo Jima deserved better. Gagnon died prematurely, of a heart attack at age fifty-four.
The only one of the three who was able to move on with his life was Bradley, the Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class who watched so many of his comrades suffer and die on Iwo Jima. Back in Antiga, Wisconsin, Bradley finished his studies in mortuary sciences and opened his own funeral home. Bradley became a model citizen, popular with his fellow residents, not because of his military fame but because of the compassionate care he extended to his customers, as well as his philanthropic endeavors. Bradley died of a stroke in 1994 at the age of seventy.
In the years after the photo was taken, Rosenthal often repeated the story of how it came together and how he almost missed the opportunity to freeze the moment in history. Considering the controversies that sprung up and that continued for the rest of his long life, he may have sometimes wished he had never ascended the volcanic mountain in the first place.
First, there were the accusations that the photograph was posed, instead of an actual, unrehearsed event. Rosenthal unwittingly contributed to the confusion. Having sent the undeveloped film to the military press office, Rosenthal had no idea how the pictures turned out. He learned secondhand that one of his photos had been featured in numerous newspapers. When asked if the image was posed, he assumed they were referring to the posed shot beneath the flag and said yes. After he learned that it was his candid shot that had been published in newspapers all over the country, he attempted to set the record straight.
“If I had posed it,” he explained, “I would have ruined it. I would have [put] fewer Marines in the picture, and I would [have made] sure that their faces were seen.”
Fortunately, there was documentary evidence corroborating Rosenthal’s version of events. A marine film photographer Sergeant William Genaust was standing beside Rosenthal at the pivotal moment, recording the entire sequence on film. Several seconds of color film show the flag being raised spontaneously as others looked on, followed by the assemblage of marines beneath the flag for the posed shot.
Even so, the genie was out of the bottle, and Rosenthal was dogged by skeptics his entire life. The photograph made Rosenthal famous, but like the flag raisers it depicted, it did little if anything to improve his fortunes or advance his career. That’s not to say that Rosenthal was unsuccessful. For years he was a beat photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he humbly and dutifully took assignments that others may have deemed trivial to a man who once worked under such dangerous conditions and captured one of the most enduring news images ever photographed.
According to an AP retrospective of Rosenthal’s life and career, years later he was asked if he regretted taking the photo.
“Hell, no! Because it of course makes me feel as though I’ve done something worthwhile. My kids think so—that’s worthwhile.”
Rosenthal was also very proud of the Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, which is based on his famous photograph. He died in 2006, at the age of ninety-four.
LOOSE ENDS
Bill Genaust, the marine who caught the footage of the flag raising on film, was another one of the Americans who never returned from Iwo Jima. Enlisted to help clear out an enemy cave by lighting the entrance with his camera, he was shot dead by hiding Japanese soldiers.
Part of the confusion about the photo’s legitimacy came from the fact that Rosenthal’s photo captured not the first but the second raising of an American flag that day. The first flag, raised by another group of marines, was photographed by marine photographer Sergeant Lou Lowery. The photographs of that raising got lost in the shuffle for a time, probably because the first flag was smaller and the images were less dramatic.
Because it was considered dishonorable to be captured, most Japanese soldiers either fought to their death or committed suicide late in the Iwo Jima campaign. The last two Japanese soldiers to surrender on the island of Iwo Jima emerged from their hiding places in 1949, the same year that Bradley, Hayes, and Gagnon made their on-location appearance in The Sands of Iwo Jima.
Little Boy and Fat Man Postmortem
It had been almost a month since an atomic bomb code-named �
�Little Boy” demolished Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and “Fat Man” descended on Nagasaki three days later. By then the American public had learned many details about the Manhattan Project, the top secret initiative to develop and deploy these unprecedented weapons. They knew that the bombs had been dropped, that they’d worked, and that tens of thousands of Japanese had died, most of them civilians. They also knew that Japan surrendered on August 15, three months after Germany did. Peace in the Pacific theater was formally ensured when representatives from Japan and the United States signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. The Manhattan Project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had also become a scientific celebrity, appearing on the covers of Time and Life magazines.
But there was a lot about the bombings that would remain unknown for quite some time—mostly because the U.S. military was now fighting a public relations battle. Throughout the world, critics were questioning the decision to employ a weapon capable of unleashing such horrific power. Japan was already teetering on the edge of surrender, some objected. Others simply considered the instantaneous extermination of tens of thousands of civilians morally repugnant. Others worried about the potential long-term dangers stemming from radiation exposure.
In the face of these criticisms, it was imperative that the U.S. military take control of the media coverage. General Douglas MacArthur enforced a news embargo, forbidding reporters from entering Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the weeks after the bombing. Not even U.S. military occupation forces entered the bombing sites until the end of September. Two reporters, however, defied MacArthur. Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett sneaked into Hiroshima on September 3, 1945, and American reporter George Weller infiltrated Nagasaki on September 6, disguised as a member of the U.S. Army.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government organized a press junket to the bombed cities, chaperoned by military personnel. Reporters were provided with a narrow, carefully orchestrated glimpse of the damages and were forbidden to question Japanese doctors about the effects of radiation. In an attempt to focus attention on Japanese atrocities, U.S. military handlers shepherded the reporters to POW camps, which were filled with newly liberated Allied prisoners, many showing the effects of malnutrition, torture, and slavery.
While in Nagasaki, the reporters were surprised to encounter their colleague George Weller, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter from the Chicago Daily News. Slipping into the city three days before any Western journalist, Weller had been writing eye-opening firsthand stories on the bomb’s awesome destructive power—of the forty thousand victims killed, many of them instantly within the mile-wide ground zero.
Weller may have ignored MacArthur’s orders to keep out of Nagasaki but decided not to skirt the military news protocol entirely. He dutifully sent his reports to the military press office. Not until weeks later did he learn that all of the reports and photographs he sent were destroyed on MacArthur’s orders. Burchett managed to get his uncensored story to the Daily Express in London, which published it under the headline “The Atomic Plague.”
“Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city,” Burchett reported. “It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence.” In addition to the people who died as a result of the initial concussive impact and heat, Burchett couldn’t help but notice that the bomb continued to claim victims—a hundred a day—long after detonation.
“People are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”
Weller had noticed a similar phenomenon in Nagasaki. Doctors there called it “Disease X.”
Meanwhile, the father of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer, was having his own misgivings about the horrors he had wrought. Associates noted that Oppenheimer was noticeably anxious and lugubrious about what the bomb meant in terms of human survival and his role in unleashing this dismal power. On October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer met with President Harry Truman, the man who authorized the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Mr. President,” he fretted, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”
If Oppenheimer was looking to create a sympathetic bond with the only other man who could be said to share the same degree of culpability in the matter, he was mistaken. Truman dismissed the scientist’s qualms and ended the meeting. Later, he privately referred to Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby” and a “son-of-a-bitch.”
“He hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have,” Truman complained. “You just don’t go around belly-aching about it.”
Marshaling his thoughts and steeling his nerves, Oppenheimer joined with like-minded colleagues in an attempt to steward a peaceful future for nuclear science. The only way to reap the benefits of nuclear power while avoiding a nuclear Armageddon, Oppenheimer claimed, was to create an international atomic commission. This commission would perform the necessary experiments and develop nuclear energy technology, while monitoring its uses in various countries to make sure that it was being used safely and responsibly. Above all, Oppenheimer insisted, “I would say that no [more] bombs be made.”
To create and maintain the governing body envisioned by Oppenheimer, individual nations would have to surrender a portion of their sovereignty. No longer would nations—the United States included—be free to make unilateral decisions regarding the development and use of nuclear energy or warfare.
“The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish,” Oppenheimer concluded. With fifty years of Cold War politics in our rearview mirrors, it’s tempting to scoff at the political naïveté of this proposition, but Oppenheimer was not in the minority among the scientists who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
Truman had other ideas. Foolishly believing that the United States could maintain a perpetual monopoly on atomic weaponry, Truman saw no reason to share the technology with others. Despite these differences, Truman approved Oppenheimer’s appointment to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
Oppenheimer served as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the AEC, and he also returned to teaching physics at Caltech and then Berkeley. All the while, he was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His phones were tapped, his movements were monitored, and his associates were scrutinized. J. Edgar Hoover took a personal interest in his case, trying to prove that Oppenheimer was a closet communist and sexual pervert. Oppenheimer freely admitted that he had once felt sympathy for communist causes, but only in terms of helping to further workers’ economic rights. He was never a member of the Communist Party and would never think of sharing any secrets about the atomic bomb with the Soviets or any other country.
Somebody had, however, and it was someone on the Manhattan Project, Klaus Fuchs, who had come to Los Alamos as a member of the British scientific team. Thanks in part to Fuchs, the Soviets had their own atomic bomb by 1949. This development led to an all-out nuclear arms race. Not content to simply stockpile more and more atomic bombs of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki variety, Truman and others argued in favor of a hydrogen bomb—a technological quantum leap in nuclear weaponry. Oppenheimer was opposed to the idea on moral and strategic grounds. At odds with political leaders, as well as members of the AEC, Oppenheimer was pressured to resign, and when he refused, he became the subject of a formal investigation.
On December 23, 1953, the commission presented Oppenheimer with a list of charges. They dredged up the now-stale accusation that he was a communist. And they suggested that his opposition to the H-bomb was un-American. Thus the man who was more responsible than any other for the development of the bomb that ended World War II was forced to defend himself before an AEC security panel. After intense hearings—showing all the earmarks of the McCarthy era—the panel ultimately declared Oppenheimer an unacceptable security risk. They stripped him of his security clearance and removed him from his position.
Disgraced and dispirited, Oppenheimer refused to let this episode destr
oy his sense of worth or prevent him from making significant intellectual contributions to the world at large. He continued to serve as director of the Institute for Advanced Study, wrote books, and delivered lectures. He earned a degree of redemption in 1963 when the Atomic Energy Commission presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award. President Lyndon Johnson also restored Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1967 at the age of sixty-two.
LOOSE ENDS
George Weller kept carbon copies of his censored dispatches from Nagasaki, but eventually misplaced them. After his death in 2002, his son discovered the papers in an attic. Four years later, the articles were published as a book, First into Nagasaki.
Colonel Paul Tibbets was the lead pilot on the Enola Gay, the aircraft—named for his mother—that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. After the war, Tibbets remained with the Air Force, where he had a varied and distinguished career of twenty-nine years. Tibbets was proud of his service and had no regrets about dropping the bomb. Tibbets was back in the news in 1995, during the controversy sparked by the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit marking the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. He was among the military veterans who objected to the tenor of the exhibit, which placed more emphasis on the Japanese victims than on their empire’s military aggression. Tibbets died in 2007 at the age of ninety-two.
Klaus Fuchs admitted his role in sharing secrets related to the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union. He also acted as a government informant, providing the British government with information that eventually led to the conviction and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. After serving part of a fourteen-year sentence, Fuchs was released from jail in 1959. He moved to East Germany, where he continued to work as a scientist. He died in 1988.