Tuttle handed the flag to Chandler Johnson, who in turn gave it to Rene to put inside his field pack. “When you get to the top,” the colonel told Mike, “you tell Schrier to put this flag up, and I want him to save the small flag for me.”
With their cargo of telephone wire, batteries, and American flag, the five boys set off up the mountain, unreeling the wire as they climbed. Doc had remained atop the mountain.
They reached the rim around noon. Mike reported to Lieutenant Schrier and explained the delivery of wire and batteries, and Johnson’s desire to preserve the first flag. As Rene handed Mike the replacement flag, the sergeant decided an explanation was in order.
“Colonel Johnson wants this big flag run up high,” he told the lieutenant, “so every son of a bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it!”
Mike directed Ira and Franklin to look for a length of pipe. He and Harlon started clearing a spot for planting the pole, and Harlon began stacking stones.
On his descent from the crater, Lowery encountered Joe Rosenthal, Bill Genaust, and Bob Campbell picking their way upward. Lowery told the group that he’d photographed the flagraising. The three photographers considered turning around and heading back. But Lowery had a different idea. “You should go on up there,” he said. “There’s a hell of a good view of the harbor.” The three photographers trudged on.
A good view of a different sort greeted Rosenthal when he reached the summit, a little after noon: the American flag, in close-up, snapping in the strong breeze. “I tell you, I still get this feeling of a patriotic jolt when I recall seeing our flag flying up there,” he told an interviewer some years later.
Then Rosenthal spotted another interesting sight toward the far side of the crater: a couple of Marines hauling an iron pole toward another Marine, who was holding a second American flag, neatly folded.
Rosenthal’s fingers instinctively went to his Speed Graphic. Maybe he would get a flagraising photograph after all.
The pole that Ira and Franklin were dragging was a length of drainage pipe that weighed more than a hundred pounds. As they approached the site, Lieutenant Schrier suggested that Mike’s team do the job. The lieutenant wanted the replacement flag raised simultaneously with the lowering of the first one.
Mike attached the flag to the pole. Schrier rounded up some Marines to lower the first pole, and then stood between the two clusters of flag groups, directing them.
The three photographers milled about some distance away, near the volcano’s outer rim. Each of the three looked for a good vantage point. Campbell walked away and moved into position a short distance down the hillside, almost directly below the first flag, so that he could shoot upward at it as the Marines took it down. Genaust, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Rosenthal, about thirty yards from the second flag, had a few feet of color film left in his camera, and decided to wait for the right moment to use them. The five-foot-three Rosenthal had put down his Speed Graphic and was bent over, piling up stones and a sand bag to stand on and improve his shooting angle. His camera was set at a speed of 1/400th of a second, with the f-stop between 8 and 16.
No one else on the summit paid much attention to what was going on. The action had all the significance of a new football being tossed into a game in progress.
It all happened in seconds. Genaust’s movie camera recorded it all. In the solitude of my living room, I have watched those few seconds again and again, in slow motion. Here is how it unfolded:
Harlon braced himself above the target spot in the rubble-strewn ground, ready to receive the base of the pole. Mike, at the other end, in charge, guided it toward him, the pipe over his right shoulder.
Mike held the large flag wrapped around the pole to keep it from fluttering in the strong wind until the pole was planted.
Mike and his four squad-members circled closer to the pole. They raised their feet high with each step, to get clear of the debris. It looked as if they were walking in deep snow.
Ira walked toward the pole, facing Mike, his back to Genaust’s camera frame. He said something to Mike that was lost in the strong wind. Ira was wearing his Indian-style blanket stuffed through his military belt on his rump.
Mike saw Doc Bradley walking past with a load of bandages in his arms and asked him to come and help. Doc dropped the bandages and moved to the pole, directly between Mike and Harlon.
Franklin walked to the pole from the foreground of Genaust’s camera frame.
Rene approached the group from behind, to the right, his rifle slung over his shoulder. He stood behind my father, who was in front of the pole in the movie frame.
The boys converged in a cluster behind Harlon, who bent low at the base. Doc gripped the pole in the cluster’s center.
Rosenthal spotted the movement and grabbed his camera.
Genaust, about three feet from Rosenthal, asked: “I’m not in your way, am I, Joe?”
“Oh, no,” Rosenthal answered. As he later remembered, “I turned from him and out of the corner of my eye I said, ‘Hey, Bill, there it goes!’”
He swung his camera and clicked off a frame. In that same instant the flagpole rose upward in a quick arc. The banner, released from Mike’s grip, fluttered out in the strong wind.
Rosenthal remembers: “By being polite to each other we both damn near missed the scene. I swung my camera around and held it until I could guess that this was the peak of the action, and shot.”
And then it was over. The flag was up.
Campbell had gotten the shot he was after: the first flag going down, in the foreground of his frame, and the second one going up, off in the distance. Genaust had gotten the footage he wanted: a routine, spontaneous color sequence of the replacement flagraising.
Only Joe Rosenthal was unsure. The AP man didn’t even have a chance to glimpse the image in his viewfinder. “Of course,” he later said, “I couldn’t positively say I had the picture. It’s something like shooting a football play; you don’t brag about it until it’s developed.” He’d captured 1/400th of a second out of four seconds of fluid motion. He had no idea whether he’d gotten a blur, a shot of the sky, or a passable photograph.
The six continued to struggle with the heavy pole in the whipping wind. The pole was fully upright. Harlon raised his hands up the pole and gripped it baseball-bat style, using his weight to force it into the ground. Ira did the same. Then Franklin added his heft. Mike anchored things.
Within a few more seconds the flagpole was freestanding, the cloth snapping and cracking in the wind. After a moment, Franklin and some of the others began looking for rocks to add support. Doc offered ropes he’d brought along to tie casualties to stretchers, and they secured the pole.
No one paid attention. It was just a replacement flag. The important flag—the first one raised that day—was brought down the mountain and presented to Colonel Johnson, who stored it in the battalion safe. It bore too much historic value for the battalion to be left unguarded atop Suribachi. The replacement flag flew for three weeks, eventually chewed up by the strong winds.
A few moments after the raising, Joe Rosenthal did what Lowery had done a couple of hours before him. He called several Marines over to cluster around the pole for a standard, posed “gung-ho!” shot. Lieutenant Schrier helped gather a crowd of boys for this photograph. Mike, Ira, Doc, Franklin, and fourteen other Marines posed proudly beneath the flag, waving their arms, rifles, and helmets.
Ira Hayes is smiling in this shot—his face creased with a wide, happy grin. He is the only seated figure among the eighteen.
Mike is standing next to Lieutenant Schrier. His lips are puckered, as if he is yelling a joyous “Whoaa!”
Franklin and Doc are behind Mike, one peering over each of his broad shoulders. Franklin has a triumphant smile and is thrusting his carbine in the air.
Doc Bradley would later say, “We were happy!” and in this shot he looks it: He has a big smile as he waves his helmet with his right hand.
Joe Rosenthal was
satisfied with this posed shot. He felt certain that with all these smiling young boys facing the camera, and the landing beaches visible below, he had a photograph that would make the papers back home.
But the AP photographer would have to wait several days before he knew. That night, his film was flown to Guam for developing. If there were any good shots, they would be transmitted by radio signal to New York.
Several months later, the 2nd Battalion filed its “Action Report” for its role in the Battle of Iwo Jima. In describing the events of February 23, the report covered the reconnaissance patrol of the early morning. It covered Easy Company’s fifteen-man patrol around the southern tip of the island (the 2nd Platoon). It covered Lieutenant Schrier’s expedition up Suribachi with the forty-man patrol from Easy, and the planting of the first American flag at ten-twenty A.M. It mentioned the blowing-up of caves, the recovery of the Japanese binoculars, the sporadic resistance by fleeing Japanese.
The Action Report made no mention of a second flagraising. It was, after all, only a replacement flag.
Photo Insert 2
Franklin Sousley with his mother, Goldie, on his last night home.
Left: Harlon Block at Camp Pendleton. Above: Ralph “Iggy” Ignatowski.
Corpsmen Vince Sagnelli, Jack Santos, and Jack Bradley. At Camp Tarawa, Hawaii, 1944.
Ira Hayes and L. B. Holly on Guadalcanal, 1943.
Ira Hayes in his USMC paratrooper gear.
Iwo Jima, 1945.
D-Day, February 19, 1945—to the beaches, with Mount Suribachi in the background.
D-Day, February 19, 1945. Top: Amphibious landing units en route to Iwo.
Bottom: U.S. Marines land on the beaches of Iwo.
Howlin’ Mad Smith congratulating Boots Thomas on the first flagraising.
Rifleman on Mount Suribachi, with the landing beach below.
The first flagraising atop Mount Suribachi, February 23, 1945. Hank Hansen (without helmet), Boots Thomas (seated), Harold Schrier (behind Thomas), Louis Charlo (hand visible grasping pole), Jim Michaels (with carbine), and Chuck Lindberg (behind Michaels).
The first flag is lowered as the second is raised.
This cropped version became photography’s most reproduced image.
The original Rosenthal photo, shot in a horizontal format,
February 23, 1945. Front row, left to right: Ira Hayes,
Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, Harlon Block. Back row:
Mike Strank (behind Sousley) and Rene Gagnon (behind Bradley).
Twelve
MYTHS
Here’s one for all time!
—JOHN BODKIN,
THE AP PHOTO EDITOR IN GUAM
THE EXHAUSTED CONQUERORS of Mount Suribachi spent the ensuing four days resting on the brittle skin of the dead serpent. Some explored and blew out caves and tunnels. Some wrote letters home.
They had beaten the mountain. And so they thought the battle was over for them. At least they were safe—or safer than they had been for nearly one hundred hours. They had to be alert for the occasional Japanese infiltrator who prowled by night. But now the Japanese were mainly destroying themselves and one another. At night the boys listened to this morbid business being conducted below them in the hollowed-out seven stories of Suribachi. “As we lay in our foxholes trying to sleep, we could hear them blowing themselves up with grenades held to their stomachs,” remembered Chick Robeson.
Joe Rosenthal’s pack of film from February 23, with its twelve exposures, together with a pack he had started shooting the day before, began to work its way through the military channels back to America. First it was tossed into a mail plane headed for the base at Guam, a thousand miles south across the Pacific. There the film would pass through many hands, any of which could consign it to a wastebasket. Technicians from a “pool” lab would develop it. Their mistakes were routinely tossed aside. Then censors would scrutinize it; and finally the “pool” chief would look at each print to decide which was worth transmitting back to the United States via radiophoto, and which to discard.
Of the twelve exposures from the pack taken on the twenty-third, two were ruined by streaks from light that had leaked through the camera housing onto the film. These two were adjacent to the tenth frame, the one Rosenthal had clicked off without looking into the viewfinder. For some reason the light hadn’t marred that one.
Three days after the flagraising, my father found time to write home. He mentioned his concern for his brother Jim, then fighting in Europe, and for his father, who had suffered a heart attack. But for the sake of his worried mother, this twenty-two-year-old, caught in one of history’s most ferocious battles, was only reassuring:
Iwo Jima
Feb 26, 1945
Dear Mother, Dad & all,
I just have time for a line or two, I want to tell you I am in the best of health. You know all about our battle out here and I was with the victorious Co. E. 2nd Batt 28th Marines who reached the top of Mt. Suribachi first. I had a little to do with raising the American flag and it was the happiest moment of my life.
I’ve been worried about Dad. I hope he is out of the hospital and up around again. I imagine you were a bit worried because you didn’t hear from me. I can’t write very often so please don’t be alarmed if you don’t receive mail frequently.
I hope the news from Jim is for the best and that you’re all in good health & happy.
About an hour after we reached the top of the Mt. our Catholic Chaplain had Mass and I went to Holy Communion. I sure did my share of praying and it really gave me much security.
I’d give my left arm for a good shower and a clean shave, I have a 6 day beard. Haven’t had any soap or water since I hit the beach. I never knew I could go without food, water, or sleep for three days but I know now, it can be done.
I’ll write a longer letter when I get the chance, good luck and give everyone my regards.
Your loving son,
Jack
Seventeen-year-old Chick Robeson more accurately described the fear all of them must have felt: “I was never scared so stiff in my life before. When the Japanese mortars and artillery starts dropping, I just can’t help but shake like I was freezing but I guess everybody else does the same thing.”
Franklin wrote to Goldie, offering her a harrowing kind of reassurance: that she shouldn’t worry, even though bullets had been whizzing through his clothes.
Iwo Jima
February 27, 1945
Dearest Mother,
As you probably already know we hit Iwo Jima February 19th just a week ago today. My regiment took the hill with our company on the front line. The hill was hard and I sure never expected war to be like it was those first 4 days. I got some through my clothing and I sure am happy that I am still OK.
This island is practically secured. There is some heavy fighting on one end and we are bothered some at night. Mother you can never imagine how a battlefield looks. It sure looks horrible. Look for my picture because I helped put the flag up. Please don’t worry and write.
Your son,
Franklin Sousley
US Marine
Like Rosenthal, Franklin hoped the posed “gung-ho” shot in which he appeared would make the papers back home.
And Rene took a moment from his rounds to jot a note to his sweetheart, Pauline Harnois:
Now that I can tell you, I was in action on Iwo Jima and that is the reason for such a delay in writing. I am still fine and some of my buddies are still with me, some are dead or wounded. After seeing all this it makes me realize what freedom really means.
I got your pictures with the evening gown aboard ship so I put them in my helmet and carried them with me. They’re not banged up too much. You still look beautiful, darling.
The Marines on Suribachi could not know it, but Americans back home were following their every move. Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in W
orld War II.
Readers who just days before had never heard of the sulfur island were by now as familiar with its contours as with their own backyards. As the war in Europe was thundering to an end, correspondents had migrated from that theater to the Pacific to record the growing conflict. Their dispatches flooded the newspapers, which churned out “extra” editions, and radio bulletins. Movie theaters showed newsreels of the assault, sometimes updating them daily as new footage arrived. For the first time in history, the radio networks carried live broadcasts from a beachhead under fire.
The news was stunningly fresh. In all invasions before Iwo, news copy had “hitchhiked” back to America on whatever transportation was available. Usually it had been flown to Honolulu on hospital planes evacuating the wounded. In this haphazard system, newsmen first had to wait until an airstrip was clear to accommodate the aircraft. Then they had to see that their dispatches made it aboard a plane; after that they could only hope the material would reach Navy press headquarters once the aircraft landed at Pearl Harbor.
It was a time-consuming process. Often days went by before news hit the home front. Tarawa’s three-day battle was over before the first on-the-spot account of the fighting reached the mainland. Fully eight days had elapsed after the Saipan invasion before the first photo reached the U.S.
But at Iwo Jima, the process was accelerated, and streamlined. Daily editions during the week of February 19 brought battle accounts within twenty-four hours of actual time. Papers told the story in bold headlines, pages of background stories, and numerous maps and diagrams. Suddenly, civilians clustered in coffee shops and gathered around water coolers were bantering expertly, tossing off terms such as “Green Beach,” “Suribachi,” and “Kuribayashi” with ease.
Flags of Our Fathers Page 24