Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  It was certainly enough for the Treasury Department. A two-front world war and the secret and fabulously expensive building of the atomic bomb had drained the national coffers. Filling them up again was not a simple matter of confiscation. In the 1940’s concept of American democracy, war expenses were considered outside the normal federal budget. A wartime government was obliged to take its case repeatedly before the citizenry, keeping it accurately informed and hoping for a patriotic volunteer response.

  War bonds were the chief mechanism for this volunteer funding, essentially a citizen’s loan to the government. Purchase of a bond, at the issue price of $18.75, gave the government temporary use of the buyer’s money; the buyer in turn could expect a yield, in ten years, of $25. The government stimulated these purchases through periodic national public relations efforts known as War Loan Drives. Each drive included newspaper and radio ads, direct mailing, and, as its centerpiece, a coast-to-coast barnstorming show featuring celebrities, war heroes, marching bands, and patriotic orators. These were known as Bond Tours.

  Bond Tours had worked splendidly in the past. But this war had already produced six of them; and, with the European conflict drawing to a close, Treasury officials were concerned about the public’s response to a seventh. The American people had dug deeply so far. Now, in March 1945, with Allied forces advancing toward Berlin, who could measure the sense of urgency that remained in an exhausted populace—or the reservoirs of wealth that still remained after six rounds of giving? Would there be enough to finance the unfinished business against the fanatical Japanese military in the Pacific—a conflict that still promised bloodshed on a massive scale? The Treasury Department was leaving nothing to chance.

  Planning for the Seventh Tour had begun months before, a mammoth undertaking. Millions of volunteers were ready to move the glittering show through America. Now the anxious organizers at Treasury moved to secure the one element that could make The Seventh shine like no other tour ever: the presence of living figures from the beloved flagraising icon.

  The President himself lent his influence to the plan.

  Martha Strank was at home in her New-World “palace” at 121 Pine Street, Franklin Borough, Pennsylvania, when the Western Union deliveryman knocked. Telegrams were never welcome to women such as Martha. Two of her sons were on active duty: Mike on Iwo Jima, and Pete, a sailor aboard the USS Franklin in the Pacific.

  Her young son John later described the way Martha stood in the doorway trying to figure how to deal with the presence of the Western Union man, the piece of yellow paper he held, the bad news she was certain it bore.

  “She was so upset that she told the man, ‘You open it,’” John recalled. “‘I can’t do that,’ he responded. ‘But I want you to,’ she said. She was pleading. He opened it and read it to her. She fainted.

  John told me decades later:

  “Her hair turned white within a couple of months. It had been coal black before Mike died.”

  As the Treasury Department shaped its theme for the “Mighty 7th,” it enjoyed the wholehearted support of Madison Avenue. Some twenty-two of America’s best advertising agencies volunteered their ideas and marketing skills. Case-hardened professionals who had delighted in no-holds-barred competitions to sell soap, sedans, and cigarettes now pooled their talents to sell hope and patriotism. Along with the six million volunteers—about four percent of the total population—it was a mobilization of civilian talent as vast, in its own way, as the mobilization of the armada for the invasion itself. As graphic artists, copywriters, designers, and photographers created stunning and informative posters, brochures, and print advertisements, veteran account executives gave up their spare time to devise distinct campaigns for every imaginable population segment: farmers, housewives, factory workers, fishermen, business leaders—all were targeted with separate appeals.

  In every campaign, however, there recurred the same luminous anchoring image.

  It was an image the public had fallen in love with, seeming to find in it an affirmation of the national purpose at its very origins that no politician, no history book had ever matched. The Photograph had become The Fact. It had, in a way, become its admirers. The Mighty 7th would make this triumphal joining complete.

  And now the ailing Roosevelt made the gesture that would assure this joining. On March 30 the popular President, who as a distant caped figure had watched the boys of the 5th Division train for Iwo Jima a seeming lifetime ago, issued a confidential order that was radioed instantly to Marine Headquarters in the Pacific: TRANSFER IMMEDIATELY TO U.S. BY AIR…6ENLISTED MEN AND/OR OFFICERS WHO ACTUALLY APPEAR IN ROSENTHAL PHOTOGRAPH OF FLAGRAISING AT MOUNT SURIBACHI.

  President Roosevelt’s order found the survivors of Easy Company four days out of Iwo aboard the Winged Arrow. Marine correspondent Keyes Beech’s cursory investigation had identified only one flagraiser on the boat: Rene Gagnon. Mike, Franklin, and the misidentified Hank Hansen were dead; Harlon had not yet been considered; and no one was sure about Doc. Ira was on the boat, but no one yet realized that he was a flagraiser. If Ira had his way, no one was going to.

  Ira knew that he was in the photo, and he knew that Rene knew; and Ira had looked into his own soul and found no pleasure in this knowledge. He just wanted to stay with his good buddies. Ira sought Rene out and took him aside. The intense combat veteran told the teenage errand-boy that he didn’t want to go on a Bond Tour. And furthermore, that if Rene revealed that Ira was in The Photograph, Ira would kill him.

  This made an impression on Rene.

  By concealing his identity, Ira was disobeying his Commander in Chief—a dire breach of discipline for a Marine. But Ira could think of no other choice. What were these people thinking? Could they possibly understand the insane difference between what he and his buddies had just endured, and what they were now asking him to do? The idea of going around the country being congratulated for his presence in a photograph, following a month of witnessing death and incessant killing, simply did not connect with his rural, tribal, almost nineteenth-century frame of reference. His memories of Iwo Jima had nothing to do with The Photograph. It certainly didn’t jibe with what it meant to be a Marine. And his grasp of the larger American culture had no grounding in the emerging power of media or the photographic image.

  It must have been like coming home from hell, and finding that he had arrived on the wrong planet.

  Whatever the motivation, Rene was not about to challenge the baleful veteran. He agreed to keep Ira’s secret, and the Winged Arrow churned for Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. There, on April 3, Rene bade farewell to his comrades-in-arms. He climbed aboard a priority flight for the States. Thirty-four years later, Rene could still crow about how a colonel was asked to give up his seat so he could board. “Me, a lousy private, bumping a full bird colonel!”

  He wouldn’t be a “lousy private” much longer. Soon he would be the most famous fighting man in America. Among the three surviving flagraisers, he would be the first to face the flashbulbs. Doc, his legs peppered with shrapnel, had been evacuated to Guam and now he lay convalescing in a hospital in Honolulu. Ira, keeping mum, was still with Easy, on a transport ship bound for Hilo. Rene was on a date with destiny all by himself.

  He landed in Washington on Saturday, April 7. A waiting car rushed him directly to Marine Corps Headquarters. There, in a large conference room scattered with note-taking staff people and dominated by a blown-up reproduction of the Rosenthal photograph, the Marine brass pressed the new hero for the identities of the flagraisers. As he had done for Keyes Beech on the island, Rene offered five names: Strank, Bradley, Sousley, the misidentified Hansen, and himself.

  But the enlarged photo showed six figures. “Who is the sixth man?”

  Rene froze, staring at the photo for long silent minutes. Yes, he eventually admitted, it appears there are six. “Who is the sixth man?” Rene’s hands began to shake. He knew who it was but had promised not to tell, Rene informed his interrogators. Impossible,
they countered, they were all under Presidential orders.

  Slowly, painfully Rene finally gave up his secret. Orders were flashed to the Pacific to bring back the sixth man. Ira’s days as just another Marine were over.

  Meanwhile, a Manchester Union-Leader newspaperman, alerted by an AP wire story, knocked on Irene Gagnon’s front door. Rene’s mother cried with relief and joy to learn her only boy was not only alive, but a hero.

  The reporter suggested that he drive Irene to Pauline’s house for a photo of the hero’s mother and girlfriend together. And so, across the front page of the April 7 Union-Leader were splashed two oversized photographs: Rene’s formal Marine Corps portrait and a shot of an “electrified” mom and fiancée: Irene Gagnon and nineteen-year-old Pauline Harnois.

  When the reporter asked Pauline if she knew Rene was in the famous photo, she replied without hesitation: “I was almost sure in my heart that it was Rene. I guess,” Pauline concluded, “it was woman’s intuition.”

  Her intuition must have been remarkable, because Rene is almost completely obscured in the photo. Only the tip of his helmet, one knee, and his hands are visible behind John Bradley’s figure.

  Within days Pauline, the day-to-day worker in the Chicopee mills, was enjoying a new national nickname: She was “The Sweetheart of Iwo Jima.”

  On Sunday, April 8, the Marines released the identification of the six figures as given by Rene. The next day the photo reappeared in newspapers across the country, this time with a name linked by arrow to each flag-raiser, save one. The AP copy provided detailed biographies of five of the boys: Hank Hansen, Doc, Ira, Rene, and Mike. Only Franklin, killed on March 21, remained unidentified, pending notification of his mother.

  On Monday, April 9, his mother was notified.

  Goldie’s last name was no longer Sousley. She’d remarried, to a man named Hensley Price. Nor did her household have a telephone. Still, the Marines found her with prompt efficiency.

  After Goldie got the news, it spread fast around the region.

  Marion Hamm had graduated from high school by now, but in her bedroom she still kept Franklin’s formal Marine portrait.

  She learned of Franklin’s death while at work as a secretary. “When I found out, I was so sad,” she told me in her direct, plainspoken way. “I went home from work and took all his letters, the insignia from his hat he had sent me, everything, and walked it over to Goldie’s house. I gave it all to her. I said, ‘I thought you might want these things.’”

  Young J. B. Shannon, who had accompanied Franklin on his last train trip out of Hilltop—the trip on which Franklin promised, “When I come back, I’ll be a hero”—remembers the moment he heard: “I was thirteen years old, plowing our field, breaking up the soil to plant tobacco. My mother came out and told me that Franklin was dead. I was very broken up. I unhooked the horses; I couldn’t work anymore.”

  But it was Goldie’s own reaction that Hilltop would remember the longest, and with the greatest sorrow. Goldie, who still put in long days of farm work, just as she had when Franklin was a little boy. Goldie, who had beamed her radiant smile through all of it; who always had an encouraging word for others.

  Her freckled son had inherited that smile, and a reminder of it was on display in her living room: a glossy photograph of Franklin in uniform, movie-star handsome and smiling to beat the band. People who knew her said that Goldie often turned that photograph over to read the words he’d written on the back:

  To the kindest friend I ever knew,

  The one I told all my troubles to.

  You can look the world over, but you won’t find another

  Like you, my dear Mother.

  Love,

  Franklin

  The telegram came to the Hilltop General Store. Because Goldie didn’t have a phone, a barefoot young boy ran it up to her farm.

  Fifty-three years later Goldie’s sister Florine Moran told me that the neighbors could hear Goldie scream all that night and into the morning. The neighbors lived a quarter-mile away.

  In Pennsylvania, the news of Mike Strank’s death was followed quickly by the revelation of his place in the iconic image. Brother John remembered how. “We were walking home from a memorial service for Mike,” he said. “We saw people all around our house. It was mass confusion with neighbors and local press. I was wondering, ‘What’s happening?’ Then they told us the story had just broken that Mike was in the photo.”

  Far to the northwest, in rural Wisconsin, Kathryn and Cabbage’s neighbors called with their congratulations. Cabbage basked in his son’s fame, but Kathryn—closer to her son in temperament—worried about appearing immodest.

  Soon, she found something else to worry about. When she had learned her Jack was in the photo, she reread some of the recent days’ press coverage about the event. She discovered the AP story datelined “Pearl Harbor” about Rene coming home, which had reported: “There are six men in the historic photo—five Marines and one Navy hospital corpsman.” Then the dispatch added the chilling sentence: “The Navy man later lost a leg in battle.”

  Yet another error: The Navy man had not lost a leg. But he was indeed bedridden in a Honolulu hospital when he first glimpsed The Photograph. Years later, he recounted his reaction.

  “I thought, ‘Holy man, is that ever a terrific picture!’” he recalled. “There was a lot of confusion. We weren’t sure who the flagraisers were. I couldn’t pick myself out. It was such an insignificant thing at the time.”

  Insignificant to the boys in the Pacific, but not to the America that awaited their return. Doc Bradley’s life was about to start changing fast. Just before it did—on the eve of his homecoming—Doc received a visit from his longtime friend Bob Connelly.

  “I searched for your dad in the hospital there,” Connelly told me. “I was walking through a ward when someone shouted at me. There he was, with his legs bandaged. He was very alert, very talkative. He told me that in the beginning of the battle he’d call for guys to cover him and heads would pop up, giving him covering fire. But as the battle went on, the replacements were too scared to cover him.

  “He told me of running out to pull a wounded guy in and how he turned his back to the firing Japanese to protect his jewels.

  “He talked about all the bodies laid out on the beach and how the Polish kid from Milwaukee was tortured. How they hammered his teeth, cut out his tongue, poked out his eyes, cut his ears off, almost dismembered him.

  “He was aware that the photo was causing a ruckus. I admired his Marine boots. He said, ‘Take them. The Marine Corps will give me anything now.’”

  On the same day, April 9, word reached the Winged Arrow that Ira’s days of anonymity were over. Sergeant Daskalakis was livid. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that you were in the photograph!?” he demanded of Ira. Ira could only shrug and mutter, “Oh, I don’t know.”

  The transport put in at Hilo on April 12. Three days later, Ira reluctantly climbed aboard a plane for Marine Headquarters in Washington.

  In Boston, the newspapers unknowingly began to perpetuate the single most tragic and painful of all the errors that adhered to the flagraising on Iwo Jima. The coverage offered solace—temporary solace, as it proved—to Hank Hansen’s grieving mother, Mrs. Joseph Evelley. Mustering a smile, she proudly held The Photograph for a reporter to see:

  “See, see the photograph,” Madeline Evelley insisted. “That’s my son, with his left hand gripped around the flag’s staff. Henry put the American flag up on Iwo Jima.”

  In Weslaco, Belle Block remained unconvinced by this assertion. When Ed Block, Sr., showed the photo to her, with Hansen’s identification attached, she just shook her head. “I don’t care what the papers say,” she repeated for perhaps the hundredth time. “I know my boy.”

  Joe Rosenthal, a modest man who did not seek attention, continued to struggle with the price of his new fame. He always made clear that his photo was of the second raising; never discounted the factor of luck. Yet the occasi
onal detractor surfaced, amidst the general flow of praise.

  A commentator on the NBC Blue network baldly asserted that the image had been “carefully posed” by Joe. The assertion was later retracted, and the photographer tried to take it in stride. “It wouldn’t have been any disgrace at all,” he told The New Yorker in its April 7 issue, “to figure out a composition like that. But it just so happened I didn’t. Good luck was with me, that’s all—the wind rippling the flag right, the men in fine positions, and the day clear enough to bring everything into sharp focus.”

  Before the flagraisers were known, the photo stood for a great military victory. Now, with names attached to all six figures, the public began to see in it a manifestation of eternal American values.

  At the outset, it was Rene who satisfied America’s thirst for humanizing details of the figures in The Photograph. With Ira impenetrable and John Bradley not yet in focus, it was the lean-faced, dark-browed Manchester boy, his mother and fiancée at his side, who confirmed the fondest elements of American wartime myth: the fighting hero as wholesome boy-next-door, eager for marriage, picket fences, and Mom’s cooking.

  The governor visited the Gagnon house and sat at Irene’s kitchen table. Rene addressed a wildly cheering New Hampshire Legislature. He visited a local Cub Scout pack and signed hundreds of autographs.