Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  The crowning event was scheduled for Thursday, April 12. Rene awoke that morning excited by the prospect of a boy’s dream come true: His hometown was going to throw a parade in his honor. Bands, church leaders, and politicians from around the state were flocking into Manchester to take part. The disconnected kid from a broken family, the mill-factory “doffer” who had become a Marine Corps runner, had made it to the top of that world. Instead of drifting down Elm Street alone, on his way to the movies, looking at his reflection in store windows, Rene Gagnon was going in style, in an open limousine. And the crowds would do the looking.

  It was not to be. A preliminary banquet went off as planned at six P.M. But then a shocking announcement changed everything. A news bulletin had flashed across the radio airwaves and was relayed to the banquet hall. The President was dead. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia. He had been wearing a certain dark cape when the seizure hit him, as he sat for a portrait in the living room of his cottage there.

  Rene’s ride in the open limousine never happened. The letdown would form a motif for his abbreviated life: The parade he always sought would never quite get under way.

  Jack Bradley slipped back into America without much fanfare. When he arrived in Bethesda he called home, speaking with his parents for the first time in months. He talked matter-of-factly of his wounds, and of how he was brought back to Washington by Presidential order. After the conversation, Kathryn was strangely sad. For a long time, she kept the reason to herself: She thought her son was trying not to hurt her feelings by speaking of the leg he had lost.

  In Wisconsin, the State Senate passed a resolution on April 12, praising “John Bradley” as one who “helped plant the American flag on Mount Suribachi.” “Doc” was the nickname he would soon put aside, along with his wartime mementos. “Jack” he would still remain to his family and his Wisconsin friends; but it was as “John” he’d be introduced to all who met him from now on.

  On Thursday, April 19, the final living flagraiser touched down in Washington. Ira arrived to find Rene, down from New Hampshire, and John, over from Bethesda on his crutches, awaiting him. Up to now the three had been serving the War Department. But now, by Presidential order, their services were transferred to the Treasury Department in a new battle, this one for money. And the Treasury Department did not believe in a gradual start: On the following day the three were to meet the new President, Harry Truman, in the White House.

  During Ira’s initial briefing at Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I Streets, he was shown the enlarged photograph of the flagraising. Ira spotted the error of identification immediately. The figure at the base of the pole was not Hank Hansen; it was Harlon Block. Ira remembered what Rene Gagnon and John Bradley could not have remembered, because they did not join the little cluster until the last moment: that it was Harlon, Mike, Franklin, and himself who had ascended Suribachi at midmorning to lay telephone wire; it was Rene who had come along with the replacement flag. Hansen had not been a part of this action.

  Ira acted on his first impulse, which was to set the record straight. He pointed out the error to the Marine public relations officer who’d been assigned to keep an eye on the young Pima. The officer’s response stunned Ira: He was ordered to keep his mouth shut. It was too late to do anything; the report had already been released.

  L. B. Holly, who kept in touch with Ira for years afterward, told me: “When he got to Washington, Ira told them it wasn’t Hansen, that it was Harlon. A corporal told Ira to be quiet, that everyone had been identified. Ira later told me he was very upset to be ordered to lie. He said he complained but there was nothing he could do.”

  Ira was ill at ease upon his reunion with Rene. He did not kill his former Easy Company mate, as he had sworn to do. But he didn’t forgive him for snitching, either. He gave the younger boy the silent treatment, speaking to him only through my father.

  The American public never glimpsed this rift. To the crowds, the boys were like the Three Musketeers. Except that they had a different collective name: Sometimes they were the “Iwo Jima flagraising heroes”; usually, they were simply “the heroes.”

  It must have felt surreal to the boys. Heroes? They had just returned from the protracted horrors of one of the deadliest and most intense battles in history, where heroes around them had acted with unimaginable bravery, suffered, and died almost by the minute. And here was an American populace driving itself into a frenzy over…what? Over an accidental photograph of a forgotten moment, an insignificant gesture in a month filled with significant ones.

  As Ira would write, in wonderment, in a letter to his parents: “It’s funny what a picture can do.”

  The first day of their official “heroism” began early and accelerated rapidly. Up the White House stairs, past the saluting guards, down the historic halls lined with applauding government employees, and into the Oval Office at 9:15 A.M. sharp. The new President already had risen from his desk to welcome them.

  “I was very nervous before going in to meet the Commander in Chief,” John told the Boston Globe afterward. “But after I got in, I felt no different than going into an office in my own hometown to meet a local businessman.”

  The boys presented Mr. Truman with the “first” copy of the official Bond Tour poster in a gold frame. Truman, smiling, asked the boys to point themselves out on the poster as photographers clicked off photo after photo—front-page news for the next day and publicity beyond value for the Seventh Bond Tour. The President thanked them for the important duty they were about to perform for their country. He grasped John’s hand and then Rene’s, calling them heroes. Then he turned to Ira and said, “You are a true American because you are an American Indian. And now, son, you are a true American hero.”

  Next on their itinerary was the U.S. Senate. Senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler of Kentucky informed his colleagues that the heroes of “one of the great pictures of American history” waited outside the chamber: “I ask unanimous consent that the three young men be escorted into the Senate Chamber so that they may be honored.” The boys trooped in, the Senate stood in recess, and its august members rose and applauded, then lined up and jostled like so many Cub Scouts to meet John, Rene, and Ira. In the midst of these high good feelings, Ira Hayes briefly revealed his unvarnished side—the self-conscious outsider who could never quite learn to disguise his honest bluntness.

  A Senator from a Western state hurried up to him, hand outstretched, babbling on in what he apparently believed to be the authentic Pima tongue. Ira stared stonily at him for a moment, then inquired, with a terrible directness, “What do you want?”

  The moment passed, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn swept the boys toward a luncheon in their honor at the Capitol.

  That evening, Rayburn escorted them to Griffith Stadium for the Washington Senators’ season-opener against the Yankees. Spectators’ eyes turned to the three uniformed young men, one of them on crutches, as they settled into choice box seats not far from home plate.

  The Speaker threw out the first ball. Then, before the first batter stepped in, a spotlight bathed the three boys in a silvery glow as the public-address announcer’s words echoed around the stadium:

  “Ladies and gentlemen! You’ve all seen pictures of six Americans raising our flag on Iwo Jima! Three of them survive! These are the three—Marine Private Gagnon, Marine Private Hayes, and Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class Bradley!”

  Some 24,000 fans rose and gave the boys an ovation.

  As the three survivors came to terms with their unreal celebrity life, in Weslaco the Blocks were finally coming to terms with Harlon’s very real death. Belle had finally admitted to herself that Harlon wouldn’t come back. But she was as insistent about Harlon’s rightful place in The Photograph as Ira was desirous of escaping his.

  Belle’s husband was imprisoned inside his stoic German grief. Harlon and Ed Sr. had become friends in the year they drove those oil trucks together. And E
d had lived vicariously through Harlon’s exploits on the football field.

  Ed didn’t cry, didn’t express his grief in words. But a friend of his son Corky, Dale Collins, remembered noticing a sign of the pain Ed kept inside:

  “In church there was a table in front with little U.S. flags representing the boys of the congregation that had gone off to war. If they were killed they got a gold flag. I’ll never forget that Mr. Block would sit in a far right pew, positioned so he couldn’t see Harlon’s flag.”

  But life had to go on: the lives of the survivors, the life of the nation. The grieving Ed Block could never have imagined the great burden that Harlon’s three comrades carried with them as they prepared for the marathon of the Seventh Bond Tour. Quite likely, the boys themselves did not fully imagine it.

  But others did. At the end of the boys’ meeting with Harry Truman, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau lingered with the new President—just long enough to present him with some dire numbers. The war had now devoured $88 billion out of a fiscal year budget of $99 billion. But government revenue receipts totaled only $46 billion.

  It was critical that the Seventh Bond Tour bring in some big numbers.

  Photo Insert 3

  The posed “gung ho” shot, under the replacement flag. Ira Hayes is seated at the far left; Franklin Sousley is fourth from left, raised rifle in hand; Mike Strank is in front of Sousley, thumbs in pocket; and Doc Bradley is in shadow, to Strank’s left.

  Left: Oval Office, April 20, 1945. Doc Bradley, Harry Truman, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes with the Seventh Bond Tour poster. Below: Iwo Jima three-cent stamp, issued July 11, 1945. More than 150 million were sold.

  A smoke before raising the flag for 50,000 fans in Soldier Field, Chicago, May 20, 1945. From left to right: Ira Hayes, Jack Bradley, and Rene Gagnon.

  Doc Bradley raises the flag as Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes look on in Times Square, New York City, May 11, 1945.

  Wall Street, May 15, 1945. The flagraisers with the “Gold Star” mothers. From left to right: Madeline Evelley (mother of the misidentified Hank Hansen), Goldie Price (Franklin Sousley’s mother), Martha Strank (Mike Strank’s mother), Rene Gagnon, Doc Bradley, Ira Hayes, Emil Schram (president, New York Stock Exchange).

  Doc Bradley and Rene Gagnon greeted by the Lockheed Girls at the Los Angeles airport June 9, 1945.

  Harlon Block’s funeral cortege, Weslaco, Texas, 1947. The casket is flanked by Harlon’s Weslaco Panthers teammates.

  Ira, Nancy, and Jobe Hayes.

  Elizabeth Van Gorp marries John Bradley, May 4, 1946.

  Pauline, Rene, and Rene Gagnon, Jr., dedicate the Iwo Jima Motel, Arlington, Virginia.

  Pauline and Rene Gagnon en route to Iwo Jima, 1965.

  John Wayne and John Bradley on the set of The Sands of Iwo Jima, 1949.

  John Wayne hands Rene Gagnon the flag as Ira Hayes and John Bradley look on.

  Left: Felix de Weldon sculpting Rene Gagnon.

  Below: De Weldon with Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, and John Bradley.

  Top: U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, Arlington, Virginia.

  Bottom: Dedication of the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, November 10, 1954. From left to right: John Bradley, Goldie Price (mother of Franklin Sousley), Richard Nixon, Belle Block (mother of Harlon Block), Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes.

  Ira Hayes in jail, Chicago, 1953.

  Rene Gagnon.

  John Bradley, Memorial Day parade, Antigo, Wisconsin.

  Iwo Jima today.

  The Bradleys with commemorative plaque atop Mount Suribachi, April 1998. From left to right: Betty, Steve, James, Joe, and Mark.

  The Bradleys in a Japanese blockhouse, Iwo Jima, 1998. From left to right: Steve, Joe, James, Mark, and Betty.

  Sixteen

  THE MIGHTY 7TH

  It’s funny what a picture can do.

  —IRA HAYES

  FOURTEEN BILLION DOLLARS, TO BE EXACT. That was the monetary goal set by Treasury for the Seventh Bond Tour. Seven billion from companies and businesses, and seven billion from individuals.

  Fourteen billion: a sum equaling the highest goal of any of the eight bond drives of World War II. A sum larger than the government’s expenditures in prewar 1941 and equaling a full quarter of its budget for fiscal 1946.

  Fourteen billion to keep feeding, clothing, sheltering, and arming the millions of men and women still fighting World War II, and provide more planes, ships, and tanks for their effort. Fourteen billion for a war that was costing $250 million a day; $175,000 a minute; a war being waged mostly now against a Pacific enemy whose population was still replacing its armies’ destruction rate of a quarter million men a year.

  Fourteen billion to be solicited from a population of 160 million: nearly one hundred dollars, on average, from every man, woman, and child in America. This in a country where an annual income of seventeen hundred dollars comfortably supported a family of four; where a Harvard education cost a thousand dollars; where a hotel room in New York could be had for three dollars; where a good breakfast cost thirty-two cents.

  A mountain of money that must have seemed as formidable, in its own way, as Suribachi. And now the three surviving flagraisers would lead the charge to take that mountain.

  Bond Tours enjoyed a cherished place in American tradition of the time. Their goal was twofold: to call attention to the wartime need for purchasing government bonds, and to stimulate citizens to leave their homes and offices and head for one of the many “buying booths” scattered about towns and cities, where the actual paper could be purchased. That was where the color and pageantry came in.

  National in scope, local in flavor, Bond Tours combined the old-fashioned elements of vaudeville, the county fair, the Fourth of July parade. And they anticipated some of the flash and crowd-pleasing fervor that would accrue, not too many years later, to Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.

  As families gathered, squinting and waving flags along the Main Streets and Broadways of the nation, columns of soldiers and marching bands would troop past, followed by open vehicles filled with waving movie stars and decorated war heroes. Mock battles would be fought in city parks and athletic stadiums. And speakers’ platforms would display a lineup of politicians, celebrities, and local heroes, many of them missing an arm or a leg, everyone exhorting the crowds to be a part of things, support their country, buy a bond.

  This was the ponderous challenge—and the incomparable excitement—of reaching a mass public in an age before television: a great roving road show that would personify the war’s realities and deliver them to Americans’ home precincts. An effort by the government to communicate almost face-to-face with as many of its citizens as possible, and to make its case for voluntary sacrifices, rather than simply confiscate the needed money through taxes. A gargantuan feat of popular democracy, the likes of which have since vanished from the culture.

  The Seventh Bond Tour—the Mighty 7th—would have all the features of the six previous drives, and more. The Mighty 7th would have as its emblem the most famous image in the history of photography. And the 7th would exhibit, for public view, three of the six figures from that almost-holy frieze.

  As the Seventh moved toward its May 9 kickoff in Washington—it would storm through thirty-three cities before winding up back in the nation’s capital on July 4—The Photograph’s mystical hold on the nation continued to deepen.

  Detached—liberated—even from the merely factual circumstances that produced it, The Photograph had become a receptacle for America’s emotions; it stood for everything good that Americans wanted it to stand for; it had begun to act as a great crystal prism, drawing the light of all America’s values into its facets, and giving off a brilliant rainbow of feeling and thoughts.

  An entrepreneur offered the Associated Press $200,000 for the rights to the photo. A Congressman, W. Sterling Cole of New York, declared that it should become “public property”—it meant too much to the nation to be used for mere commerce. The AP finally decided to donate the rights
to the photo to the government, with royalties going to a sailors’ retirement fund.

  The sculptor Felix de Weldon went to work on a larger model of his flagraising monument. And in Times Square, the crossroads of the world, a five-story flagraising statue was being installed.

  On Tuesday, May 8, the newspapers trumpeted the biggest news yet in the war: Germany had surrendered. And still a development regarding The Photograph worked its way onto the front page of The New York Times: Joe Rosenthal had won a Pulitzer Prize.

  A Pulitzer submission for work done in 1945 normally would not be eligible for a prize until 1946. But for the first and only time the trustees of Columbia University suspended the rules “for this distinguished example,” declaring “Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the flagraising on Iwo depicts one of the war’s great moments,” a “frozen flash of history” caught by his camera.

  Bright sunshine and soft spring breezes graced the Mighty 7th’s opening ceremonies in Washington the next day. As military brass glittered, tubas oom-pahed and flags undulated overhead, members of the President’s Cabinet and of both Houses assembled outside the Capitol Building to wish the tour godspeed.

  After some speeches and introductions, the crowning event unfolded. As official Washington silently saluted, the Marine Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Rene stood at ramrod attention, while John and Ira pulled a guide rope to hoist the American flag over the Capitol dome. In raising it there, the boys were introducing a new national relic into American history.