Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  The next morning as Rene, John, and Keyes Beech headed for St. Louis, Ira stopped off in San Francisco and wrote a letter home. Self-revealing in a way that few of his “tough-guy” statements to the press were, it showed the embarrassment, hurt pride, and frustrated yearning of a still-young, still-tender, and deeply wounded man:

  Dear Parents & Brothers;

  This may shock you but do not be afraid. At the present I’m in San Francisco just got in this morning from Chicago. And leaving this morning for Pearl Harbor.

  There’s supposed to be some show out there that’s why Gen. Rockey wants me back there just for it. Then back here again to rejoin Gagnon, Bradley and Beech. So do not worry.

  Today Bradley & the others are in St. Louis and I sure wish I was with them. But that has to wait till later.

  Well I’ll close here as I have a few things I’d like to do.

  God Bless all of you & please for my sake do not worry.

  Your Loving Son & Bro.

  I.H.H.

  The “show” that Ira alluded to was nothing less than the contemplated invasion of Japan, which was then in its building stages. By suggesting that the commanding general of Spearhead required his participation, Ira was making a grandiose—and tortured—grasp at camouflaging his humiliation.

  Accumulated folklore has it that Ira was an innocent corrupted by the Bond Tour, that he hated every minute of it. But the truth is that when released from his promotional duties, he only wanted back on the tour.

  St. Louis, Tulsa, San Antonio, Austin, Portland, Seattle. The cities began to blur. But the popular adulation, amplified by the newspapers, contrasted acutely with how the boys saw themselves. “We are not heroes,” John Bradley insisted in El Paso. He continued to insist that “anyone on the island could have been in the picture,” and that “we didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.”

  Rene was likewise humble: “Someone yelled, ‘give us a hand,’ so I did,” was his typical interview line. He emphasized repeatedly that theirs was the second flagraising of the morning.

  In fact, the boys had little to say about the replacement flagraising itself. There was, after all, little to say. The act had been so insignificant at the time, they had paid it little heed. John and Rene emphasized repeatedly that they “didn’t know anything at all” about the presence of any photographer, and had as yet not even met Joe Rosenthal—“the guy who got us into all this.” The boys talked far more about the first flagraising—recounting the efforts of Boots Thomas, Lieutenant Schrier, photographer Lou Lowery, and the rest.

  None of it really registered. Ordinary prose, it seemed, no longer sufficed. The Photograph had transported many thousands of anxious, grieving, and war-weary Americans into a radiant state of mind: a kind of sacred realm, where faith, patriotism, mythic history, and the simple capacity to hope all intermingled.

  And it reflected the epic regard in which the public held the boys—a regard that manifested itself repeatedly in the massive crowds the boys drew; the almost universal wish to touch them.

  Meanwhile, some four thousand miles to the west, a fallen “immortal” was reconciling himself once again to the military life.

  Ira had rejoined Easy Company in Hawaii—where the 5th Division was training for the invasion of Japan—clinging to the face-saving story that the Marines had allowed him: He “wanted to be with the boys.”

  He had breezed in with a swagger that he perhaps did not feel, a seabag full of autographed glossies of showgirls, and a greater thirst than he’d shown before the Bond Tour. “He had changed,” said Lloyd Thompson, the first Easy man to spot him, grinning, in front of the company’s office tent. “He’d get drunk and create problems. He was fairly straitlaced before.”

  His buddies had spilled out of their tents and greeted him with thumps on the back, and for a while he reigned as the toast of the 28th Regiment. But soon his comrades noticed that Ira was not really with them. “He’d take his allotment of six Saturday afternoon beers and take off alone,” Thompson remembered. “He never drank with us.”

  Truth to tell, there were more strangers than buddies in the outfit now. The boys he’d cared about the most were dead.

  “I can never forget them,” he wrote to his parents from Pearl Harbor, carefully embroidering the fiction of a voluntary return.

  …I know there are lots of persons who think I am crazy for coming back when I could have stayed in the States forever. But as I said before, I have a reason…Nobody would understand it but me. There was a strong urge in me to come back. And I felt it was my Lord, still by my side. And now I am back, more confident in myself and stronger in mind and I am unafraid. For I still have Christ to look up to…

  The bond tour was really fun for a while. We found out it would not be so easy after a week on the road…It got so boring and tiresome.

  And the people were so bothering. I couldn’t stand much more, especially newspaper reporters and photographers.

  Over here I feel a lot better. I feel like my own self, just another Marine, and that’s the way I want it.

  Please do not feel hurt over the quick decision I made…

  Appleton, El Paso, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Greensboro, Tampa, Columbia, Charleston, Richmond, Norfolk. As the tour headed south, June deepened toward July; the weather turned hot, and fatigue and numbness overtook the boys. It was all train stations, airports, flashbulbs, adoring faces, unfamiliar beds, no sleep, the same old questions. Luxury was no longer a sumptuous banquet, a well-appointed suite. Luxury was a good shave, a hot bath, a square meal. Fastidious John grew focused on his laundry. It never seemed to catch up with his schedule. In the final weeks, laundry came to dominate the concerns of local rally chairmen: The boys had decided that until their fresh clothes had been delivered, they would give no interviews to the press. Service improved markedly.

  Asked for a third time whether The Photograph had been posed, John replied evenly: “I did not know the picture was being taken. If I had, I would have gotten the hell out of there and I would not be on this tour.”

  As the tour neared the final phase of its eight-week loop around America, John and Rene could not have fully appreciated the scale of what they had accomplished. The Mighty 7th was exceeding all expectations. With the invasion of Okinawa now commanding the headlines, and patriotic fervor running high, the tour was inspiring subscriptions at a rate that would astound the nation when they were finally totaled.

  The Bond Tour revenues would have immediate use. America was pouring every resource into the Pacific War. At the beginning of June, President Truman had announced doubling to seven million the troop strength pitted against Japan—higher than the U.S. deployment in Europe at its peak. All strategies pointed to an invasion of the Japanese home islands. An expeditionary force of 770,000 was being assembled for the first wave alone, the landing set for Kyushu. (Normandy had required 175,000.) On June 18, Truman’s military advisers presented the President with horrifying projections: Up to 35 percent—nearly 270,000—of these men would be killed or wounded in the first thirty days of fighting. After 120 days, the time allotted for occupying the island, U.S. casualties could reach 395,000.

  That was the first wave. The second—an invasion of Honshu and the capture of Tokyo, projected for March 1946—would require a force of one million. And would exact hundreds of thousands of casualties.

  On the night of July 4, the nation’s capital was a tumult of the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air. Some 350,000 spectators—a larger crowd even than would assemble for Martin Luther King’s March on Washington eighteen years later—turned their faces upward to watch fireworks explode and spread their contrails over the Washington Monument, turning the Potomac’s surface, for nearly an hour, into a mirror of reds and whites and yellows and greens. The fireworks filled the night sky with the outlines of the American flag, the face of President Truman, and the Iwo Jima flagraising scene.

  The Mighty 7th had completed
its triumphal circuit of the nation; it had come back home.

  It was over.

  Rene reported to Marine Headquarters the next day. He was given a short leave before his transfer back to San Diego. On July 7 he married Pauline in Baltimore, in a ceremony performed by the Vice Chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese there, the Reverend F. Joseph Manns. John Bradley served as best man. Irene Gagnon did not attend.

  Pauline accompanied Rene as far west as Pasadena. By November 7, he was on active duty in Tsingtao, China.

  By the end of the summer, the final totals for the Mighty 7th were in. The tour had not just met its goal; the tour had nearly doubled it: Americans had pledged $26.3 billion. This was equal to almost half of the 1946 total U.S. government budget of $56 billion.

  When I spoke with a Treasury Department source by telephone to confirm these figures, the official marveled over the size and accomplishments of the Mighty 7th. He fell silent for a moment as he shuffled some papers on his desk. Then he said, simply: “We were one then.”

  Nor was the outpouring of riches inspired by the image at an end.

  An Iwo Jima commemorative stamp was issued on July 11, the anniversary of the founding of the Marine Corps Reserve. It was the first stamp to feature living people. Even Presidents had to die to get their image on a stamp. It immediately broke post office records for firstday sales, topping 400,000. In time, 150 million stamps would be printed, making it the bestselling stamp in history up to that time.

  John Bradley, again being treated at nearby Bethesda for his wounds, sat quietly among the dignitaries—the only one of the six figures present—during the Washington ceremonies that opened the sale of the stamp. Presented by the postmaster with the first sheet off the presses, he managed a simple “Thank you” before sitting down again.

  He listened as the postmaster proclaimed: “We honor the individuals here depicted, who by God’s mercy still live among us. But they are not represented on this stamp as individuals. In the glorious tradition of the Marine Corps, they submerged their identities, giving themselves wholly to the United States of America.”

  I can only imagine the thoughts that must have coursed through my father’s mind as he heard these words: my father, age twenty-one, two years out of his adolescence, who had never wished more fervently for anything than he wished for the day he could return to Wisconsin, marry, start a family, and open his funeral home—the quiet dream that had sustained him through the long months in the Pacific, who indeed “gave himself wholly to the United States of America.”

  My father was now listening to the news that his identity would never again be his own: that it would remain, in some irretrievable way, the property of the nation.

  He would not be able to leave the image. The image would not leave him.

  He was a figure in The Photograph.

  Seventeen

  A CONFLICT OF HONOR

  That’s Harlon. I know my boy.

  —BELLE BLOCK

  IN WESLACO, TEXAS, at about the time the Bond Tour was looping back east for its triumphal finale, Ed and Belle Block were packing their belongings for a private journey west. They were moving to California—to Loma Linda, where the Seventh-Day Adventist Church had a large presence.

  Loma Linda was Belle’s idea. In fact, she’d insisted on it. Daughter Maurine, now Maurine Mitchell, lived there with her husband and two daughters. Ed Jr. was stationed nearby in the Air Force. But just as important for Belle, Loma Linda was somewhere besides the Valley. Belle had never adjusted to the sapping humidity, the isolation, the endless milking, of farm life in south Texas. Ed had adjusted fine; it was the life he knew in his bones, the only life. But he did not resist his wife’s strong desire to leave. Sorrow and solitude had steered the Blocks’ marriage into trouble, and Ed hoped that maybe a move away from their memory-laden environs could make things better. He hoped that at least she could leave behind her preoccupation with Harlon as a figure in the flagraising photograph. And he harbored the secret hope that someday, when the grief had finally eased down, he and Belle might come back home.

  The stresses had begun even before they had learned of Harlon’s death. They had already sold their house when the telegram arrived. But the bad news had only hardened Belle’s determination. “Harlon’s death exploded Mom from the Valley,” Maurine later recalled. “She couldn’t go on; there was just too much hurt. She used to say, ‘Everything bad that ever happened to me happened in the Valley.’”

  On the surface, Belle remained the cool and focused prairie matriarch. At age fifty she was a handsome woman, straight-backed and conscious of her breeding, her thick black hair pulled tightly into a bun, her hazel eyes appraising behind her round spectacles. But people who knew her well understood that something in her had been broken. Something in all of the Blocks. “Harlon’s death tore that family apart,” remembers Travis Truitt, a friend of Harlon’s in Weslaco. “It was like taking a glass and dropping it on a concrete floor—it just shattered them.”

  So in June 1945, while the nation celebrated the grand tour of the surviving flagraisers and their patriotic show, Ed and Belle quietly loaded up their car and, with their young sons Mel, Larry, and Corky in tow, left Weslaco, Texas, heading for California.

  In late July, the Big Three leaders of the Allied nations—Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Harry Truman of the United States, and Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union—met in Potsdam to map out the closure of the Pacific War. Blockades and carpet-bombing were quickly ruled out: Clearly, the malignant Japanese war machine would capitulate only to direct and cataclysmic force. This machine would have to be broken, at nearly any cost. The Allied leaders settled on an invasion of Japan.

  It would be the largest and costliest operation in the annals of warfare: 1.5 million combat troops committed to the initial assault waves, with reserves bringing the total to 4.5 million. The projected casualties beggared the imagination: a million Americans; half a million British.

  Churchill, Truman, and their aides conferred discreetly on one further, just-emerging alternative: the one whose detritus still floated in the high winds above the testing ground at Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico, where it had fissioned into human history only days earlier, at five-thirty A.M., on July 16.

  “The decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to complete the surrender of Japan was never an issue,” Churchill later wrote. “There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement…nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”

  On July 26, the Allied leaders issued their Potsdam Declaration: Japan must surrender or face “utter and complete destruction.”

  Japan ignored the ultimatum. It still numbered 2.5 million active troops and a civilian population that could be conscripted into a suicide defense force. “One hundred million hearts beating as one” was the slogan. The Rising Sun would fight to the last issen gorin.

  Hundreds of thousands of young American men, including veterans of both the Pacific and the European Theaters, braced themselves for likely death on the shores of Kyushu and Honshu. Easy Company trained with the 5th Division at Camp Tarawa for its role in “The Big One.” At mail call, Ira Hayes received an imposing package: a commemorative sheet of flagraiser stamps signed by President Truman, Commandant Vandegrift, and John Bradley. He barely glanced at it before crumpling it and tossing it in his seabag.

  With her new husband on active duty in Tsingtao, China, Pauline Harnois—now Mrs. Rene Gagnon—returned to her life as a mill worker in Manchester, New Hampshire. Among her fondest possessions was a formal color photograph of Rene in his full-dress Marine uniform.

  “My mother always told me she married him in that uniform,” Rene Jr. told me. “But when I was older I saw an old news photograph showing him in a casual uniform at his wedding. That was typical of my mother. She always had to maintain a certain image of him, of what things should be like.”

  Loma Linda did indeed bring Belle some measure of peace. The family bo
ught a small house, and Belle busied herself with church life and her children while Ed scouted for farmland.

  Belle’s fixation on Harlon’s place in the photograph, though, remained unshakable. In fact, it grew stronger. One of the first items she unpacked in their new dwelling was a copy of the photo. And for the rest of her life she wore a scarf pin fashioned from Harlon’s paratrooper wings.

  Her heart continued to harbor the belief that it was her son in the photo. One day she received a visit from a student from the old hometown of Weslaco, Russell Youngberg. “She showed me the photo,” he remembered, “and told me it was Harlon there putting the pole in the ground. I thought to myself, ‘How can she be so sure?’”

  California was less welcoming to Ed. It proved as bad a fit for him as Texas had for Belle. He could not believe the price of land out there; it dwarfed his small nest egg. A stranger to the local banks, he was unable to secure a loan. The dream of a farm began to wither. Frustrated and miserable, he told Belle one day: “I’ve got to make us a living. I’m going back to Texas.”

  Whatever hopes he might have harbored about Belle were dashed when she replied: “Go. But I’m not.” Ed picked up a used Model A on the cheap, threw his luggage into it, and hit the long road back to the Valley.

  “He always thought that eventually she would come back there to him,” Maurine said. “I think she broke his heart.”

  Through the summer of 1945, Iwo Jima continued to serve the purpose for which it had been wrested from the Japanese: to provide air cover and an emergency landing strip for the B-29 bombers flying from their base in Tinian to their targets in Japan.

  In the dim predawn light of August 6, 1945, the pilot of one of those bombers, on his first mission to the Japanese homeland, puffed his favorite Bond Street tobacco through a Kaywoodie briar pipe as, through the broken clouds ahead, Iwo loomed into view. At 5:55 A.M. he made a spontaneous loop around Mount Suribachi as he waited for two other B-29’s to catch up with him. Looking down from the cockpit of the plane he had named after his mother, the pilot ruminated that the horrendous battle had been worth its costs: “The island, which had become Japan’s prime defensive outpost, lay directly on the route our bombers flew on their mission from the Marianas to Tokyo. Without it, our mission would have been more difficult.”