Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima

The second flag, not the first

The most famous photograph of the Pacific War — Joe Rosenthal's shot of six US Marines raising an American flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima — does not show the first flag-raising.

It shows the second.

The first flag, a smaller one (54 by 28 inches), was raised at 10:20 on 23 February 1945 by a patrol of the 28th Marines who had just reached the summit. The flag was almost immediately deemed too small to be seen from the beach below.

Marine command requested a larger replacement — a 96-by-56-inch flag — which was carried up by a second patrol. The second flag- raising took place at approximately 13:00 the same day.

Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press photographed the second event because he had missed the first one entirely.

Six men, three of whom would die

The six Marines in the photograph are: Harlon Block (Texas, 25); Harold Keller (Iowa, 23); Franklin Sousley (Kentucky, 19); Michael Strank (Pennsylvania, sergeant in charge, 25); Ira Hayes (Pima Indian from Arizona, 22); and Harold Schultz (Detroit, 19).

Strank, Block and Sousley were killed in the next month of fighting on Iwo Jima, which continued through 26 March 1945.

The identifications were partially wrong from the beginning. For decades, John "Doc" Bradley was thought to be one of the flag-raisers. In 2016 a US Marine Corps investigation confirmed that the man identified as Bradley was actually Harold Schultz. Rene Gagnon, similarly identified for 75 years, was confirmed in 2019 to actually be Harold Keller.

Why the battle mattered

The Battle of Iwo Jima ran 19 February to 26 March 1945. The 8-square-mile volcanic island, midway between the Mariana Islands and Tokyo, was strategically valuable as an emergency landing field for B-29 bombers returning from raids on Japan.

110 000 Marines landed. 6 800 were killed. 19 000 wounded.

The 21 000 Japanese defenders fought from an extensive underground tunnel system. Almost none surrendered. Only about 1 000 were taken prisoner; the rest fought to the death.

It was the only Pacific battle of the war in which US casualties (killed and wounded) exceeded Japanese casualties.

The photograph that funded the war

Rosenthal's photograph reached the United States by AP wire on 25 February 1945, two days after it was taken, and appeared in hundreds of US newspapers that morning.

It became the most-reproduced photograph in American history.

It was used as the basis for the design of the US Marine Corps War Memorial (unveiled at Arlington in 1954 — the second-largest bronze statue in the world). It was placed on a 3-cent postage stamp in 1945.

Most consequentially, the photograph was the centrepiece of the Seventh War Loan bond drive, which raised $26.3 billion — the largest single fundraising event in US history at the time and sufficient to fund 25 per cent of the entire US war budget for 1945.

The three flag-raisers who survived the battle were brought back to the US to tour the bond drive cities. Ira Hayes, who struggled with what would today be called PTSD, hated the tour and drank himself to death in 1955, age 32.