Inseparable from the campaign to conquer Iwo Jima is the photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the flag being raised on Mount Suribachi. Five marines and a Navy corpsman put it up on February 23, 1945, five days after D-day. Back in the states, the photograph was an instant sensation. It appeared on the front page of dozens of newspapers across the country on Sunday, February 25. The success of Rosenthal’s image obscured the fact that it merely recorded the second flag raising on the mountain. Six other marines had erected the first flag a few hours earlier. The planting of the second flag was a routine incident, not even mentioned in the daily logs.
That first flag, fifty-four inches long and twenty-eight inches deep, was put up by Lieutenant Harold Schrier, Platoon Sergeant Ernest T. Thomas, Sergeant Henry O. Hansen, Corporal Charles W. Lindberg, and Privates First Class Louis C. Charlo and James Michels. Three of the marines who raised the first flag were to die in combat, just as three from the second flag raising were also killed. Staff Sergeant Lou Lowery, a staff photographer for the Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck, took a picture of three marines tying the first flag to a pipe and another after it was in place, with some marines standing around. The second photo is static and uninspired.
Lindberg, the last living member of the twelve flag raisers, told me shortly before he died in June 2007 that it went up at 10:30 a.m. Much was made in the press at the time about the ferocious fighting the patrol endured in order to get the flag to the summit, but it was all grossly exaggerated. Both the first and the second group of flag raisers scaled the 556-foot elevation with minimal interference from the enemy.
No one is quite sure why they had such an easy time. There were still plenty of Japanese in various caves and tunnels all the way to the summit. For whatever reason, however, none emerged until after the first flag had gone up. Lindberg thought the Japanese troops stayed inside because Suribachi had taken such a terrible pounding from the ships before the patrols ascended its slopes. In any case, most of the fight for Suribachi occurred around its base in the four days preceding the flag raisings.
The second flag, which was eight feet long and four feet eight inches deep, almost twice the size of the first, was raised early in the afternoon. Present besides Rosenthal were Sergeant Bill Genaust, a Marine motion-picture photographer, and Private Bob Campbell, a still photographer. Rosenthal took several pictures, including what he called a posed “gung ho” group shot. The story of this posed photograph later helped foster confusion over the assertion that the famous flag raising shot had been staged. Genaust shot a sequence of the flag going up that later confirmed the validity of Rosenthal’s photo. Rosenthal took his picture with a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic at 1/400th of a second, lens aperture between f8 and f11 on sheet No. 10 of a twelve-sheet film pack, according to Hal Buell. Campbell got a nice shot showing the new flag in place while the first one was being gathered in.
Hal Buell, who spent forty years as a photo editor with the Associated Press, including twenty-five as the head man, reports in his authoritative book Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph that Captured America that three other photographers were present before the second flag went up.
Of course it was Rosenthal’s photo that got the attention. Three of the flag raisers—the Navy corpsman Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class John H. Bradley, Private First Class Ira H. Hayes, and Private First Class Rene A. Gagnon—were later brought home and feted as heroes as they led a nationwide bond drive to help raise money for the war effort. The other three—Private First Class Franklin R. Sousley, Sergeant Mike Strank, and Corporal Harlon H. Block—were all killed in the weeks following the flag raising.
Lowery initially resented the attention Rosenthal received and thought his shot had to be a fake because he wasn’t even there when the first flag went up. Chuck Lindberg too maintained that Rosenthal was a self-promoter who helped set it all up, but this was not the case. Rosenthal was just a news photographer, trying to get a good shot, and things went his way. His material got back to Guam quickly, got sorted out and sent to the States right away, where it became an immediate hit.
I interviewed Joe Rosenthal in 1995, when Parade magazine ran his photo on its cover to accompany a fiftieth anniversary piece on the battle of Iwo Jima, written by James Brady. You always hear about famous photos being staged, so we ran a sidebar with Joe explaining how he had come to get the shot, emphasizing that it had not been posed. “I backed off thirty-five feet and stood on a couple of old Japanese sandbags and some rocks,” he told me. It was around noon, he said. “The light from above tends to sculpt your subject. The tension in the picture comes from the weight of the pole, which was about one hundred fifty pounds. Other guys jumped in to help when they saw it was heavy. I never would have used that many in the shot.”
Since he worked for the AP when he took the photo, the agency owned the rights. He got a raise, though, and won a Pulitzer Prize. Ten years later, on February 18, 1955, he told the full story with W. C. Heinz in an article for Collier’s magazine. Rosenthal downplayed his part in the story, and his last line was the best. Yes, he said, he took the picture, but the marines took the island. Rosenthal went on to a full career with the San Francisco Chronicle.
Though the Associated Press owns the copyright to the photograph, the Marine Corps has the right to distribute it. According to Hal Buell, proceeds from commercial use go to the Navy Relief Fund. Though it is one of the most memorable images of the twentieth century, the AP doesn’t make any money off it. “Everybody knew the picture was going to be around forever,” says Buell.
Rosenthal was “a delightful human being, witty, insightful, easy to talk to, very friendly, and unassuming to a point of distraction,” Buell recalls. He was a small man, five feet five, 130 pounds. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had volunteered for all the services, and they all had turned him down because his eyesight was so bad. Buell adds, “As I say in the book, he was painfully modest. There was a story I heard after I did the book: He’d been out on assignment with some young reporter at the Chronicle, and she introduced Joe this way: ‘You know he’s the man who made that famous picture.’ And Joe took her aside and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again. Don’t introduce me that way. I’m Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle.’ He was very modest about it; I used to give him a hard time because he always said the picture was a lucky shot.
“Serendipity is part of every picture ever made, but there’s a lot more to it than that. He wanted at first to make a picture of one flag going up, the other one coming down, and then he thought: No, that wouldn’t, might not work. It was too much like a football play. Go this way or that way, and you could miss it. So he went around to the front, then had to step back so he could get the whole swing of the flag. If you notice in the [Genaust] film, the flag goes up and out of the frame, and he didn’t want that to happen, so he stepped down.
“Then he built a little platform that cut down the foreground, and then Genaust walks in front of him and they get involved in a ‘Am I in your way?’ ‘No, you’re not—whoops, there it goes,’ and he raised the camera and—bang—right at the perfect peak of the action. So there’s a lot of skillful photography involved. It wasn’t lucky. There was some luck, but it was mostly Joe making a good picture, taking the time to make it right.
“Some photographers go to war because it’s a way to make a career; a great war picture can make a career. Some photographers go because it’s a way to make a buck; there’s a story to be covered, and you can sell your pictures and make some money. And some photographers go because they sincerely feel that the story should be told because they can help change the world. A lot of photographers are motivated by that. Photographers are basically emotional journalists. The nature of the work is emotional, instinctive, and intuitive, and so the mind works that way all the time. There’s a swashbuckling element involved as well, something that takes you to the place where the action occurs.
“Joe’s flag, the second flag, flew till March 15. There’s a lot of irony in that too. They said the island was now secure. So they declared a headquarters company and put a flag up, and that became the flag on Iwo Jima, and the flag on the mountain was taken down. But there were a lot of people died after March 15.” Both flags now hang in the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico.
“You know Rosenthal’s favorite picture from the invasion days is not that good, but Joe was crazy about it. [The photo shows two slain marines in the foreground, with another marine advancing over the sand from right to left.] The reason he liked it was, he said, he was so impressed by the fact that no matter how many marines fell, they just kept coming. They just kept coming. They just kept coming. And I think that’s why they weren’t annihilated, because the Japanese couldn’t kill them all. There were too many of them. Once they got up off the beach, it was a little tougher to get them.”
Joe Rosenthal died in California on Sunday, August 20, 2006. He was ninety-four.