The flag on Suribachi

On 23 February 1945, the fifth day of the fighting on Iwo Jima, men of the United States Marine Corps reached the summit of Suribachi – an extinct volcano some 169 metres high that closes off the southern tip of the island. At about 10.20 a.m. a patrol under Lieutenant Harold Schrier planted a small United States flag on the rim of the crater. A few hours later, around noon, a second, much larger flag was raised in its place. That second moment was captured by the Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. His picture, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, appeared in newspapers across the United States within days and became one of the best-known images of the Second World War.

The moment itself was symbolic rather than decisive. The capture of Suribachi deprived the Japanese of their best observation point over the landing beaches. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s main line of defence, however, ran across the island’s rocky northern plateaus, and the fighting there went on for more than another month.

Cutting off and storming the mountain

When the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions landed on Iwo Jima on 19 February, the task of taking Suribachi was given to Colonel Harry Liversedge’s 28th Marines of the 5th Division. On the very first day its 1st Battalion crossed the narrowest part of the island, less than a kilometre wide at that point, and reached the west coast. It thereby cut the mountain off from the rest of the Japanese defences – at least above ground. The volcano was honeycombed with a network of tunnels, caves and bunkers, and its slopes concealed artillery, mortar and machine-gun positions. From these the Japanese fired on the crowded beaches and the ships offshore.

Kuribayashi did not intend to defend Suribachi to the last man. He treated the sector as one element in the defence of the whole island, whose main purpose was to bleed the Americans for as long as possible. According to American studies, the mountain sector was commanded by Colonel Kanehiko Atsuchi, who had some two thousand soldiers and sailors at his disposal.

For three days, from 20 to 22 February, the Marines of the 28th Regiment edged forward metre by metre towards the base of the mountain. They were supported by carrier aircraft, naval gunfire and tanks, which quickly bogged down in the soft volcanic ash. Bunkers were destroyed with flamethrowers, demolition charges and grenades, often from a few metres away. Losses were heavy, and on 22 February the attack was slowed further by cold rain. By that evening the regiment had surrounded the base of the volcano. Some of the Japanese defenders were killed in the fighting and in sealed caves. Some, according to American accounts, slipped through at night to the north, to Kuribayashi’s main lines. Atsuchi himself was killed in the fighting for the mountain.

The first flag

On the morning of 23 February the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, first sent two small reconnaissance patrols up the mountain. When they returned without serious trouble, he sent a detachment of some forty men from Company E up to the summit under Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier. Johnson handed him a small flag, measuring about 140 by 70 centimetres, which came from the transport USS Missoula. The order was simple: if he reached the summit, he was to raise it there.

Contrary to later press descriptions, the climb was not a fierce struggle for every metre. The Marines expected an ambush but encountered only isolated defenders on the way. On the rim of the crater they found a length of pipe, tied the flag to it and at about 10.20 a.m. set it up at the highest point. The moment was photographed by Sergeant Louis R. Lowery, a Marine photographer from Leatherneck magazine. Moments later Japanese soldiers emerged from caves and opened fire on the group on the summit. Lowery smashed his camera diving away from a grenade, but the film survived. The flag was small, but it could be seen from the beaches and the ships. According to many accounts, the men below cheered and the ships sounded their sirens and whistles.

At that moment the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, came ashore with the commander of the Marine expeditionary troops, Lieutenant General Holland Smith. In his memoirs Smith recorded what Forrestal said to him then: “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.” Forrestal wanted to take the flag as a souvenir. According to participants’ accounts, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson decided that the flag belonged to the battalion, and resolved to replace it with a larger one and bring the first one safely down.

The second flag and Rosenthal’s photograph

The larger flag, measuring about 245 by 140 centimetres, was brought from the tank landing ship LST-779 lying off the beach. Accounts of who obtained it differ in detail. It was carried up the mountain by the battalion runner, Private First Class Rene Gagnon. At the same time a group of Company E men was climbing to the summit to lay a telephone line there. It was led by Sergeant Michael Strank, a Rusyn born in Jarabina in present-day Slovakia, who had emigrated with his family to Pennsylvania as a child.

Behind them came Joe Rosenthal and two Marine photographers, Bob Campbell and Sergeant Bill Genaust with a cine camera. Halfway up they met Lowery coming down, who told them that the flag was already up but that the view from the top was worth the climb. On the summit the Marines were just tying the new flag to a heavy Japanese water pipe. Rosenthal, a short man, built himself a platform of stones and sandbags. As six men began to heave the pole upright and the first flag was being lowered, he managed to press the shutter of his Speed Graphic camera – by his own account almost without looking through the viewfinder. Genaust, standing a few metres away, filmed the same scene in colour. Rosenthal then took several more pictures, including a posed photograph of more than a dozen Marines cheering beneath the flag, known as the “gung ho” shot.

The photograph that went round the country

Rosenthal did not know what he had captured. He sent the film, unseen, by air to Guam, where it was developed at the fleet press office. Associated Press editors immediately recognised the quality of the frame and transmitted it to New York. By Sunday 25 February the picture was on the front pages of hundreds of American newspapers. The diagonal composition, the figures of the soldiers with no visible faces and the flag flying in the wind seemed to sum up the entire war effort.

Suspicions that the scene had been staged soon arose as well. Rosenthal himself contributed to them. Asked on Guam whether the picture had been posed, he said yes – as he later explained, he was thinking of the “gung ho” shot, not the photograph of the flag-raising. The doubts resurfaced in the press and on the radio for decades. They were dispelled above all by Genaust’s film, which shows that the photograph was taken during a real, unposed movement. A further source of misunderstanding was that the flag had been raised twice, and that the second flag replaced the first. In May 1945 the photograph won the Pulitzer Prize for photography – as is often emphasised, the only photograph to win in the same year in which it was taken.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Treasury Department saw in the photograph an excellent symbol for the coming war bond drive. On orders from Washington, the men in the picture were to be identified and the survivors brought home. Gagnon, Ira Hayes and the Navy corpsman John Bradley arrived in Washington in April 1945 – after Roosevelt’s death on 12 April – and took part in the touring campaign of the Seventh War Loan. The image from Suribachi appeared on posters and, in July 1945, on a postage stamp.

Who the six men were

Identifying the men in the photograph proved difficult, because their faces can hardly be seen. The identification was corrected several times. The Marine Corps’ original version named Strank, Gagnon, Hayes, Bradley, Franklin Sousley and Sergeant Henry Hansen. In 1947, after an inquiry opened at the family’s request and on the testimony of Ira Hayes, it was accepted that the man at the base of the pole was not Hansen but Corporal Harlon Block. Hansen had taken part in raising the first flag. In June 2016 a board convened by the Marine Corps established that John Bradley – who had also been on the summit at the first flag-raising – does not appear in Rosenthal’s photograph, and that in his place is Private First Class Harold Schultz. In October 2019, after a two-year investigation carried out with the help of the FBI and amateur historians, the Corps announced that the figure previously identified as Gagnon was Corporal Harold Keller. Gagnon nevertheless remained the man who had carried the second flag up the mountain and brought the first one down.

According to the Marine Corps’ current position, then, the men raising the flag in the photograph are Michael Strank, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, Ira Hayes, Harold Schultz and Harold Keller. Three of them did not survive the battle. Strank and Block were killed on 1 March 1945 – Strank, according to later findings, probably by a shell fired from an American ship – and Sousley on 21 March, by a sniper’s bullet. Also killed were Sergeant Hansen and Sergeant Ernest Thomas from the first flag party, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, and the cameraman Bill Genaust, whose body was never found.

The battle went on

The cheers on the beaches on 23 February did not herald an early end to the fighting. The capture of Suribachi was the first, but not the hardest, stage of the battle. Kuribayashi’s main forces, hidden in an extensive network of tunnels in the north of the island, were still waiting for the Americans. The fighting for Hill 382, the “Amphitheater” and “Turkey Knob”, which the Marines called the “Meat Grinder”, cost far more lives in the following weeks than the assault on the volcano. Organised resistance ceased only in mid-March, and the last Japanese attack was beaten off on 26 March 1945. 6,821 Americans were killed. The Japanese lost, according to various estimates, from about 18,000 to 21,000 dead, and only 216 prisoners were taken during the battle.

The first days of the fighting are also linked to a question historians later asked themselves: was the island worth the price? Its airfields served as an emergency landing ground for B-29 bombers returning from Japan and as a base for escort fighters. The scale of these benefits, however, remains a matter of dispute.

Rosenthal’s photograph took on a life of its own. The sculptor Felix de Weldon based on it the monumental Marine Corps War Memorial, unveiled on 10 November 1954 in Arlington, outside Washington, in the presence of President Dwight Eisenhower. The survivors’ lives were not easy either. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, could not cope with fame and died in 1955 at the age of 32. In 2006 Clint Eastwood told the story of the photograph in the film Flags of Our Fathers, based on the book by John Bradley’s son. At the same time he made Letters from Iwo Jima, which shows the same battle through the eyes of the Japanese defenders and their commander.

In the history of the Pacific War the photograph from Suribachi became the image of American victory, even though it was taken on the fifth day of a battle that was to last more than another month. It also captured a change in the character of the war. The Americans were now fighting for land that belonged to Japan, and each successive island on the road to the Japanese home islands cost more blood.