Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

Taken by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press on February 23, 1945, the photograph was published in Sunday newspapers two days later and reprinted in thousands of publications.

It won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography and has come to be regarded in the United States as one of the most recognizable images of World War II.

Iwo Jima originally was not a target, but the relatively quick liberation of the Philippines left the Americans with a longer-than-expected lull prior to the planned invasion of Okinawa.

The Americans, after capturing the island, weakened the Japanese early warning system, and used it as an emergency landing strip for damaged bombers.

[11] First Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, executive officer of Easy Company, who had replaced the wounded Third Platoon commander, John Keith Wells,[12] volunteered to lead a 40-man combat patrol up the mountain.

The loud noise made by the servicemen and blasts of the ship horns alerted the Japanese, who up to this point had stayed in their cave bunkers.

[17] Schrier was later awarded the Navy Cross for volunteering to take the patrol up Mount Suribachi and raising the American flag, and a Silver Star Medal for a heroic action in March while in command of D Company, 2/28 Marines on Iwo Jima.

[18][19] Others involved with the first flag-raising include Corporal Charles W. Lindberg (who also helped raise the flag),[20][page needed][better source needed] Privates First Class James Michels, Harold Schultz, Raymond Jacobs (F Company radioman), Private Phil Ward, and Navy corpsman John Bradley.

The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, had decided the previous night that he wanted to go ashore and witness the final stage of the fight for the mountain.

Gazing upward, at the red, white, and blue speck, Forrestal remarked to Smith: "Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years".

The news of this wish did not sit well with 2nd Battalion Commander Chandler Johnson, whose temperament was every bit as fiery as Howlin Mad's.

He decided to secure it as soon as possible, and dispatched his assistant operations officer, Lieutenant Ted Tuttle, to the beach to obtain a replacement flag.

[25] On orders from Colonel Chandler Johnson—passed on by Easy Company's commander, Captain Dave Severance—Sergeant Michael Strank, one of Second Platoon's squad leaders, was to take three members of his rifle squad (Corporal Harlon H. Block and Privates First Class Franklin R. Sousley and Ira H. Hayes) and climb up Mount Suribachi to raise a replacement flag on top; the three took supplies or laid telephone wire on the way to the top.

Severance also dispatched Private First Class Rene A. Gagnon, the battalion runner (messenger) for Easy Company, to the command post for fresh SCR-300 walkie-talkie batteries to be taken to the top.

[26] Meanwhile, Lieutenant Albert Theodore Tuttle[24] under Johnson's orders, had found a large (96-by-56–inch) flag in nearby Tank Landing Ship USS LST-779.

[34] Resnick said he grabbed a flag from a bunting box and asked permission from his ship's commanding officer Lt. Felix Molenda to donate it.

Rosenthal, along with Marine photographers Sergeant Bill Genaust (who was killed in action after the flag-raising) and Private First Class Bob Campbell[38] were climbing Suribachi at this time.

It "was distributed by Associated Press within seventeen and one-half hours after Rosenthal shot it—an astonishingly fast turnaround time in those days.

On May 9, during a ceremony at the nation's capitol, the three men raised the original second flag to initiate the bond tour which began on May 11 in New York City.

On May 24, Hayes was taken off the tour due to problems caused by drinking alcohol and ordered back to his company and regiment which had returned to Hawaii.

On April 8, 1945, the Marine Corps released the identification of five of the six flag raisers, including Hansen rather than Block (Sousley's identity was temporarily withheld pending notification of his family of his death during the battle).

[54] James Bradley spent four years interviewing and researching the topic and published a nonfiction book entitled Flags of Our Fathers (2000) about the flag-raising and its participants.

There was some resentment from Marines of the original 40-man patrol that went up Mount Suribachi, including those involved with the first flag-raising, that they did not receive their deserved recognition.

[81] According to the song, after the war: Then Ira started drinkin' hard Jail was often his home They'd let him raise the flag and lower it Like you'd throw a dog a bone!

He died drunk early one mornin' Alone in the land he fought to save Two inches of water in a lonely ditch Was a grave for Ira Hayes.

[82] After the war, he worked at Delta Air Lines as a ticket agent, opened his own travel agency, and was a maintenance director of an apartment complex in Manchester, New Hampshire.

[90] Edward Kienholz's Portable War Memorial in 1968 depicted faceless Marines raising the flag on an outdoor picnic table in a typical American consumerist environment of the 1960s.

[94] Time magazine came under fire in 2008 after altering the image for use on its cover, replacing the American flag with a tree for an issue focused on global warming.

[90] The British Airlines Stewards and Stewardesses Association likewise came under criticism in 2010 for a poster depicting employees raising a flag marked "BASSA" at the edge of a runway.

They then are addressed on the flag raising and its meaning and are then awarded their Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblems by their drill instructors signifying them as full-fledged Marines.