Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  Their expertise was formed abruptly. There had been no advance hint that an invasion of this magnitude was brewing. Iwo Jima burst onto the front page of The New York Times on Monday, February 19, under the bold lead headline: U.S. MARINES STORM ASHORE ON IWO ISLAND.

  On the following day and for the rest of the week, Iwo Jima remained the number-one news story. Tuesday’s main headline in the Times blared: MARINES FIGHT WAY TO AIRFIELD ON IWO ISLE; WIN 2-MILE BEACHHEAD; 800 SHIPS AID LANDING.

  Below this appeared an enlarged photo of Iwo Jima with eighteen strategic points identified. The dominant feature was Mount Suribachi, festooned with an artist’s rendering of a Japanese flag sitting atop it.

  It hardly seemed to matter that General Patton was racing across Germany, or that President Roosevelt was sailing back from a historic summit conference in the Crimea. All other news was secondary to that from Iwo. Wednesday’s headline offered a hint of triumph: MARINES CONQUER AIRFIELD, HOLD THIRD OF IWO.

  This was tempered a bit by General Holland M. Smith’s somber front-page quote that made plain the scale of the bloodletting: “The fight is the toughest we’ve run across in 168 years.”

  On Thursday the banner headline brought sobering news: MARINES HALTED ON IWO, NEAR FIRST AIRFIELD.

  And on page four of The New York Times, in an article headlined MARINES’ HARDEST FIGHT, the grisly statistics began to unspool:

  Now the Marines have come to their hardest battle, a battle still unwon. Our first waves on Iwo were almost wiped out; 3,650 Marines were dead, wounded or missing after only two days of fighting on the most heavily defended island in the world, more than the total casualties of Tarawa, about as many as all the Marine casualties of Guadalcanal in the five months of jungle combat.

  Americans recoiled. This was worse than anything their boys had suffered in World War II: worse than Tarawa, worse than Normandy, worse than on the beachhead at Anzio. There was no doubt that the Marines were in the bloodiest battle since Gettysburg. The statistics were staggering: Iwo’s four days of fighting worse than Guadalcanal’s five months! It was as though Babe Ruth’s sixty-homer season had been eclipsed in one game.

  The news text may have accelerated in its race around the globe, but in 1945, it still took news wirephotos two extra days to complete the journey. Thus, the hopeful Times headline of Friday, February 23—MARINES TAKE SURIBACHI, CHIEF POINT ON IWO—was not accompanied by any photos of the seizure.

  Readers must have been heartened as the news proclaimed: VOLCANO IS SEIZED—MARINES PUT FLAG ATOP SURIBACHI’S CREST, but any joy was tempered by JAPANESE HIT BACK — OUR CASUALTIES AT 5,372.

  Saturday, February 24, brought a still more sobering headline: MARINES GAIN SLOWLY IN CENTER OF IWO.

  Americans must have gone to sleep that Saturday night with heavy hearts. Normandy had been a wrenching experience; on the other hand, the beaches were captured in just a day. The casualties there had not been as heavy as on Iwo, and the reader was comforted by the knowledge of a quick victory.

  But the Pacific’s largest D-Day was terribly different. Five days of unthinkable casualties filled each morning’s headlines. Americans combed the columns for a hint of hope. The sudden wave of uncertainty in the Pacific, so hard upon the triumphal news from Europe, created a sickening anxiety.

  And then, as unexpectedly as news of the invasion itself, a radiant image of victory burned its way around the curve of the earth.

  One of the first to notice it was John Bodkin, the AP photo editor in Guam. On a routine night in his bureau office, he casually picked up a glossy print of the “replacement” photograph. He looked at it. He paused, shook his head in wonder, and whistled. “Here’s one for all time!” he exclaimed to the bureau at large. Then, without wasting another second, he radiophotoed the image to AP headquarters in New York at seven A.M., Eastern War Time.

  Soon afterward, wirephoto machines in newsrooms across the country were picking up the AP image. Newspaper editors, accustomed to sorting through endless battle photographs, would cast an idle glance at it, then stand fascinated. “Lead photo, page one, above the fold,” they would bark.

  News pros were not the only ones bedazzled by the photo. Navy Captain T. B. Clark was on duty at Patuxent Air Station in Virginia that Saturday when it came humming off the wire. He studied it for a minute, then thrust it under the gaze of Navy Petty Officer Felix de Weldon.

  De Weldon was an Austrian immigrant schooled in European painting and sculpture. He was assigned to Patuxent’s studios to paint a mural of the Battle of the Coral Sea.

  De Weldon could not take his eyes off the photo. In its classic triangular lines he recognized similarities with the great ancient statues he had studied.

  He reflexively reached for some sculptor’s clay and tools. With the photograph before him he labored through the long night. By dawn, he had replicated the six boys pushing a pole, raising a flag.

  The next morning, Sunday, February 25, millions of Americans were similarly transfixed by the image. People would always remember where they were the moment they saw the photo, as others would later remember President Kennedy’s death. The flagraising photograph signaled victory and hope, a counterpoint to the photos of sinking ships at Pearl Harbor that had signaled defeat and fear four years earlier.

  Men and women bent down sleepily to their doorsteps, took one look, and called back into the house, “Hey, look at this!”

  City pedestrians handed three cents to a street news vendor, took a few steps, then turned back and bought another copy.

  Charles Sweeney, who later dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, would write that his Catholic mother allowed only two images to be hung on the family’s dining-room wall: Jesus and FDR. Until the morning she saw the flag photo, that is: She framed it and hung it as the revered third icon on the wall.

  Many a mother with a son in the Pacific wondered if her boy was in the photo. But for Harlon’s mother, Belle, back in Weslaco, Texas, there was no doubt. She was sure.

  Early that morning Harlon’s brother, Ed Block, Jr., home on leave from the Air Force, stepped onto the family porch and stooped to retrieve the Sunday edition of the Weslaco Mid-Valley News.

  He had just sat down in an easy chair in the living room and lifted the paper in front of him when Belle breezed into the room. As she passed behind him, she glanced at the paper. Then she stopped. She leaned over Ed’s right shoulder, put her finger on the figure in the photo thrusting the pole into the ground, and exclaimed: “Lookit there, Junior! There’s your brother Harlon!”

  Ed did a double take, looking hard at the photo. The figure Belle was pointing to was unidentifiable, just the back of a Marine with no side view. The caption read only Old Glory Goes Up Over Iwo, and the articles provided no names.

  “Momma,” Ed declared, “there’s no way you can know that’s Harlon. That’s just the back of a Marine. And besides, we don’t even know Harlon is on Iwo Jima.”

  “Oh, that’s definitely Harlon,” Belle insisted as she slid the paper from Ed’s grasp. And as she strode into the kitchen, her eyes fixed on the photo, Ed could hear her saying, “I know my boy.”

  The Photograph’s impact spread like a shock wave. That same Sunday, February 25, a columnist for The New York Times launched into a piece devoted to “the most beautiful picture of the war.” A writer for the Times-Union of Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak and a city where the visual vocabulary of photography was a familiar language, proclaimed the image “a masterpiece comparable to Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper.’”

  The receptionists at major newspapers reported something unusual the week of the photo’s appearance. Their switchboards were jammed with callers seeking reprints. Soon publishers were issuing “Special Extra Editions,” one featuring the photograph “In Color!” while another promised “Printed on heavy paper, suitable for framing!” They couldn’t print enough. All sold out.

  No one knew who the flagraisers were, but Joe Rosenthal was an instant celebrity. O
n February 27, the Times ran a huge photo of Joe, identifying him as the photographer “who has earned nationwide praise for his picture.”

  Mr. A.B.R. Shelley of Raleigh, North Carolina, saw the photo and immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the Times, who published it on February 28:

  On the front page of the Times of Feb. 25 is a picture which should make a magnificent war memorial. It is the picture of the Marines of the Fifth Division raising Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi. There are war statues aplenty, but most of them are fictional. Reproduced in bronze, this actual scene should make good art and a fitting tribute to American men and American valor.

  By national consensus, it was a beautiful image. But for those who wanted facts, what, exactly, did it represent? No one suspected it, but the photograph suggested a very different reality from that being experienced by the Marines back on Iwo Jima.

  On the same day the replacement photo appeared in the U.S., Boots Thomas was summoned from his battle post to General Smith’s command ship. There, he was interviewed by a CBS radio correspondent. The interviewer didn’t touch upon the Rosenthal photograph. He had not learned of its existence. Even if he had, he would not have brought it up: After all, it was only a replacement flagraising. It held no significance to those on Iwo Jima. To everyone on the island, “the flagraising” referred only to the one Boots was involved in.

  In his interview Boots told the modest truth: His patrol walked up the volcano’s slope encountering no opposition, and put up a flag as photographer Lowery recorded the scene.

  But a number of elements came together to create an altogether different set of perceptions for the folks back home.

  First, thousands had cheered the initial flagraising atop Suribachi, but from a distance. Only a few were close enough to see exactly who the raisers were. No one paid attention to or cheered the replacement flagraising. And no one cared who raised it. For most of the Marines on the island, there was only one flagraising.

  Second, because civilian Rosenthal’s AP photos traveled faster than Marine Lowery’s military photos, only one flagraising was represented in the papers back home.

  Third, because the replacement flagraising was essentially a nonevent, little was said about it. So readers back home assumed there was only one flagraising: the one they beheld on the front pages of their newspapers.

  Fourth, reporters safe on ships miles from Suribachi and editors half a world away not only failed to report the full range of facts, they inadvertently created a confusing myth about the flagraisings that continues to this day.

  There was the matter of that almost mythical image of the mountain. Nearly all aerial photographs featured Mount Suribachi; maps highlighted it, and news reports emphasized the enemy fire raining down from it. Thus, even though the rocky northern end of the island would prove to be the costliest part of the battle, it was natural for the reader to assume that once Mount Suribachi, the high point on the island, was taken, the battle would quickly end.

  Then there was the shifting emphasis of reportage as the assault on the volcano wound down. The distant reporters had lavished great detail on the fierce fighting that led the Marines to the base of the mountain. Then they added three days of fanciful and garbled accounts of a murderous fight up Suribachi’s slopes. But they never mentioned the actual, quiet walk up Suribachi on that Friday morning of February 23. On that day, lacking any supporting photos of the conquest, the editors substituted a photograph of Marines pinned down on a hill far to the north. This only added to the false impression that Marines had been pinned down on Suribachi’s slopes.

  On Saturday, February 24, the day after the flagraisings and the day before the photo appeared, correspondents continued to embellish the myth of the battle of Suribachi:

  SURIBACHI REACHED IN A FIERY BATTLE

  WAY TO VOLCANO’S BASE BURNED WITH

  FLAMETHROWERS PRIOR TO SCALING OF VOLCANO

  ASCENT MADE BY MARINES AS JAPANESE HURLED

  GRENADES AND POURED BULLETS ON THEM The boys of Easy Company would have howled at these gross exaggerations, but the Times copy just kept it up. Suribachi was the devil incarnate, “seeping steam and volcanic fumes,” and the Japanese “were rolling grenades down the steep tawny cliffs to burst in the faces of advancing Marines” as the embattled Marines “called for ropes and stretchers to lower the wounded over the sharp cliffs.”

  These were the myths and inaccuracies that shaped Americans’ perceptions of the battle in the days before the photograph appeared. When it did spring into the nation’s consciousness on that Sunday morning, the photograph fused with the accumulated myth, and seemed to depict a final triumph in the very teeth of battle.

  The Times was not through yet. It continued to fan the flames of hilltop heroism with the report that Boots Thomas “broke out the ensign, which was about three feet long, while his company was under intense enemy sniper fire.”

  How to explain this travesty of accuracy? How could an unopposed forty-five-minute climb up a hill and a quiet flagraising be portrayed as a valiant fight to the death?

  The Marines were not to blame. None were quoted as sources, and none have since been blamed for the misleading hyperbole.

  Quite simply, the press faltered in its duty. It replaced reportage with romanticism. Carried away by the daily valor of the Marines, working at a safe but obfuscating distance, and swept up in its own fantasy of a swashbuckling fight for a mountain, reporters invented the heroic fight up the slopes, and the flagraising among whizzing bullets, out of whole cloth.

  In later months and years, when the myth was found to be just that, other reporters focused their suspicions on the men on the mountain. Then a new myth, an antimyth, took root, fanned by later complacent reporters who made no effort to root out the true story.

  The flagraising did not signify the end of the battle. It was just beginning.

  Easy Company’s sector was secure but no place was safe on the small island. Distant giant guns in the north showered the mountain with nerve-shattering nighttime shells.

  Dave Severance, hardly an officer given to panic, recalled one especially severe barrage. “It was my first experience with heavy artillery,” he said, “and I was scared as hell. I crowded myself against the edge of the crater so hard that I gradually inched myself right up over the top.”

  On Wednesday, February 28, the 28th Marines received orders to prepare to move north. Their assignment was to relieve the 27th Marines at the 5th Division front on the heavily embattled west coast of the island.

  The order to leave the mountain quickly changed Easy’s mood to one of apprehension. “My twenty-first birthday is coming up March 10,” Boots Thomas observed to a friend, “but I’ll never see it.”

  And on that evening, Tex Stanton dropped into a foxhole that he and Mike Strank had prepared a little while earlier. Mike was already there, and Stanton at once sensed something different about him.

  “He was lying limp, hobo-style, on his back with his hands behind his head,” Stanton remembered. “And he was quiet. Now, Mike was always active, always talking, and I had never seen him still. So I asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ Mike answered, ‘Oh, nothing. I was just wondering where we’re going with all this.’”

  Tex Stanton felt a chill. He was so affected that he jumped out of the foxhole. “He was talking about his death,” Tex maintained years later. “Mike knew he was going to die.”

  The northern battlefield beckoned. The idyll atop Suribachi was about to end. Harold Keller, looking through binoculars toward the fighting in the distance, summed up what Easy would face the next day. Asked later by a fellow Marine what he saw, Keller responded simply: “The Japs had all the cover, and our men got clobbered.”

  Thirteen

  “LIKE HELL WITH THE FIRE OUT”

  They are saying, “The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.” I ask, how is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?

  �
��EVELYN WAUGH, IN HIS 1939 DIARY

  HAROLD KELLER COULD NOT KNOW how right he was. He was peering through his lens into bad territory: an open furnace of violence that would soon beggar the suffering and dying thus far.

  No one could have predicted the horrors to come. In fact, much of the world would assume—given 4,574 U.S. casualties and the triumphal raising of the American colors on February 23—that the Battle of Iwo Jima was over. In fact the reverse was closer to the truth.

  For Easy Company, and for many thousands of other Marines, the real Battle of Iwo Jima was only about to begin.

  “Dearest Mother,” Harlon wrote to Belle in Weslaco early on March 1, the day of Easy Company’s plunge into the asylum. “Just a few lines to let you know I’m OK. I came through without a scratch. Oh yes, I saw Carl Sims just before we hit. He is OK. I guess you’re pretty anxious to hear from me by this time. This isn’t much but it’s all I could get. I will write more later.”

  The real battle would be waged exactly on General Kuribayashi’s terms. It would be a battle of attrition on terrain that had no front lines; where the attackers were exposed and the defenders fortified; where Japanese infiltrators stalked the night; where every rock, every ditch, every open stretch of ground could conceal a burrowing, suicidal enemy. And where brave Marines trained to advance despite any conditions and all losses would advance yard by bloody yard for four more hellacious weeks, until the smell of death staggered the burial crews and the survivors on both sides resembled ragged phantoms more than living, vital young men.

  They would advance, and die, largely bereft of their nation’s good wishes or sympathy. Attention had now begun to shift away from Iwo Jima, even as the great bulk of the bloodletting began. The flagraising on Suribachi had given the press corps a convenient symbol of a “happy ending.” Some seventy war correspondents had accompanied the armada to the island; for the first, drama-soaked week, they had remained on the scene and sent hundreds of thousands of words back to their newspapers, magazines, and radio networks—not to mention countless photographs and newsreel images.