Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  Ralph Ignatowski’s remains were put into the earth of the National Military Cemetery in Rock Island, Illinois.

  Like most mothers of dead servicemen, Frances Ignatowski could not restrain her need to know what had happened to her son. She wrote letters of inquiry. No one would tell this mother the awful truth about her Ralph. But eventually she found out.

  Julia Heyer, Ralph’s sister, told me of that terrible time: “My mother could barely eat for six months. We were all so indescribably sad. We couldn’t talk about it. There was just a quiet in the house.”

  There is confusion within the Ignatowski family over how their mother learned the details of Iggy’s death so many years ago. But brother Al Ignatowski told me his mother spoke of “a man from northern Wisconsin,” who came to their home in Milwaukee and told Frances and Walter of how the Japanese had captured Ralph.

  The “man from northern Wisconsin” could only be my father.

  The last two Japanese defenders on Iwo surrendered on January 8, 1949. They emerged from the caves clean and well fed. They decided to give up after reading, in a fragment of the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, of how American forces were celebrating Christmas in Japan. This told them that the war was over. For four years they had foraged food and clothing in nighttime raids on the compounds of American occupation troops on the island.

  The Photograph continued to maintain its hold on the American imagination. In four years it had metamorphosed from an image of hope in battle, to an icon of victory in World War II, to a symbol of the pride Americans now felt as citizens of the world’s new superpower.

  In early 1949, Republic Studios announced that production was under way on an ambitious motion picture depicting the role of the Marines in the Pacific War. As contrasted with earlier, wartime morale-boosting “quickies,” this film would have the scope and stature of an epic. Its price tag was more than one million dollars, the largest in Republic’s history. The studio chief, Herbert Yates, “nearly had heart failure” at the prospect of such an investment, as the director, Allan Dwan, recalled it. But Yates gave his approval—on the condition that the lead role be played by Hollywood’s emerging superstar of action films, John Wayne.

  The movie would portray Marines training in New Zealand, fighting on Tarawa, on leave in Hawaii, and in the closing few minutes, landing on Iwo Jima. This required a huge budget, which necessitated a giant turnout at the box office. It was imperative that the movie capture the public’s imagination.

  So Republic Studios hatched a plan to have the three survivors raise their flag as the climax to the movie. Imagine—John Wayne and the flagraising! Soon, even though little of the movie concerned Iwo Jima, the flagraising image became central to its marketing. The image even overwhelmed the naming of the film, whose title became Sands of Iwo Jima.

  To ensure that the flagraisers were aboard the project, Republic took no chances: It called out the Marines.

  No doubt the Marines were well aware by now of John’s reclusiveness and the unpredictability of Ira. So they moved shrewdly and efficiently. They contacted Ira, Rene, and John in turn, informing each of them that the other two had agreed to participate. Thus each man was given to understand that if he backed out, he would ruin the entire movie.

  It worked. Certainly it worked on John Bradley, the one most likely to have resisted. “John didn’t want to go to Hollywood,” recalled his friend John Freidl. “He said the only reason any of them would come was because the others came.” My mother agreed with this. “Jack went because he was told Rene and Ira would be there,” she said. “He felt he should go, too.”

  But even in accepting, John did all he could to minimize attention to his moviemaking debut. He instructed Betty that if anyone in Antigo should wonder where he’d disappeared to for a few days in July 1949, he was simply away on a business trip.

  Later, after returning from Hollywood, John gave the straight scoop in a letter to his old buddy from Easy Company, former corpsman Cliff Langley:

  They didn’t get us out to California to help make the picture. All that was a cheap publicity trick to get a little free advertising for the movie. Republic Studios is making the movie, we were out there only two days and most of that time was spent fooling around. I think they only took about two shots of the flagraising and that only took about ten minutes. If you think you will see real action like Iwo Jima by seeing the picture I really think you will be sadly disappointed. Chief Hayes says they have the picture so fucked up he isn’t even going to see the movie.

  John had it figured right. The flagraisers’ roles in the movie were minuscule. Their two scenes—one bunched around John Wayne as they receive orders, the other a quick glimpse of them pushing up a flagpole—required a total of only about thirty minutes of filming. Still, they had value to the Republic project: value as feature-story fodder. As the studio had guessed, reporters followed them everywhere on and off the set. And indeed the three generated so much copy that, combined with the movie’s title and promotional art, the impression took hold that Sands of Iwo Jima would center on the flagraisers and their “immortal” action.

  The survivors made little further news until September 1953 when the Chicago Sun-Times ran a shocking photo of Ira behind the bars of a Chicago jail. The headline read IWO FLAGRAISER JAILED AS DRUNK.

  Ira had moved to Chicago to work as a tool grinder at an International Harvester plant. He worked diligently on the three-thirty-to-eleven-P.M. shift and maintained his own apartment. He was enjoying his anonymity until management featured him on the cover of their in-house magazine, Harvester World. A three-page story blew Ira’s cover, and the listing of his home address encouraged countless autograph seekers. For two days after the article appeared, the International Harvester switchboard was jammed. Ira’s apartment phone rang off the hook day and night.

  In the glare of celebrity all the old temptations resurfaced. “Will you say a few words at our dinner, Ira?” “Can I buy you a drink, Ira?”

  Not surprisingly, there soon came to be nights when Ira did not make it back to his apartment and the ringing phone. The Chicago police soon grew as acquainted with him as the Phoenix police had been. “He was a hero to everyone but himself,” one of them commented.

  His superiors at International Harvester tried to accommodate his ever-more-frequent absences. They groped for ways to handle what was quickly turning from a public relations coup to a public relations embarrassment.

  By the end of the summer, Ira himself solved International Harvester’s problem. He left. “I quit there because I was drinking so much and I was ashamed to face my coworkers,” he later said.

  The arrests for drunkenness continued. Judges often assigned him to work crews in lieu of a fine. Pima leader Jay Morago remembered a stopover at O’Hare when he was returning to Arizona from a National Congress of American Indians conference in Washington. Rinsing his hands in the men’s room, Morago glanced in the mirror and spotted a familiar figure sweeping the floor, dressed in prisoners’ fatigues. “I walked over to him and said, ‘Ira, hey, man, come back home,’” Morago recalled. “But Ira just said, ‘We’ve had this conversation,’ and moved away from me.”

  The more helpless and vulnerable Ira grew, the more brazen was the press’s exploitation of him. On his fifth arrest, in September 1953, someone, probably a Chicago policeman, tipped off the Sun-Times. As he sat in his cell, an officer entered the block and called him to the bars: “You’ve got a friend to see you.” But the man in the fedora was no friend. He whipped a camera from behind his back, and before Ira—who had risen in curiosity and was now gripping the bars—could react, he flooded Ira’s face with a flashbulb explosion at close range.

  Sun-Times editors, encouraged by the national interest in Ira, decided to make journalistic hay out of his plight. They put up bail money, installed him in an alcoholics’ sanitarium, and proceeded to wring all the pathos from the story they could:

  This newspaper does not believe that Ira Hayes shou
ld spend a night in jail.

  The Sun-Times believes that the people of Chicago will feel the same way when they are told who Ira Hayes is.

  Do you think that Ira Hayes, hero of Iwo Jima, is worth a second chance? The Sun-Times will accept contributions to help him toward a new life.

  So “saving Ira Hayes” through the “Ira Hayes Fund” became the Sun-Times’s sanctimonious mission. Newspaper sales rose as people scanned the donor lists and the photos of prominent citizens counting the funds.

  For his part, Ira gamely played along with the authorities’ visions of his recovery. In a letter home about that time, he wrote:

  Well, I guess you know what happened. The whole country knows now. I got drunk, woke up in jail. No shirt, no shoes. The judge gave me [a fine of] $25 or 17 days in the workhouse.

  The Sun-Times came and bailed me out and took me to see the editor and I guess I owe him everything…They took me to the Hopecrest sanitarium where they cure drunks. In 5 to 7 days they will help the patient to hate any kind of liquor. I was there 5 days and took 10 treatments and 16 shots in the arm. My last four treatments were rough, but I was forced to take it if I really wanted to help myself, and of course I did.

  Like I said I was pretty sick. I threw up all the whiskey, gin, beer and wine they forced on me and automatically hated the taste of all of them….

  So I was cured in their eyes. They had done their part. Now the real test is up to me…all I need is the will power….

  So you see what a position I’m in. People have put their trust in me—so many people and so much trust—and now I’ve got to do good.

  Ira was the number-one story in many periodicals that fall, including the lead national item in Time magazine’s October 6 issue. The Time correspondent spilled much useless ink wringing his hands over whether Rosenthal’s chance shot had ruined this “big copper-colored kid,” who as a youth ran “barefooted across the Gila River Indian Reservation.” If only the correspondent could have seen beyond his prejudices and preconceptions and listened to Ira as he described the root cause of his problem.

  “I was sick,” he told Time. “I guess I was about to crack up, thinking about all those other guys who were better than me not coming back at all, much less to the White House.”

  Ira Hayes was not the only veteran of World War II who came home drinking. He was not the only kid of any race who drank before he entered the service. It seems clear that Ira, like millions of his countrymen, was predisposed to problems with alcohol. But it is equally clear—at least to me—that he did not drink because of The Photograph, because he was an Indian, or because enlightened white society had failed to save him from himself.

  Ira drank—I think—for the same reason Danny Thomas sought hypnosis; for the same reason my father wept at night and kept a knife in his drawer. Ira drank to escape the images of horror burned into his brain on Iwo Jima. He drank because he walked off that island, leaving so many of his good buddies behind.

  Elizabeth Martin, singer Dean Martin’s estranged wife, hired Ira as her chauffeur and children’s guardian after reading of Ira’s plight in the Chicago Sun-Times. For months it was a fortunate match, Ira with his own room in Martin’s Beverly Hills home, ferrying the children to and from school and other appointments. He seemed to have taken the cure.

  Then the day after Halloween, in 1953, Mrs. Martin received a call at five A.M.: Ira had been arrested a block from the house. Drunk and disoriented, he had abandoned the car and tried to walk back to the safety of the house. He came within one cruising patrol car of making it.

  She kept her faith in him; installed him in another sanitarium. He returned to work for her. A week passed. This time the call was from the Los Angeles jail. The alternatives given him by the judge were unsparing: either a jail term or a one-way ticket to Arizona.

  The police escorted him to the bus terminal. He was weeping as he said good-bye to Elizabeth Martin.

  On November 11—Veterans Day—Ira stepped off the bus in Phoenix. “There was no hero’s welcome for Ira Hayes when he arrived,” reported the Phoenix Gazette. But of course there were some reporters and photographers. And of course Ira supplied them with the quotes they demanded. “I guess I’m just no good,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of chances, but just when things start looking good I get that craving for whiskey and foul up.”

  Arriving back in Jobe’s and Nancy’s household that same day, Ira learned that his brother Dean had been awarded the Silver Star for heroism in Korea.

  The drinking went on. Ira’s war would never end.

  In December 1953, “Cabbage” Bradley—John’s father—suffered the heart attack that killed him. He did not live to see his son immortalized in bronze.

  I was born two months later, in February 1954, in Antigo, and was given Cabbage’s name: James Joseph Bradley.

  The Photograph’s power surged along undiminished. The gigantic work of art it had inspired—the world’s tallest bronze statue, the only monument in the nation’s capital commemorating World War II—continued to take shape in Washington. Sculptor Felix de Weldon worked feverishly at it as the years went by; working in plaster to form the molding for a finished casting in bronze, the great mass to be established at Arlington National Cemetery.

  De Weldon worked three years to create the six figures as nudes. Then he worked three more years to adorn them with uniforms and equipment.

  When completed, the statue would rise a hundred and ten feet from the ground and would weigh more than a hundred tons. The six figures would average about thirty-two feet in height. Their rifles would be sixteen feet long. Its cost was $850,000—every penny of it covered by private donations.

  The logistics of construction were as outsized as the edifice itself. Far from simply translocating from the studio to nearby Arlington, the sculptor’s completed plaster mold would have to be broken down into component parts—eighteen one-ton sections for each plaster figure—and transported by truck to a Brooklyn foundry for casting into bronze. Then those massive bronze figures would have to be trucked back to Washington, there to be bolted and welded together into the final, unified piece.

  On September 2, 1954, the great bronze elements—the Brobdingnagian bodies, stretched out and secured on three flatbed trucks—began their journey. They lumbered slowly out of Brooklyn and through the narrow streets of Manhattan, flanked by police escorts and tailed by press reporters and network TV crews. They thundered across the George Washington Bridge, and headed south to Arlington.

  As the unveiling date, November 10, 1954—the shared birthdays of Mike Strank and the U.S. Marine Corps—neared, the three surviving flagraisers were summoned once more into the nation’s spotlight. Rene and Pauline came down from New Hampshire. John and Betty Bradley arrived from Antigo. Ira showed up, alone.

  The governor of Kentucky had proclaimed November 10 “Iwo Jima Day” in that state in honor of Franklin, and Goldie came to the ceremonies in Washington. All the surviving Stranks were there—Pete, John, Mary, Martha, and Vasil. Ed and Belle Block were reunited for the first time since Harlon’s burial at Weslaco, along with Maurine and Mel. Rene Jr. accompanied his parents.

  It was to be the last contact among the families until I began making telephone calls forty-one years later, in 1995.

  Joe Rosenthal arrived with his wife, Lee, and their two small children, feeling elated. Before the ceremonies he led his family on a walk around the monument’s base—hoping to watch the expressions on their faces when they discovered his name there.

  But the discovery never happened. Rosenthal’s name had not been inscribed on the base. Neither, for that matter, had the names of the six boys. The only name that appeared on the giant edifice was that of the sculptor, de Weldon.

  In the nation’s memory, the flagraisers’ transformation from individuals to anonymous representative figures had begun.

  The face of the black granite did, however, contain an inscription. It was a quotation from Admiral Nimitz immediately afte
r the battle, summing up the Marines’ collective heroism on the island. The inscription read:

  UNCOMMON VALOR WAS A COMMON VIRTUE Seven thousand dignitaries swelled the grounds on the day of the unveiling. Marching bands and streaking military jets added to the great sweep of ceremonial pomp. President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon sat on the speakers’ stage, along with the Secretary of Defense, General H. M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, and former Commandant Vandegrift—who found himself staring directly at Ira Hayes in the front row facing the monument.

  The moment of unveiling arrived. The lanyard was pulled, the protective draping swung free, and the Iwo Jima memorial statue took its place amidst the sacred icons of the nation.

  The survivors and their families sat staring at it, stunned.

  “Awesome,” was the way my father later described the moment. “The statue was just so huge, so impressive. I could hardly believe it was a reality.”

  Ira—who had wept upon meeting Martha Strank in New York during the Bond Tour—beheld the image, burst into tears, and buried his face in Goldie’s lap.

  Belle Block fought mightily to hold herself together.

  After the ceremony, photographers and TV cameramen rushed toward the stage. They arranged the survivors and the dignitaries in various groupings. Amateur photographers from the large milling crowd joined in, and the requests for posing went on and on. One AP shot captured Ira, Rene, and John, Belle, Goldie, and Martha, and the Vice President. Published in The New York Times, it was the final image of the three men in a single photographic frame.