Flags of Our Fathers (31 page)

The original Rosenthal photo, shot in a horizontal format,
February 23, 1945. Front row, left to right: Ira Hayes,
Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, Harlon Block. Back row:
Mike Strank (behind Sousley) and Rene Gagnon (behind Bradley).

Twelve

MYTHS

Here’s one for all time!

—JOHN BODKIN,
THE AP PHOTO EDITOR IN GUAM

THE EXHAUSTED CONQUERORS of Mount Suribachi spent the ensuing four days resting on the brittle skin of the dead serpent. Some explored and blew out caves and tunnels. Some wrote letters home.

They had beaten the mountain. And so they thought the battle was over for them. At least they were safe—or safer than they had been for nearly one hundred hours. They had to be alert for the occasional Japanese infiltrator who prowled by night. But now the Japanese were mainly destroying themselves and one another. At night the boys listened to this morbid business being conducted below them in the hollowed-out seven stories of Suribachi. “As we lay in our foxholes trying to sleep, we could hear them blowing themselves up with grenades held to their stomachs,” remembered Chick Robeson.

Joe Rosenthal’s pack of film from February 23, with its twelve exposures, together with a pack he had started shooting the day before, began to work its way through the military channels back to America. First it was tossed into a mail plane headed for the base at Guam, a thousand miles south across the Pacific. There the film would pass through many hands, any of which could consign it to a wastebasket. Technicians from a “pool” lab would develop it. Their mistakes were routinely tossed aside. Then censors would scrutinize it; and finally the “pool” chief would look at each print to decide which was worth transmitting back to the United States via radiophoto, and which to discard.

Of the twelve exposures from the pack taken on the twenty-third, two were ruined by streaks from light that had leaked through the camera housing onto the film. These two were adjacent to the tenth frame, the one Rosenthal had clicked off without looking into the viewfinder. For some reason the light hadn’t marred that one.

Three days after the flagraising, my father found time to write home. He mentioned his concern for his brother Jim, then fighting in Europe, and for his father, who had suffered a heart attack. But for the sake of his worried mother, this twenty-two-year-old, caught in one of history’s most ferocious battles, was only reassuring:

Iwo Jima

Feb 26, 1945

Dear Mother, Dad & all,

I just have time for a line or two, I want to tell you I am in the best of health. You know all about our battle out here and I was with the victorious Co. E. 2nd Batt 28th Marines who reached the top of Mt. Suribachi first. I had a little to do with raising the American flag and it was the happiest moment of my life.

I’ve been worried about Dad. I hope he is out of the hospital and up around again. I imagine you were a bit worried because you didn’t hear from me. I can’t write very often so please don’t be alarmed if you don’t receive mail frequently.

I hope the news from Jim is for the best and that you’re all in good health & happy.

About an hour after we reached the top of the Mt. our Catholic Chaplain had Mass and I went to Holy Communion. I sure did my share of praying and it really gave me much security.

I’d give my left arm for a good shower and a clean shave, I have a 6 day beard. Haven’t had any soap or water since I hit the beach. I never knew I could go without food, water, or sleep for three days but I know now, it can be done.

I’ll write a longer letter when I get the chance, good luck and give everyone my regards.

Your loving son,

Jack

Seventeen-year-old Chick Robeson more accurately described the fear all of them must have felt: “I was never scared so stiff in my life before. When the Japanese mortars and artillery starts dropping, I just can’t help but shake like I was freezing but I guess everybody else does the same thing.”

Franklin wrote to Goldie, offering her a harrowing kind of reassurance: that she shouldn’t worry, even though bullets had been whizzing through his clothes.

Iwo Jima

February 27, 1945

Dearest Mother,

As you probably already know we hit Iwo Jima February 19th just a week ago today. My regiment took the hill with our company on the front line. The hill was hard and I sure never expected war to be like it was those first 4 days. I got some through my clothing and I sure am happy that I am still OK.

This island is practically secured. There is some heavy fighting on one end and we are bothered some at night. Mother you can never imagine how a battlefield looks. It sure looks horrible. Look for my picture because I helped put the flag up. Please don’t worry and write.

Your son,

Franklin Sousley

US Marine

Like Rosenthal, Franklin hoped the posed “gung-ho” shot in which he appeared would make the papers back home.

And Rene took a moment from his rounds to jot a note to his sweetheart, Pauline Harnois:

Now that I can tell you, I was in action on Iwo Jima and that is the reason for such a delay in writing. I am still fine and some of my buddies are still with me, some are dead or wounded. After seeing all this it makes me realize what freedom really means.

I got your pictures with the evening gown aboard ship so I put them in my helmet and carried them with me. They’re not banged up too much. You still look beautiful, darling.

The Marines on Suribachi could not know it, but Americans back home were following their every move. Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in World War II.

Readers who just days before had never heard of the sulfur island were by now as familiar with its contours as with their own backyards. As the war in Europe was thundering to an end, correspondents had migrated from that theater to the Pacific to record the growing conflict. Their dispatches flooded the newspapers, which churned out “extra” editions, and radio bulletins. Movie theaters showed newsreels of the assault, sometimes updating them daily as new footage arrived. For the first time in history, the radio networks carried live broadcasts from a beachhead under fire.

The news was stunningly fresh. In all invasions before Iwo, news copy had “hitchhiked” back to America on whatever transportation was available. Usually it had been flown to Honolulu on hospital planes evacuating the wounded. In this haphazard system, newsmen first had to wait until an airstrip was clear to accommodate the aircraft. Then they had to see that their dispatches made it aboard a plane; after that they could only hope the material would reach Navy press headquarters once the aircraft landed at Pearl Harbor.

It was a time-consuming process. Often days went by before news hit the home front. Tarawa’s three-day battle was over before the first on-the-spot account of the fighting reached the mainland. Fully eight days had elapsed after the Saipan invasion before the first photo reached the U.S.

But at Iwo Jima, the process was accelerated, and streamlined. Daily editions during the week of February 19 brought battle accounts within twenty-four hours of actual time. Papers told the story in bold headlines, pages of background stories, and numerous maps and diagrams. Suddenly, civilians clustered in coffee shops and gathered around water coolers were bantering expertly, tossing off terms such as “Green Beach,” “Suribachi,” and “Kuribayashi” with ease.

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.