Flags of Our Fathers (37 page)

And yet misunderstood. Fundamentally, crucially misunderstood. Unrepresentative, in fact—at least when judged against the thousands upon thousands of split seconds that Doc and his buddies witnessed during that battle.

Antigo, the peaceable kingdom of my childhood, would be my father’s lifelong refuge from all this: a place of clarity and simple goodness, where people understood one another for who they were and what they actually did. Where hard work, service, and love of family counted, and not myth or fantasy.

Antigo would be the one place in America where The Photograph did not distort things. Where its extraordinary power was overshadowed by the power of ordinary life.

But my father’s longed-for reentry into this peaceable world was not to happen as quickly as he wished.

On the second-to-last day of March 1945, in one of his last acts as President before he died two weeks later, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a secret order to Marine Headquarters in the Pacific. It was an order that further magnified the image’s impact in American life—further magnified the distance between John Bradley, the man, and Doc Bradley, the figure in The Photograph.

Fifteen

COMING HOME

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

—DUKE OF WELLINGTON

IN SIX POCKETS OF AMERICA, six mothers waited for word.

They did not yet know one another—or that they were soon to be forever linked by happenstance and history. At the end of March 1945 they were simply six random mothers among the 100,000 or so who waited for word from the Pacific. The newspapers, the radio, the newsreels at the movies had made it clear that a cataclysmic battle had occurred. Who survived, who was lost—this was still the great mystery.

Six mothers: to be linked, for a while, with a seventh, through a painful accident of misidentification.

In Weslaco, Texas, Belle Block felt that the word, in a sense, had already arrived, and the word was good. The Blocks had still not received Harlon’s March 1 letter reporting that he had “come through without a scratch.” But Belle felt secure. She felt an almost mystical connection to her boy because, as she was telling everyone, he was in the famous photograph. No one believed Belle; they asked her how she could know. But she did know, and because she knew, she felt somehow that Harlon was alive. Somehow The Photograph assured her that Harlon would not be killed.

On a windblown day, toward the end of the month, a telegram from the Commandant of the Marine Corps arrived, tolling otherwise.

But even as grief, borne of telegrams, began to flow into households such as the Blocks’, a different kind of current, a current of exaltation, gathered its own momentum in the nation. This current was borne of The Photograph. The Photograph seemed to illuminate the air around it; it released pulses of hope and pride and often tears in people who glimpsed it—even hardheaded people who would not think of themselves as susceptible to “inspirational” imagery.

The public needed to touch The Photograph, own it somehow, and place it among sacred objects. The San Francisco
Chronicle
offered “Color Versions Hand-Painted by Trained Artists,” and sold out in a day. The California Legislature passed a resolution calling on the Post Office to issue an Iwo Jima Flagraising stamp to honor the bravery of the American fighting man. The AP in New York had established a “Joe Rosenthal desk” to handle the flood of inquiries about the photo. When the press wrote of it now, it was the “historic photo,” the “famous photo,” showing the “heroic” Marines raising the flag. There was almost no discussion of the facts surrounding the flagraising. The facts didn’t matter. The photo looked heroic, and that was enough.

It was certainly enough for the Treasury Department. A two-front world war and the secret and fabulously expensive building of the atomic bomb had drained the national coffers. Filling them up again was not a simple matter of confiscation. In the 1940’s concept of American democracy, war expenses were considered outside the normal federal budget. A wartime government was obliged to take its case repeatedly before the citizenry, keeping it accurately informed and hoping for a patriotic volunteer response.

War bonds were the chief mechanism for this volunteer funding, essentially a citizen’s loan to the government. Purchase of a bond, at the issue price of $18.75, gave the government temporary use of the buyer’s money; the buyer in turn could expect a yield, in ten years, of $25. The government stimulated these purchases through periodic national public relations efforts known as War Loan Drives. Each drive included newspaper and radio ads, direct mailing, and, as its centerpiece, a coast-to-coast barnstorming show featuring celebrities, war heroes, marching bands, and patriotic orators. These were known as Bond Tours.

Bond Tours had worked splendidly in the past. But this war had already produced six of them; and, with the European conflict drawing to a close, Treasury officials were concerned about the public’s response to a seventh. The American people had dug deeply so far. Now, in March 1945, with Allied forces advancing toward Berlin, who could measure the sense of urgency that remained in an exhausted populace—or the reservoirs of wealth that still remained after six rounds of giving? Would there be enough to finance the unfinished business against the fanatical Japanese military in the Pacific—a conflict that still promised bloodshed on a massive scale? The Treasury Department was leaving nothing to chance.

Planning for the Seventh Tour had begun months before, a mammoth undertaking. Millions of volunteers were ready to move the glittering show through America. Now the anxious organizers at Treasury moved to secure the one element that could make The Seventh shine like no other tour ever: the presence of living figures from the beloved flagraising icon.

The President himself lent his influence to the plan.

Martha Strank was at home in her New-World “palace” at 121 Pine Street, Franklin Borough, Pennsylvania, when the Western Union deliveryman knocked. Telegrams were never welcome to women such as Martha. Two of her sons were on active duty: Mike on Iwo Jima, and Pete, a sailor aboard the USS
Franklin
in the Pacific.

Her young son John later described the way Martha stood in the doorway trying to figure how to deal with the presence of the Western Union man, the piece of yellow paper he held, the bad news she was certain it bore.

“She was so upset that she told the man, ‘You open it,’” John recalled. “‘I can’t do that,’ he responded. ‘But I want you to,’ she said. She was pleading. He opened it and read it to her. She fainted.

John told me decades later:

“Her hair turned white within a couple of months. It had been coal black before Mike died.”

As the Treasury Department shaped its theme for the “Mighty 7th,” it enjoyed the wholehearted support of Madison Avenue. Some twenty-two of America’s best advertising agencies volunteered their ideas and marketing skills. Case-hardened professionals who had delighted in no-holds-barred competitions to sell soap, sedans, and cigarettes now pooled their talents to sell hope and patriotism. Along with the six million volunteers—about four percent of the total population—it was a mobilization of civilian talent as vast, in its own way, as the mobilization of the armada for the invasion itself. As graphic artists, copywriters, designers, and photographers created stunning and informative posters, brochures, and print advertisements, veteran account executives gave up their spare time to devise distinct campaigns for every imaginable population segment: farmers, housewives, factory workers, fishermen, business leaders—all were targeted with separate appeals.

In every campaign, however, there recurred the same luminous anchoring image.

It was an image the public had fallen in love with, seeming to find in it an affirmation of the national purpose at its very origins that no politician, no history book had ever matched. The Photograph had become The Fact. It had, in a way, become its admirers. The Mighty 7th would make this triumphal joining complete.

And now the ailing Roosevelt made the gesture that would assure this joining. On March 30 the popular President, who as a distant caped figure had watched the boys of the 5th Division train for Iwo Jima a seeming lifetime ago, issued a confidential order that was radioed instantly to Marine Headquarters in the Pacific:
TRANSFER IMMEDIATELY TO U.S. BY AIR…
6
ENLISTED MEN AND/OR OFFICERS WHO ACTUALLY APPEAR IN ROSENTHAL PHOTOGRAPH OF FLAGRAISING AT MOUNT SURIBACHI.

President Roosevelt’s order found the survivors of Easy Company four days out of Iwo aboard the
Winged Arrow
. Marine correspondent Keyes Beech’s cursory investigation had identified only one flagraiser on the boat: Rene Gagnon. Mike, Franklin, and the misidentified Hank Hansen were dead; Harlon had not yet been considered; and no one was sure about Doc. Ira was on the boat, but no one yet realized that he was a flagraiser. If Ira had his way, no one was going to.

Ira knew that he was in the photo, and he knew that Rene knew; and Ira had looked into his own soul and found no pleasure in this knowledge. He just wanted to stay with his good buddies. Ira sought Rene out and took him aside. The intense combat veteran told the teenage errand-boy that he didn’t want to go on a Bond Tour. And furthermore, that if Rene revealed that Ira was in The Photograph, Ira would kill him.

This made an impression on Rene.

By concealing his identity, Ira was disobeying his Commander in Chief—a dire breach of discipline for a Marine. But Ira could think of no other choice. What were these people thinking? Could they possibly understand the insane difference between what he and his buddies had just endured, and what they were now asking him to do? The idea of going around the country being congratulated for his presence in a photograph, following a month of witnessing death and incessant killing, simply did not connect with his rural, tribal, almost nineteenth-century frame of reference. His memories of Iwo Jima had nothing to do with The Photograph. It certainly didn’t jibe with what it meant to be a Marine. And his grasp of the larger American culture had no grounding in the emerging power of media or the photographic image.

It must have been like coming home from hell, and finding that he had arrived on the wrong planet.

Whatever the motivation, Rene was not about to challenge the baleful veteran. He agreed to keep Ira’s secret, and the
Winged Arrow
churned for Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. There, on April 3, Rene bade farewell to his comrades-in-arms. He climbed aboard a priority flight for the States. Thirty-four years later, Rene could still crow about how a colonel was asked to give up his seat so he could board. “Me, a lousy private, bumping a full bird colonel!”

He wouldn’t be a “lousy private” much longer. Soon he would be the most famous fighting man in America. Among the three surviving flagraisers, he would be the first to face the flashbulbs. Doc, his legs peppered with shrapnel, had been evacuated to Guam and now he lay convalescing in a hospital in Honolulu. Ira, keeping mum, was still with Easy, on a transport ship bound for Hilo. Rene was on a date with destiny all by himself.

He landed in Washington on Saturday, April 7. A waiting car rushed him directly to Marine Corps Headquarters. There, in a large conference room scattered with note-taking staff people and dominated by a blown-up reproduction of the Rosenthal photograph, the Marine brass pressed the new hero for the identities of the flagraisers. As he had done for Keyes Beech on the island, Rene offered five names: Strank, Bradley, Sousley, the misidentified Hansen, and himself.

But the enlarged photo showed six figures. “Who is the sixth man?”

Rene froze, staring at the photo for long silent minutes. Yes, he eventually admitted, it appears there are six. “Who is the sixth man?” Rene’s hands began to shake. He knew who it was but had promised not to tell, Rene informed his interrogators. Impossible, they countered, they were all under Presidential orders.

Slowly, painfully Rene finally gave up his secret. Orders were flashed to the Pacific to bring back the sixth man. Ira’s days as just another Marine were over.

Meanwhile, a Manchester
Union-Leader
newspaperman, alerted by an AP wire story, knocked on Irene Gagnon’s front door. Rene’s mother cried with relief and joy to learn her only boy was not only alive, but a hero.

The reporter suggested that he drive Irene to Pauline’s house for a photo of the hero’s mother and girlfriend together. And so, across the front page of the April 7
Union-Leader
were splashed two oversized photographs: Rene’s formal Marine Corps portrait and a shot of an “electrified” mom and fiancée: Irene Gagnon and nineteen-year-old Pauline Harnois.

When the reporter asked Pauline if she knew Rene was in the famous photo, she replied without hesitation: “I was almost sure in my heart that it was Rene. I guess,” Pauline concluded, “it was woman’s intuition.”