Flags of Our Fathers (40 page)

John Wayne hands Rene Gagnon the flag as Ira Hayes and John Bradley look on.

Left: Felix de Weldon sculpting Rene Gagnon.

Below: De Weldon with Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, and John Bradley.

Top: U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, Arlington, Virginia.

Bottom: Dedication of the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, November 10, 1954. From left to right: John Bradley, Goldie Price (mother of Franklin Sousley), Richard Nixon, Belle Block (mother of Harlon Block), Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes.

Ira Hayes in jail, Chicago, 1953.

Rene Gagnon.

John Bradley, Memorial Day parade, Antigo, Wisconsin.

Iwo Jima today.

The Bradleys with commemorative plaque atop Mount Suribachi, April 1998. From left to right: Betty, Steve, James, Joe, and Mark.

The Bradleys in a Japanese blockhouse, Iwo Jima, 1998. From left to right: Steve, Joe, James, Mark, and Betty.

Sixteen

THE MIGHTY 7TH

It’s funny what a picture can do.

—IRA HAYES

FOURTEEN BILLION DOLLARS, TO BE EXACT. That was the monetary goal set by Treasury for the Seventh Bond Tour. Seven billion from companies and businesses, and seven billion from individuals.

Fourteen billion: a sum equaling the highest goal of any of the eight bond drives of World War II. A sum larger than the government’s expenditures in prewar 1941 and equaling a full quarter of its budget for fiscal 1946.

Fourteen billion to keep feeding, clothing, sheltering, and arming the millions of men and women still fighting World War II, and provide more planes, ships, and tanks for their effort. Fourteen billion for a war that was costing $250 million a day; $175,000 a minute; a war being waged mostly now against a Pacific enemy whose population was still replacing its armies’ destruction rate of a quarter million men a year.

Fourteen billion to be solicited from a population of 160 million: nearly one hundred dollars, on average, from every man, woman, and child in America. This in a country where an annual income of seventeen hundred dollars comfortably supported a family of four; where a Harvard education cost a thousand dollars; where a hotel room in New York could be had for three dollars; where a good breakfast cost thirty-two cents.

A mountain of money that must have seemed as formidable, in its own way, as Suribachi. And now the three surviving flagraisers would lead the charge to take that mountain.

Bond Tours enjoyed a cherished place in American tradition of the time. Their goal was twofold: to call attention to the wartime need for purchasing government bonds, and to stimulate citizens to leave their homes and offices and head for one of the many “buying booths” scattered about towns and cities, where the actual paper could be purchased. That was where the color and pageantry came in.

National in scope, local in flavor, Bond Tours combined the old-fashioned elements of vaudeville, the county fair, the Fourth of July parade. And they anticipated some of the flash and crowd-pleasing fervor that would accrue, not too many years later, to Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.

As families gathered, squinting and waving flags along the Main Streets and Broadways of the nation, columns of soldiers and marching bands would troop past, followed by open vehicles filled with waving movie stars and decorated war heroes. Mock battles would be fought in city parks and athletic stadiums. And speakers’ platforms would display a lineup of politicians, celebrities, and local heroes, many of them missing an arm or a leg, everyone exhorting the crowds to be a part of things, support their country, buy a bond.

This was the ponderous challenge—and the incomparable excitement—of reaching a mass public in an age before television: a great roving road show that would personify the war’s realities and deliver them to Americans’ home precincts. An effort by the government to communicate almost face-to-face with as many of its citizens as possible, and to make its case for voluntary sacrifices, rather than simply confiscate the needed money through taxes. A gargantuan feat of popular democracy, the likes of which have since vanished from the culture.

The Seventh Bond Tour—the Mighty 7th—would have all the features of the six previous drives, and more. The Mighty 7th would have as its emblem the most famous image in the history of photography. And the 7th would exhibit, for public view, three of the six figures from that almost-holy frieze.

As the Seventh moved toward its May 9 kickoff in Washington—it would storm through thirty-three cities before winding up back in the nation’s capital on July 4—The Photograph’s mystical hold on the nation continued to deepen.

Detached—liberated—even from the merely factual circumstances that produced it, The Photograph had become a receptacle for America’s emotions; it stood for everything good that Americans wanted it to stand for; it had begun to act as a great crystal prism, drawing the light of all America’s values into its facets, and giving off a brilliant rainbow of feeling and thoughts.

An entrepreneur offered the Associated Press $200,000 for the rights to the photo. A Congressman, W. Sterling Cole of New York, declared that it should become “public property”—it meant too much to the nation to be used for mere commerce. The AP finally decided to donate the rights to the photo to the government, with royalties going to a sailors’ retirement fund.

The sculptor Felix de Weldon went to work on a larger model of his flagraising monument. And in Times Square, the crossroads of the world, a five-story flagraising statue was being installed.

On Tuesday, May 8, the newspapers trumpeted the biggest news yet in the war: Germany had surrendered. And still a development regarding The Photograph worked its way onto the front page of
The New York Times:
Joe Rosenthal had won a Pulitzer Prize.

A Pulitzer submission for work done in 1945 normally would not be eligible for a prize until 1946. But for the first and only time the trustees of Columbia University suspended the rules “for this distinguished example,” declaring “Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the flagraising on Iwo depicts one of the war’s great moments,” a “frozen flash of history” caught by his camera.

Bright sunshine and soft spring breezes graced the Mighty 7th’s opening ceremonies in Washington the next day. As military brass glittered, tubas
oom-pahed
and flags undulated overhead, members of the President’s Cabinet and of both Houses assembled outside the Capitol Building to wish the tour godspeed.

After some speeches and introductions, the crowning event unfolded. As official Washington silently saluted, the Marine Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Rene stood at ramrod attention, while John and Ira pulled a guide rope to hoist the American flag over the Capitol dome. In raising it there, the boys were introducing a new national relic into American history.

Within a few hours, Ira, Rene, and John—now “immortal heroes”—would hit the road with their sacred relic to inspire the populace.

They boarded a train bound for New York. As they traveled, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and Commandant Vandegrift commented on their journey in a national broadcast from a Washington studio with Bob Hope as host. Hope then sang a duet with Bing Crosby via a remote hookup with Hollywood. The song was one that disc jockeys all over the country would play for months afterward: Crosby’s recording of “Buy, Buy Bonds.”

The boys did not travel unsupervised. Accompanying them was their chaperon: Keyes Beech, the Marine correspondent. Ira explained Beech’s role in a letter home to his parents: “Four of us are on this trip. Gagnon, Bradley and Tech. Sgt. Beech, who is watching over us and taking care of our traveling business. He’s a swell guy and I like him.”

Ira liked Beech for a number of reasons, including several wrong ones. Paramount among them was the fact that Keyes reinforced Ira’s soggy notions of a good time. George McArthur, Beech’s good friend in later life, told me, “Keyes was a big drinker. He was a drop-dead alcoholic until he joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1960’s. He used to tell me that he and Ira drank every night on the Bond Tour and that his main job was to get Ira to the scheduled events.”

The boys disembarked at Grand Central Station to a huge applauding reception committee. They gaped at blowups of the Bond Tour poster that papered the cavernous Main Hall. Whisked ten blocks up Park Avenue to the Waldorf-Astoria, the boys passed likenesses of themselves that seemed to cover just about every surface in the city.

Nearly every New Yorker had beheld those likenesses. The bond poster fluttered from street lamps; it adorned buses and taxicabs; it festooned the windows of banks, factories, post offices, and department stores. In the most tangible of ways, the boys’ reputation had preceded them.

Another reproduction of the image was draped above the Waldorf’s entrance. As the boys entered the lobby, the staff of the world-famous hotel lined their path and applauded.

As soon as he’d settled in his room, a dazzled John Bradley grabbed a sheet of Waldorf stationery and dashed off a note home:

Dear Mom, Dad & all,

We just arrived at New York and look where we’re hanging our hats. Boy, what a swanky joint. I couldn’t pay for a room if I had $100. All our meals are free and valet service also…I’m really all excited about the whole affair so if I don’t sound like myself, you’ll know why.

At about the same time, Ira was likewise scribbling away:

Dear Parents and Brothers,

We just arrived here in NYC about 2 hours ago from Washington. I can’t hardly realize I’m here in the most famous hotel in the world. But I am…

Tomorrow is a big day. We go to the Roxy Theater in the morning and make an appearance. Then we go to Times Square to unveil the monument of the flagraising on Iwo, which is 25 feet high. And then the dinner to be held in our honor in the evening. Then we leave for Philadelphia and Boston and back here in New York. So you see we will be busy.

Your excited but happy son…

Ira H. Hayes

New York City’s bond sales goal was $287 million, and the boys’ schedule was crammed. They commenced their roles as tour celebrities on Thursday morning with an autograph-signing session at the Roxy Theater in Times Square. Their admirers crowded the lobby, gaping at the boys beneath a huge enlargement of Rosenthal’s photograph, which had been wedged between smaller portraits of Roosevelt and Truman.

Meanwhile, fundraising events blossomed around the city. At the Astor, representatives of the ready-to-wear industry enthusiastically pledged to raise $100 million. Life insurance executives, dining elsewhere, pledged the efforts of thirty thousand New York area agents to the cause.

But the big show unfurled Friday, May 11, in Times Square. There, with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and tens of thousands of New Yorkers looking on, the five-story Iwo statue was unveiled. The
Times
coverage the next day featured a photograph of John raising the flag over the statue as Rene, Ira, Commandant Vandegrift, and the mayor saluted.

Again and again, despite abundant opportunity, the three boys refused to pick up the theme of press and speechmakers and portray themselves as valiant warriors who hoisted the colors against sheets of enemy fire. New York reporters threw the first of many chances to them. But the three chose instead to tell the unadorned truth: They had simply put up a replacement flag. A bit sourly, perhaps, the
Times
reported that the three “looked a bit harried and confessed that appearing for the Seventh War Loan Drive ‘is not as much fun as it would seem.’”

Clearly, modesty wasn’t enough for the aggressive urban press. Glory was the thing that sold papers. The press wanted tales of blood-and-guts heroism from the living icons in front of them. It was my father who finally cut the reporters off at one impromptu press conference. They should just report the truth, John Bradley said: “It took everyone on that island and the men on the ships offshore to get the flag up on Suribachi.”

Ira learned to take refuge from such ordeals in his beloved bottle. His drunkenness created acute demands on his equally bibulous chaperon. At a banquet that night, Beech struggled to keep the befogged Ira conscious enough to “say a few words” when his turn came. Beech later wrote:

There is something disconcerting about presenting to an audience a man who is gently snoozing at your side. But the Chief always came to life when I mentioned his name.

He would stand, acknowledge the introduction with a prodigious yawn, which invariably brought a mass response from the audience, then sit down and go back to sleep.