Iwo Jima in Thirty-Six Days and the Two Flag Raisings on Mount Suribachi

Everyone knows the picture. Six men straining to lift a pole against the wind, on top of a volcanic hill, with a flag snapping above them. It is on stamps and statues and the walls of barber shops from here to Okinawa. And almost everyone who knows the picture has a slightly wrong idea of what it shows.

It does not show the end of the battle. When that photograph was taken, the fight for Iwo Jima had barely begun, and another month of killing lay ahead. It does not show the first flag raised on the mountain, which went up earlier that same morning. And, as the Marine Corps itself has determined, it does not show every man that history first said it did. The honest version of the story is longer and harder than the photograph, and it is better, because it is true. Let me tell it in order.

Why the island

Iwo Jima is a volcanic island about eight square miles in area, in the Volcano Islands, some 650 miles south of Tokyo. It was a barren place of black ash and sulphur, with a dormant volcano, Mount Suribachi, rising about 550 feet at its southern tip. Nobody wanted to live there. The Americans wanted it for one reason: airfields. By early 1945 American B-29 bombers were flying from the Mariana Islands to bomb Japan, and the round trip was long. An island halfway between would give the bombers a place to make emergency landings, and a base from which fighters could escort them. The Japanese, who knew this, wanted to hold it for the same reason.

The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, was a clever and determined officer who had studied the American army and understood what he faced. He did not plan to hold the beaches. Instead he built a defence of tunnels and underground fortifications, about 21,000 men dug into volcanic rock, connected by passages that ran for miles, with hidden artillery, mortars and machine guns. His intention was to make each yard of the island cost the Americans dearly, and to wear them down. He ordered his men to die killing as many Marines as possible, and not to waste their lives in the suicidal banzai charges that earlier battles had seen.

The Americans threw three days of naval and air bombardment at the island before the landing. It was less than the Marine commanders had asked for, and against an enemy underground, it did less than anyone hoped.

February 19: the landing

On the morning of February 19, 1945, the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions went ashore on the southeastern beaches, under the shadow of Suribachi. The black volcanic sand was a nightmare to move across, soft and deep, and it held men and vehicles back like glue. For the first hour the Japanese held their fire and let the beach fill with men and equipment. Then they opened up with everything they had, and the Marines on the beach were caught in the open with nothing to dig into.

By nightfall about 30,000 Marines were ashore, and they had cut the island across its narrow waist, isolating Suribachi. It had cost a lot of men. The next four days were spent fighting for the mountain.

February 23: the first flag

On the morning of February 23, a patrol from the 28th Marine Regiment climbed to the top of Suribachi. The patrol was led by First Lieutenant Harold Schrier of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, and it carried a small American flag taken from a transport ship in the invasion fleet. At roughly 10:30 in the morning, the Marines found a length of pipe on the summit, attached the flag to it, and raised it over the crater.

The sight of the flag was seen all across the island and by the ships offshore. Men on the beaches cheered, and ships sounded their horns. A flag on that peak meant something: the mountain, which had loomed over the landing beaches since the first minute, was in American hands. It was a first flag, and a small one, and the Marines who raised it were photographed by a Marine photographer on the spot.

What happened next explains the second flag. A senior officer decided he wanted the first flag as a keepsake for his battalion, and sent for a replacement. A larger flag, from a landing ship, was brought up to the summit that afternoon.

The second flag and Joe Rosenthal's photograph

The photographer who was on the mountain that day was Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press. He had climbed up with a group of Marines and found them about to replace the flag with the bigger one. He set up his camera on a pile of rocks and took the shot as six men planted the pole. He did not even know what he had at the time. The film was sent off to be developed, and, when the picture came back, the editors who saw it understood at once that it had caught something. It ran in American newspapers on February 25, and it was reproduced everywhere. The photograph won the Pulitzer Prize that year.

So the famous picture is, strictly, of the second flag raising, a replacement carried out within hours of the first. Both were real, and both were done by Marines under fire on the same morning and afternoon. The photo of the second became the icon. The first raising, by Schrier's patrol, is where the mountain was truly claimed.

Who is in the picture

The six men in Rosenthal's photograph were identified in the weeks afterwards, and the identification became a part of the story. It also turned out to be more tangled than the early accounts suggested. In 1947 the Marine Corps announced that the man at the base of the flagpole was Harlon Block, a Texan killed in the battle, and not the man first named, a correction that followed Ira Hayes's word to Block's parents. In 2016, after a further review by the Marine Corps with the help of historians and enthusiasts who had studied the photographs and film, it announced that the Navy corpsman John Bradley, long identified as one of the six, was not in Rosenthal's photograph; the Corps named Private First Class Harold Schultz in his place. In 2019 it announced that Rene Gagnon, also long identified, was not in the photograph either, and named Harold Keller.

I mention these corrections because conservatives should be the first to insist on accuracy about the past. A legend that depends on a mistake is a fragile legend. The men did not change; the record was improved. And the corrected record makes the point sharper: the heroism on Suribachi does not depend on who stood where in one frame. It belonged to all the men who climbed the mountain. Of the men named in the photograph, three did not survive the battle: Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block and Private First Class Franklin Sousley were killed in the fighting over the following weeks. Others who were in the photograph, or had been identified as being in it, lived and were brought home.

The thirty-six days

If the flag went up on the fifth day, the battle was just beginning. For the next month, the Marines fought their way north across the island, mile by mile, through the tunnels and caves and the fortified ridges. The ground gave up no cover. The Japanese did not surrender. They came out of caves and tunnels by night and day, and the Marines had to take each position one at a time, with flamethrowers, grenades and demolition charges. A square yard of the island could cost a man his life.

The fighting went on until March 26, 1945, the date usually given for the end of the battle (one account has the island declared secure earlier, on March 16, with the mopping-up continuing). Count the days on the March 26 reckoning: from February 19 to March 26 inclusive is ten days left in February (the 19th through the 28th) plus twenty-six in March, or thirty-six. Thirty-six days for eight square miles.

The cost was extraordinary. About 6,800 Americans were killed, and the total American casualties, killed and wounded, were around 26,000. Of the 21,000 or so Japanese defenders, nearly all died; only roughly a thousand were eventually taken prisoner, most of them after the main fighting ended. Few battles of the Pacific war cost so much for so little ground.

Twenty-seven Medals of Honor

When the war ended, 27 Medals of Honor had been awarded for actions on Iwo Jima, the largest number for any single battle in the war, and a large share of all those awarded to Marines in the whole conflict. Many were awarded posthumously, and many went to men who threw themselves on grenades to save their comrades, or who attacked machine-gun positions alone. Among the recipients were Marines, and also Navy corpsmen, the medics who went into the line with the infantry and who carried their wounded out under fire.

The commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Nimitz, wrote of the men who fought there that "uncommon valor was a common virtue." I have rarely seen a sentence that does more in fewer words. What the Medal of Honor Is, Who Awards It and How a Citation Is Written explains the award and how a citation is built, and Five Medal of Honor Citations Read Closely and What Each One Asks of Us reads five of them. I recommend both for anyone who wants to see what these honours actually say.

The rebuttal: the photograph was staged

The strongest objection to the whole icon is one that has circulated for decades. The famous photograph is of a second flag raising, a replacement. The first was the real one. Rosenthal's picture is therefore a re-enactment, a fake, and the whole story was dressed up for the home front. The government used it to sell war bonds. It is propaganda.

Let me answer that point by point.

One, the premise is half right and the conclusion is wrong. The picture is of the second raising. That is a fact, and this article says it in the first paragraph. But the second raising was not a re-enactment. It was a real flag, raised by real Marines under real fire conditions, on a mountain that had not yet been fully secured, on the same day as the first. It was done to replace a small flag with a large one. Nobody posed.

Two, the claim that Rosenthal staged his famous shot confuses it with a different photograph. Rosenthal also took a posed group picture, with the Marines gathered under the flag, cheering, which he made afterward and which he never claimed was anything but posed. The two photographs have been mixed up in people's memories for decades, and rumours followed. Rosenthal's famous photograph was shot in an instant while the men were actually raising the pole. He spent years denying the charge, and the evidence supports him.

Three, the government did use the photograph. The three surviving men who were identified in the picture were brought home from the war to take part in a bond tour for the Seventh War Loan. It is also true that the picture was sold to the public as a symbol. But a symbol is not a lie. A symbol is the use of a true image to carry a true meaning, and the meaning here, that Americans took a mountain at terrible cost, is true. The fact that the picture was a good piece of public communication does not make the battle less real. The press had every right to publish it and the people had every right to be moved by it. The soldiers on the mountain did not need a publicist; they needed a photographer, and one was there.

The Founding and the Marines

There is a constitutional thread worth following. Article I, Section 8, Clause 13 gives Congress the power "To provide and maintain a Navy." The Marine Corps, which the Continental Congress created on November 10, 1775, is a part of that Navy tradition, a body of men trained to go ashore from the sea. The Founders knew what a fleet was for, and they gave to Congress, not to the executive, the power to build and fund one.

Think of the line that runs from that clause to the beaches of Iwo Jima. A people who valued their liberty enough to put limits on their own government also saw the need to defend it, and they wrote the power to do so into their charter. The Marines who landed on February 19, 1945 were the instruments of a republic that had decided, a hundred and seventy years before, that a free country must be able to project force when its security requires it. The memorial to the flag raising, the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, was dedicated on November 10, 1954, the Corps' birthday, with President Eisenhower presiding. It is a fitting place for a citizen to take a child. And for the other fronts of the same war, see The Doolittle Raid Hit Tokyo Four Months After Pearl Harbor From a Carrier Deck and Midway and the Codebreakers Who Let the Navy Set an Ambush.

What the photograph asks of us

I will end where I began. Everyone knows the picture, and I hope you now know more than the picture. The picture does not show the thirty-six days, or the tunnels, or the 27 Medals of Honor, or the families that waited. It shows six men lifting a pole. The best way to honour them is to hold the whole story in your head at once: the courage on the mountain, the cost on the island, the corrected record and the country that sent them.

If you want to carry it further, ask what a citizen owes to the men who did this. The answer is not a slogan. It is the unglamorous work of keeping the republic they fought for in good order: knowing its text, voting, serving on a jury, teaching children, supporting the veterans in your town.

The case in brief

1. Iwo Jima was fought for its airfields; Lieutenant General Kuribayashi's 21,000 defenders held a network of tunnels, and the Marines landed on February 19, 1945 and did not secure the island until March 26, thirty-six days later.
2. The first flag went up on Mount Suribachi on the morning of February 23, and a larger second flag replaced it that afternoon, the one in Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph.
3. The identification of the six men in the photograph has been corrected, in 1947, 2016 and 2019, and the corrections improve the record without diminishing the heroism.
4. About 6,800 Americans were killed, and 27 Medals of Honor were awarded for the battle, the most for any single battle of the war.
5. The charge that the photograph was staged confuses it with a separate posed picture, and a true symbol of a true battle is not propaganda.

What you can do: visit a veterans' memorial or a Marine Corps League post near you this year, and read the names on it aloud with someone younger.