U.S. Marines stormed the black sands of Iwo Jima 70 years ago today.
Four days later, on Feb. 23, 1945, and while still under enemy fire, Associated Press photojournalist Joe Rosenthal took one of the most iconic war photos of all time, capturing five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising a U.S. flag on the summit of Mt. Suribachi, an extinct volcano and Iwo Jima’s high point.
Joe Rosenthal, AP.
Three of the Marines in the photo, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, and Michael Strank, died days later in the ongoing battle for the remote Pacific island.
Rosenthal’s photograph became an instant symbol of the war, turning the surviving three troops into celebrities, and is the only photo to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography the same year as its publication.
The military capitalized on the photo’s “viral” appeal, using the image, and the three surviving troops featured in it, to promote a 1945 War Bond drive, which raised $26.3 billion.
Rosenthal’s photograph ultimately evolved into a long-lasting, defining symbol of the war, and may be the most widely reproduced photograph in history.
Sculptor Felix de Weldon used the image as the inspiration for his statue at the Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, dedicated in 1954 to honor fallen Marines.
The Marine Corps War Memorial.
The 2006 film, “Flags of our fathers,” directed by Clint Eastwood, depicted the flag raising and the fate of the six troops involved.
Rosenthal, a Washington D.C. native and the son of Russian immigrants, was deemed unfit for military duty during World War II due to his eyesight—he only had one-twentieth normal vision. He joined the AP in 1941 as a photographer and went with the U.S. fleet in the Pacific. He accompanied the 70,000 Marines who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima during the first waves of the invasion on Feb. 19, 1945.
Highlighting the difficulties of objectively covering a war in which one’s own countrymen are fighting, Rosenthal later pushed back against claims that the famous Iwo Jima image was staged.
Joe Rosenthal
Other troops who witnessed the flag raising insisted the moment was authentic, and a color motion-picture film by Marine Sgt. William Genaust, a combat cameraman, shows the flag going up in a continuous sequence of events.
“To get that flag up there, America’s fighting men had to die on that island and on other islands and off the shores and in the air,” Rosenthal wrote in 1955. “What difference does it make who took the picture? I took it, but the Marines took Iwo Jima.”
Rosenthal died Aug. 20, 2006. He was 94.