Flags of Our Fathers (29 page)

The firefight lasted several minutes, and no American casualties were taken. And then the invisible enemy was silent once again.

After things had settled down, some of the young Marines grew fascinated with the view down below. Donald Howell found a working pair of large artillery field glasses, amazingly intact, in the rubble. He propped them up on their tripod, gazed through them, and was startled by what he could see. “They gave you an amazing view of the beaches,” he recalled. “They [the Japanese] could see our every move.” When eighteen-year-old James Buchanan had his turn, the war fell away for a moment and he was taken with boyish wonder: “I looked through them and could see all of Iwo. It was beautiful.”

For others, the morning exacted grimmer duties. Chuck Lindberg remembered that he and his comrades spent the ensuing hour securing the mountain. “We used the flamethrowers or demolition charges for the caves we couldn’t walk into, and we walked into whatever caves we could. We burned them out. We didn’t know what side the Japanese would be coming up from, so we had to work fast.”

Only later would the Marines comprehend just how much danger still festered inside Suribachi on the morning of February 23. Rummaging through an opened cave for souvenirs a few days afterward, Lindberg and Chick Robeson uncovered a sickening sight: the bodies of at least 150 Japanese, freshly dead. They had died of self-inflicted wounds.

“The stench was so foul that we had to put on gas masks,” Robeson recalled. “We went in with a small flashlight, and found it to be a large cave in two parts. Dead Japanese lay all about—so thick we had to tread on some. Many had died by holding grenades to their stomachs.

“Why these Japanese hadn’t tried to bolt from the cave and overwhelm the flagraising patrol is a mystery,” Robeson continued. “They had our men outnumbered four to one. What made the situation even more unaccountable was that there were other occupied caves on the summit. We’ll never know the number of Japanese who could have hurled themselves against our patrol. But there were surely enough to have killed every man in it.”

There is one persuasive explanation for those self-annihilated soldiers, and it speaks to the corruption of Bushido that was wrought by Japan’s malignant military regime. A traditional samurai might expect to die in combat and be honored for it. He might kill himself to atone for a moral mistake or a failure of courage. But suicide as an expression of ultimate sacrifice for one’s country was not a traditional samurai value. This was a construct of a deranged military establishment cynically bent on extracting the maximum utility from its
issen gorin
.

While the 3rd Platoon was taking control of Suribachi’s summit, other things were going on down below.

The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, had decided the previous night that he wanted to go ashore and witness the final stage of the fight for the mountain. Now, under a stern commitment to take orders from Howlin’ Mad Smith, the secretary was churning ashore in the company of the blunt, earthy general. Their boat touched the beach just after the flag went up, and the mood among the high command turned jubilant. Gazing upward at the red, white, and blue speck, Forrestal remarked to Smith: “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

Forrestal was so taken with the fervor of the moment that he decided he wanted the Suribachi flag as a souvenir. The news of this wish did not sit well with Chandler Johnson, whose temperament was every bit as fiery as Howlin’ Mad’s. “The hell with that!” the colonel spat when that message reached him. The flag belonged to the battalion, as far as Johnson was concerned. He decided to secure it as soon as possible, and dispatched his assistant operations officer, Lieutenant Ted Tuttle, to the beach to scare up a replacement flag. As an afterthought, Johnson called after Tuttle: “And make it a bigger one.”

At about this same time, a short, nearsighted, mustachioed wire-service photographer named Joe Rosenthal was struggling through a bad morning indeed.

Rosenthal, covering the invasion for the Associated Press, had landed on Iwo at around noon on D-Day and had risked his life to get stirring action shots through the days of combat that followed. But on the morning of February 23, nothing seemed to go right for him. He slipped on a wet ladder and fell into the ocean between the command ship and a landing craft. Fished out, he unzipped his camera—a bulky and durable Speed Graphic—from its waterproof bag, and clicked off a shot of Forrestal and Smith looking resolutely toward the beach.

As he was approaching Iwo Jima in an LCT in the company of Bill Hipple, a magazine correspondent, the boatswain told Rosenthal he had just heard on his radio that a patrol was climbing Suribachi.

“The hell you say,” Hipple said.

“That’s what I heard,” the sailor said.

Hipple and Rosenthal headed toward the mountain, being careful to avoid marked mines, until they reached the command post of the 28th Regiment. There they encountered two Marines who were also combat photographers: Private Bob Campbell, who worked with a still camera, and Sergeant Bill Genaust, who had a movie camera loaded with color film.

“I think we’ll be too late for the flagraising,” Genaust remarked. But Rosenthal had come too far to turn back. “I’d still like to go up,” he said, and talked Campbell and Genaust—who were armed—into making the ascent with him. The three men shouldered their cameras and hit the steep trail.

While Lieutenant Tuttle was off searching for a replacement flag, Chandler Johnson decided that Lieutenant Schrier, up on the mountain, could use a wired connection with the base for his field telephone, whose battery signal was growing weak. He rang up Dave Severance at Easy Company and ordered a detail to reel out a phone wire. The 2nd Platoon had just trooped in from its probe around the mountain’s base. Severance ordered Mike, Harlon, Ira, and Franklin to the battalion command post to tie in a telephone wire that the fire team would then unreel up the mountain. Strank said simply, “Let’s go!” The boys were tired, but nobody asked the young sergeant where they were going; nobody complained. As Ira later wrote, “We were certainly uneasy.”

The captain also dispatched his runner, nineteen-year-old Rene Gagnon, to the command post for fresh SCR-300 batteries for Schrier.

They reached Colonel Johnson’s field headquarters just as Lieutenant Tuttle hurried into view. He was carrying an American flag that he had obtained from LST-779 on the beach. As it happened, this flag—which at ninety-six by fifty-six inches was a good deal larger than the one now planted on the mountain—had been found in a salvage yard at Pearl Harbor, rescued from a sinking ship on that date which will live in infamy.

Tuttle handed the flag to Chandler Johnson, who in turn gave it to Rene to put inside his field pack. “When you get to the top,” the colonel told Mike, “you tell Schrier to put this flag up, and I want him to save the small flag for me.”

With their cargo of telephone wire, batteries, and American flag, the five boys set off up the mountain, unreeling the wire as they climbed. Doc had remained atop the mountain.

They reached the rim around noon. Mike reported to Lieutenant Schrier and explained the delivery of wire and batteries, and Johnson’s desire to preserve the first flag. As Rene handed Mike the replacement flag, the sergeant decided an explanation was in order.

“Colonel Johnson wants this big flag run up high,” he told the lieutenant, “so every son of a bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it!”

Mike directed Ira and Franklin to look for a length of pipe. He and Harlon started clearing a spot for planting the pole, and Harlon began stacking stones.

On his descent from the crater, Lowery encountered Joe Rosenthal, Bill Genaust, and Bob Campbell picking their way upward. Lowery told the group that he’d photographed the flagraising. The three photographers considered turning around and heading back. But Lowery had a different idea. “You should go on up there,” he said. “There’s a hell of a good view of the harbor.” The three photographers trudged on.

A good view of a different sort greeted Rosenthal when he reached the summit, a little after noon: the American flag, in close-up, snapping in the strong breeze. “I tell you, I still get this feeling of a patriotic jolt when I recall seeing our flag flying up there,” he told an interviewer some years later.

Then Rosenthal spotted another interesting sight toward the far side of the crater: a couple of Marines hauling an iron pole toward another Marine, who was holding a second American flag, neatly folded.

Rosenthal’s fingers instinctively went to his Speed Graphic. Maybe he would get a flagraising photograph after all.

The pole that Ira and Franklin were dragging was a length of drainage pipe that weighed more than a hundred pounds. As they approached the site, Lieutenant Schrier suggested that Mike’s team do the job. The lieutenant wanted the replacement flag raised simultaneously with the lowering of the first one.

Mike attached the flag to the pole. Schrier rounded up some Marines to lower the first pole, and then stood between the two clusters of flag groups, directing them.

The three photographers milled about some distance away, near the volcano’s outer rim. Each of the three looked for a good vantage point. Campbell walked away and moved into position a short distance down the hillside, almost directly below the first flag, so that he could shoot upward at it as the Marines took it down. Genaust, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Rosenthal, about thirty yards from the second flag, had a few feet of color film left in his camera, and decided to wait for the right moment to use them. The five-foot-three Rosenthal had put down his Speed Graphic and was bent over, piling up stones and a sand bag to stand on and improve his shooting angle. His camera was set at a speed of 1/400th of a second, with the f-stop between 8 and 16.

No one else on the summit paid much attention to what was going on. The action had all the significance of a new football being tossed into a game in progress.

It all happened in seconds. Genaust’s movie camera recorded it all. In the solitude of my living room, I have watched those few seconds again and again, in slow motion. Here is how it unfolded:

Harlon braced himself above the target spot in the rubble-strewn ground, ready to receive the base of the pole. Mike, at the other end, in charge, guided it toward him, the pipe over his right shoulder.

Mike held the large flag wrapped around the pole to keep it from fluttering in the strong wind until the pole was planted.

Mike and his four squad-members circled closer to the pole. They raised their feet high with each step, to get clear of the debris. It looked as if they were walking in deep snow.

Ira walked toward the pole, facing Mike, his back to Genaust’s camera frame. He said something to Mike that was lost in the strong wind. Ira was wearing his Indian-style blanket stuffed through his military belt on his rump.

Mike saw Doc Bradley walking past with a load of bandages in his arms and asked him to come and help. Doc dropped the bandages and moved to the pole, directly between Mike and Harlon.

Franklin walked to the pole from the foreground of Genaust’s camera frame.

Rene approached the group from behind, to the right, his rifle slung over his shoulder. He stood behind my father, who was in front of the pole in the movie frame.

The boys converged in a cluster behind Harlon, who bent low at the base. Doc gripped the pole in the cluster’s center.

Rosenthal spotted the movement and grabbed his camera.

Genaust, about three feet from Rosenthal, asked: “I’m not in your way, am I, Joe?”

“Oh, no,” Rosenthal answered. As he later remembered, “I turned from him and out of the corner of my eye I said, ‘Hey, Bill, there it goes!’”

He swung his camera and clicked off a frame. In that same instant the flagpole rose upward in a quick arc. The banner, released from Mike’s grip, fluttered out in the strong wind.

Rosenthal remembers: “By being polite to each other we both damn near missed the scene. I swung my camera around and held it until I could guess that this was the peak of the action, and shot.”

And then it was over. The flag was up.

Campbell had gotten the shot he was after: the first flag going down, in the foreground of his frame, and the second one going up, off in the distance. Genaust had gotten the footage he wanted: a routine, spontaneous color sequence of the replacement flagraising.

Only Joe Rosenthal was unsure. The AP man didn’t even have a chance to glimpse the image in his viewfinder. “Of course,” he later said, “I couldn’t positively say I had the picture. It’s something like shooting a football play; you don’t brag about it until it’s developed.” He’d captured 1/400th of a second out of four seconds of fluid motion. He had no idea whether he’d gotten a blur, a shot of the sky, or a passable photograph.

The six continued to struggle with the heavy pole in the whipping wind. The pole was fully upright. Harlon raised his hands up the pole and gripped it baseball-bat style, using his weight to force it into the ground. Ira did the same. Then Franklin added his heft. Mike anchored things.

Within a few more seconds the flagpole was freestanding, the cloth snapping and cracking in the wind. After a moment, Franklin and some of the others began looking for rocks to add support. Doc offered ropes he’d brought along to tie casualties to stretchers, and they secured the pole.

No one paid attention. It was just a replacement flag. The important flag—the first one raised that day—was brought down the mountain and presented to Colonel Johnson, who stored it in the battalion safe. It bore too much historic value for the battalion to be left unguarded atop Suribachi. The replacement flag flew for three weeks, eventually chewed up by the strong winds.

A few moments after the raising, Joe Rosenthal did what Lowery had done a couple of hours before him. He called several Marines over to cluster around the pole for a standard, posed “gung-ho!” shot. Lieutenant Schrier helped gather a crowd of boys for this photograph. Mike, Ira, Doc, Franklin, and fourteen other Marines posed proudly beneath the flag, waving their arms, rifles, and helmets.