Flags of Our Fathers (32 page)

He reflexively reached for some sculptor’s clay and tools. With the photograph before him he labored through the long night. By dawn, he had replicated the six boys pushing a pole, raising a flag.

The next morning, Sunday, February 25, millions of Americans were similarly transfixed by the image. People would always remember where they were the moment they saw the photo, as others would later remember President Kennedy’s death. The flagraising photograph signaled victory and hope, a counterpoint to the photos of sinking ships at Pearl Harbor that had signaled defeat and fear four years earlier.

Men and women bent down sleepily to their doorsteps, took one look, and called back into the house, “Hey, look at this!”

City pedestrians handed three cents to a street news vendor, took a few steps, then turned back and bought another copy.

Charles Sweeney, who later dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, would write that his Catholic mother allowed only two images to be hung on the family’s dining-room wall: Jesus and FDR. Until the morning she saw the flag photo, that is: She framed it and hung it as the revered third icon on the wall.

Many a mother with a son in the Pacific wondered if her boy was in the photo. But for Harlon’s mother, Belle, back in Weslaco, Texas, there was no doubt. She was sure.

Early that morning Harlon’s brother, Ed Block, Jr., home on leave from the Air Force, stepped onto the family porch and stooped to retrieve the Sunday edition of the Weslaco
Mid-Valley News
.

He had just sat down in an easy chair in the living room and lifted the paper in front of him when Belle breezed into the room. As she passed behind him, she glanced at the paper. Then she stopped. She leaned over Ed’s right shoulder, put her finger on the figure in the photo thrusting the pole into the ground, and exclaimed: “Lookit there, Junior! There’s your brother Harlon!”

Ed did a double take, looking hard at the photo. The figure Belle was pointing to was unidentifiable, just the back of a Marine with no side view. The caption read only
Old Glory Goes Up Over Iwo,
and the articles provided no names.

“Momma,” Ed declared, “there’s no way you can know that’s Harlon. That’s just the back of a Marine. And besides, we don’t even know Harlon is on Iwo Jima.”

“Oh, that’s definitely Harlon,” Belle insisted as she slid the paper from Ed’s grasp. And as she strode into the kitchen, her eyes fixed on the photo, Ed could hear her saying, “I know my boy.”

The Photograph’s impact spread like a shock wave. That same Sunday, February 25, a columnist for
The New York Times
launched into a piece devoted to “the most beautiful picture of the war.” A writer for the
Times-Union
of Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak and a city where the visual vocabulary of photography was a familiar language, proclaimed the image “a masterpiece comparable to Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper.’”

The receptionists at major newspapers reported something unusual the week of the photo’s appearance. Their switchboards were jammed with callers seeking reprints. Soon publishers were issuing “Special Extra Editions,” one featuring the photograph “In Color!” while another promised “Printed on heavy paper, suitable for framing!” They couldn’t print enough. All sold out.

No one knew who the flagraisers were, but Joe Rosenthal was an instant celebrity. On February 27, the
Times
ran a huge photo of Joe, identifying him as the photographer “who has earned nationwide praise for his picture.”

Mr. A.B.R. Shelley of Raleigh, North Carolina, saw the photo and immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the
Times,
who published it on February 28:

On the front page of the
Times
of Feb. 25 is a picture which should make a magnificent war memorial. It is the picture of the Marines of the Fifth Division raising Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi. There are war statues aplenty, but most of them are fictional. Reproduced in bronze, this actual scene should make good art and a fitting tribute to American men and American valor.

By national consensus, it was a beautiful image. But for those who wanted facts, what, exactly, did it represent? No one suspected it, but the photograph suggested a very different reality from that being experienced by the Marines back on Iwo Jima.

On the same day the replacement photo appeared in the U.S., Boots Thomas was summoned from his battle post to General Smith’s command ship. There, he was interviewed by a CBS radio correspondent. The interviewer didn’t touch upon the Rosenthal photograph. He had not learned of its existence. Even if he had, he would not have brought it up: After all, it was only a replacement flagraising. It held no significance to those on Iwo Jima. To everyone on the island, “the flagraising” referred only to the one Boots was involved in.

In his interview Boots told the modest truth: His patrol walked up the volcano’s slope encountering no opposition, and put up a flag as photographer Lowery recorded the scene.

But a number of elements came together to create an altogether different set of perceptions for the folks back home.

First, thousands had cheered the initial flagraising atop Suribachi, but from a distance. Only a few were close enough to see exactly who the raisers were. No one paid attention to or cheered the replacement flagraising. And no one cared who raised it. For most of the Marines on the island, there was only one flagraising.

Second, because civilian Rosenthal’s AP photos traveled faster than Marine Lowery’s military photos, only one flagraising was represented in the papers back home.

Third, because the replacement flagraising was essentially a nonevent, little was said about it. So readers back home assumed there was only one flagraising: the one they beheld on the front pages of their newspapers.

Fourth, reporters safe on ships miles from Suribachi and editors half a world away not only failed to report the full range of facts, they inadvertently created a confusing myth about the flagraisings that continues to this day.

There was the matter of that almost mythical image of the mountain. Nearly all aerial photographs featured Mount Suribachi; maps highlighted it, and news reports emphasized the enemy fire raining down from it. Thus, even though the rocky northern end of the island would prove to be the costliest part of the battle, it was natural for the reader to assume that once Mount Suribachi, the high point on the island, was taken, the battle would quickly end.

Then there was the shifting emphasis of reportage as the assault on the volcano wound down. The distant reporters had lavished great detail on the fierce fighting that led the Marines to the base of the mountain. Then they added three days of fanciful and garbled accounts of a murderous fight up Suribachi’s slopes. But they never mentioned the actual, quiet walk up Suribachi on that Friday morning of February 23. On that day, lacking any supporting photos of the conquest, the editors substituted a photograph of Marines pinned down on a hill far to the north. This only added to the false impression that Marines had been pinned down on Suribachi’s slopes.

On Saturday, February 24, the day after the flagraisings and the day before the photo appeared, correspondents continued to embellish the myth of the battle of Suribachi:

SURIBACHI REACHED IN A FIERY BATTLE

WAY TO VOLCANO’S BASE BURNED WITH
FLAMETHROWERS PRIOR TO SCALING OF VOLCANO

ASCENT MADE BY MARINES AS JAPANESE HURLED
GRENADES AND POURED BULLETS ON THEM

The boys of Easy Company would have howled at these gross exaggerations, but the
Times
copy just kept it up. Suribachi was the devil incarnate, “seeping steam and volcanic fumes,” and the Japanese “were rolling grenades down the steep tawny cliffs to burst in the faces of advancing Marines” as the embattled Marines “called for ropes and stretchers to lower the wounded over the sharp cliffs.”

These were the myths and inaccuracies that shaped Americans’ perceptions of the battle in the days before the photograph appeared. When it did spring into the nation’s consciousness on that Sunday morning, the photograph fused with the accumulated myth, and seemed to depict a final triumph in the very teeth of battle.

The
Times
was not through yet. It continued to fan the flames of hilltop heroism with the report that Boots Thomas “broke out the ensign, which was about three feet long, while his company was under intense enemy sniper fire.”

How to explain this travesty of accuracy? How could an unopposed forty-five-minute climb up a hill and a quiet flagraising be portrayed as a valiant fight to the death?

The Marines were not to blame. None were quoted as sources, and none have since been blamed for the misleading hyperbole.

Quite simply, the press faltered in its duty. It replaced reportage with romanticism. Carried away by the daily valor of the Marines, working at a safe but obfuscating distance, and swept up in its own fantasy of a swashbuckling fight for a mountain, reporters invented the heroic fight up the slopes, and the flagraising among whizzing bullets, out of whole cloth.

In later months and years, when the myth was found to be just that, other reporters focused their suspicions on the men on the mountain. Then a new myth, an antimyth, took root, fanned by later complacent reporters who made no effort to root out the true story.

The flagraising did not signify the end of the battle. It was just beginning.

Easy Company’s sector was secure but no place was safe on the small island. Distant giant guns in the north showered the mountain with nerve-shattering nighttime shells.

Dave Severance, hardly an officer given to panic, recalled one especially severe barrage. “It was my first experience with heavy artillery,” he said, “and I was scared as hell. I crowded myself against the edge of the crater so hard that I gradually inched myself right up over the top.”

On Wednesday, February 28, the 28th Marines received orders to prepare to move north. Their assignment was to relieve the 27th Marines at the 5th Division front on the heavily embattled west coast of the island.

The order to leave the mountain quickly changed Easy’s mood to one of apprehension. “My twenty-first birthday is coming up March 10,” Boots Thomas observed to a friend, “but I’ll never see it.”

And on that evening, Tex Stanton dropped into a foxhole that he and Mike Strank had prepared a little while earlier. Mike was already there, and Stanton at once sensed something different about him.

“He was lying limp, hobo-style, on his back with his hands behind his head,” Stanton remembered. “And he was quiet. Now, Mike was always active, always talking, and I had never seen him still. So I asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ Mike answered, ‘Oh, nothing. I was just wondering where we’re going with all this.’”

Tex Stanton felt a chill. He was so affected that he jumped out of the foxhole. “He was talking about his death,” Tex maintained years later. “Mike knew he was going to die.”

The northern battlefield beckoned. The idyll atop Suribachi was about to end. Harold Keller, looking through binoculars toward the fighting in the distance, summed up what Easy would face the next day. Asked later by a fellow Marine what he saw, Keller responded simply: “The Japs had all the cover, and our men got clobbered.”

Thirteen

“LIKE HELL WITH THE FIRE OUT”

They are saying, “The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.” I ask, how is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?

—EVELYN WAUGH, IN HIS 1939 DIARY

HAROLD KELLER COULD NOT KNOW how right he was. He was peering through his lens into bad territory: an open furnace of violence that would soon beggar the suffering and dying thus far.

No one could have predicted the horrors to come. In fact, much of the world would assume—given 4,574 U.S. casualties and the triumphal raising of the American colors on February 23—that the Battle of Iwo Jima was over. In fact the reverse was closer to the truth.

For Easy Company, and for many thousands of other Marines, the real Battle of Iwo Jima was only about to begin.

“Dearest Mother,” Harlon wrote to Belle in Weslaco early on March 1, the day of Easy Company’s plunge into the asylum. “Just a few lines to let you know I’m OK. I came through without a scratch. Oh yes, I saw Carl Sims just before we hit. He is OK. I guess you’re pretty anxious to hear from me by this time. This isn’t much but it’s all I could get. I will write more later.”

The real battle would be waged exactly on General Kuribayashi’s terms. It would be a battle of attrition on terrain that had no front lines; where the attackers were exposed and the defenders fortified; where Japanese infiltrators stalked the night; where every rock, every ditch, every open stretch of ground could conceal a burrowing, suicidal enemy. And where brave Marines trained to advance despite any conditions and all losses would advance yard by bloody yard for four more hellacious weeks, until the smell of death staggered the burial crews and the survivors on both sides resembled ragged phantoms more than living, vital young men.

They would advance, and die, largely bereft of their nation’s good wishes or sympathy. Attention had now begun to shift away from Iwo Jima, even as the great bulk of the bloodletting began. The flagraising on Suribachi had given the press corps a convenient symbol of a “happy ending.” Some seventy war correspondents had accompanied the armada to the island; for the first, drama-soaked week, they had remained on the scene and sent hundreds of thousands of words back to their newspapers, magazines, and radio networks—not to mention countless photographs and newsreel images.

But now the majority of these seemed to consider the story over. Having badly distorted the facts of the ascent up Suribachi, and having fatally garbled the true story of the flagraisings from the safety of their distant ships, the gentlemen of the press—or most of them—withdrew. There were other war zones to inspect, other exotic locales for their datelines.

Now the agony would have its veil of privacy. Now the valor would go uncelebrated.

Easy Company, reunited with its patrol that descended Suribachi the night before, was ready to join the great offensive on the northern plateau. Now the dying would begin in earnest.

Easy plunged into action with the rest of the 28th Marines along the island’s embattled west coast, in the 5th Division’s zone of operations. It was nasty business. The terrain—rocky plateaus abutting on steep cliffs, shallow ravines; “like hell with the fire out” in the words of one correspondent—offered the usual absence of cover. The 28th threw all three of its battalions onto the line, and the hidden Japanese gunners resumed their harvest. Easy had to cross rough, exposed ground against a heavily fortified ridge.

The Japanese ordnance showed no respect for heroes.

Among the first to get hit was Chuck Lindberg, shot through the arm. Doc Bradley was instantly at his side. (“The only time I saw your dad on Iwo, he was running,” Pee Wee Griffiths told me. “Somebody was screaming and he was running.”) The heroic flamethrower’s war was over. He was evacuated from the island.

A few minutes later Mike Strank’s dark prophecy came true.

Mike was leading Ira, Harlon, Franklin, and some other Marines across a dangerous strip of ground when a cluster of Japanese snipers opened up on them. Jesse Boatwright took a bullet in the stomach, a nonlethal wound but enough to slam him into a shell hole. His buddies scrambled for cover. Mike and some others dove behind an outcropping that seemed to give them solid protection from three sides. Its only exposure was toward the sea, where the American destroyers lay at anchor. As sniper fire continued to rake the area, Mike sized up the situation with a veteran’s detachment. Pee Wee Griffiths, L. B. Holly, and Franklin bent toward their leader, awaiting orders.

Mike talked to them about possible escape routes. Then he seemed to drift into a private place. He broke his own silence after a moment with a cryptic remark to L.B.: “You know, Holly, that’s going to be one hell of an experience.” L.B. waited for him to continue, then finally asked: “What are you talking about?” Mike did not reply; he only pointed to a dead Marine who sprawled a few feet from the group.

“He was telling me he would die,” Holly reflected many years later. “And sure enough, two minutes later, Mike was dead.”

Joe Rodriguez watched it happen at close range; he was nearly killed himself. “Mike hollered at me to come over,” he recalled. “He was on one knee with Franklin and the other guys around, getting ready to draw a plan in the sand to get us out of there. But before he could get a word out, a shell exploded.”

Franklin and Holly were bowled over by the blast, but were uninjured. Pee Wee was hit in the face and shoulder and temporarily blinded. Rodriguez woke up a few seconds later with “a warm feeling in my chest, unable to move my legs.”

Mike Strank did not wake up.

The shell got Mike where he gave it. The impact tore a hole in his chest and ripped out his heart.

No Japanese could claim credit for this kill. Almost certainly, the round had come from a U.S. destroyer offshore; it sliced through the only unprotected side of the outcropping. The Czech immigrant to America, born on the Marine Corps birthday, serving his third tour of duty for his adopted country, the sergeant who was a friend to his boys, was cut down by friendly fire.

Melvin Duncan, just nineteen, reached down and cradled Mike in his arms. Now, at seventy-two, Melvin’s emotional comment recalls the esteem he and the others felt for Sergeant Mike: “If there had been some way I could have died in his place, I would have done it.”

L. B. Holly gently replaced Mike’s helmet on his head and whispered to the lifeless form: “Mike, you’re the best damn Marine I ever knew.” Then Holly took Mike’s watch off and gave it to Harlon, who had idolized Mike. Now Harlon was “Mike,” the squad leader.

And then the war went on.

Progress was slow and lethal across the rocky, windswept plain. The 28th had moved out at nine
A.M.
By nine-thirty it was taking harassing fire from the rear. Seven hundred yards inland, on a front that ranged from two hundred to five hundred yards wide, the regiment was caught in a harsh landscape of outcroppings and ravines. Below the surface was the labyrinth of caves and tunnels. As one combatant later wrote: “If a heavy aerial bomb happened to hit an entrance, smoke would puff out of the other entrances, sometimes an astonishing distance away.”

The 28th was pinned down for four hours, its crouching boys getting picked off with sickening regularity, before it could start moving again.

And movement without cover offered only more danger. Easy, strung out in a long line, scampered across the hard rock toward the island’s northern tip. The gunfire directed at them was intermittent but deadly. My father was following Hank Hansen across a crust of exposed ground when he saw Hank crumple up. No one had heard a shot, and at first Doc thought the sergeant had tripped and fallen. But Hansen did not get back up, and as the other Marines scattered, Doc ran to him and pulled him into a nearby shell crater.

The bullet had entered Hansen’s back and exited through his abdomen. “It was a bad wound,” my father told a magazine interviewer a few months later, “but one thing you learn out there is not to give up. I yelled for somebody to hold the plasma bottle while I put a battle dressing on. For me, it was the luckiest thing I ever did.”

Hansen was dying, but Doc’s cry for assistance saved his own life. Tex Hipps came sliding into the crater to assist the corpsman. Then he glanced over Doc’s shoulder and shouted, “Watch out, Bradley!” Four Japanese, one brandishing a sword, were charging him, screaming, “Banzai!” Hipps dropped the sword-wielding officer and one soldier with his M1; the other two retreated. Now two Marines came tearing onto the scene, hurling grenades at the Japanese, who were disappearing into a hole. After it was cleaned out, ten enemy bodies were discovered.

But Hank Hansen was dead. Like too many young boys, he died in Doc Bradley’s arms. My father slipped Hank’s wristwatch off, vowing to pass it on to his friend’s mother.

Harlon Block’s tenure as the heir to Mike Strank lasted until dusk.

As twilight settled in, the rawboned Texan moved among the boys of what was now his squad, giving orders for everyone to dig in and align themselves with a good field of fire.

Tex Stanton had secured himself in his foxhole when Harlon—his helmet characteristically tilted to one side—walked up to the rim and asked, “Where’s Hauskins?”

“Over there,” Stanton replied, and then: “You’d better get down, Harlon.”

“Then Harlon just exploded,” Melvin Duncan remembered. “He was blown into the air; there was dust and debris all around him.”

Stanton could see that Harlon had been sliced from his groin to his neck. The All-State pass-catcher, the boy who’d ridden along the banks of the Rio Grande on his white horse, stood there a moment, his hands filled with a heavy redness. He gave a strangulated scream: “They killed me!” He struggled with his intestines for a moment longer, then rolled to the ground and died facedown.

His back—which formed one of the most galvanic contours in the flagraising photograph—now lay limp and exposed to the setting sun. His letter to Belle—saying that he had come through without a scratch—had not yet left the island. Its postal cancellation would not be stamped until March 14.

On the day Mike and Harlon died, Congressman Joseph Hendricks of Florida stood up on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce a bill authorizing the erection of a monument. It would be a tribute “to the heroic action of the Marine Corps as typified by the Marines in this photograph. I have provided in the bill that this picture be a model for the monument because I do not believe any product of the mind of the artist could equal this photograph in action. Never have I seen a more striking photograph.”

At the same time, Maurine Block was imploring her mother, Belle, not to keep telling everyone that it was Harlon in the photograph at the base of the flagpole. It was just the back of a Marine. No one could be sure which one.

But Belle was sure. Her reply to Maurine was a mother’s: “I changed so many diapers on that boy’s butt. I know it’s my boy.”