Flags of Our Fathers (38 page)

Her intuition must have been remarkable, because Rene is almost completely obscured in the photo. Only the tip of his helmet, one knee, and his hands are visible behind John Bradley’s figure.

Within days Pauline, the day-to-day worker in the Chicopee mills, was enjoying a new national nickname: She was “The Sweetheart of Iwo Jima.”

On Sunday, April 8, the Marines released the identification of the six figures as given by Rene. The next day the photo reappeared in newspapers across the country, this time with a name linked by arrow to each flag-raiser, save one. The AP copy provided detailed biographies of five of the boys: Hank Hansen, Doc, Ira, Rene, and Mike. Only Franklin, killed on March 21, remained unidentified, pending notification of his mother.

On Monday, April 9, his mother was notified.

Goldie’s last name was no longer Sousley. She’d remarried, to a man named Hensley Price. Nor did her household have a telephone. Still, the Marines found her with prompt efficiency.

After Goldie got the news, it spread fast around the region.

Marion Hamm had graduated from high school by now, but in her bedroom she still kept Franklin’s formal Marine portrait.

She learned of Franklin’s death while at work as a secretary. “When I found out, I was so sad,” she told me in her direct, plainspoken way. “I went home from work and took all his letters, the insignia from his hat he had sent me, everything, and walked it over to Goldie’s house. I gave it all to her. I said, ‘I thought you might want these things.’”

Young J. B. Shannon, who had accompanied Franklin on his last train trip out of Hilltop—the trip on which Franklin promised, “When I come back, I’ll be a hero”—remembers the moment he heard: “I was thirteen years old, plowing our field, breaking up the soil to plant tobacco. My mother came out and told me that Franklin was dead. I was very broken up. I unhooked the horses; I couldn’t work anymore.”

But it was Goldie’s own reaction that Hilltop would remember the longest, and with the greatest sorrow. Goldie, who still put in long days of farm work, just as she had when Franklin was a little boy. Goldie, who had beamed her radiant smile through all of it; who always had an encouraging word for others.

Her freckled son had inherited that smile, and a reminder of it was on display in her living room: a glossy photograph of Franklin in uniform, movie-star handsome and smiling to beat the band. People who knew her said that Goldie often turned that photograph over to read the words he’d written on the back:

To the kindest friend I ever knew,

The one I told all my troubles to.

You can look the world over, but you won’t find another

Like you, my dear Mother.

Love,

Franklin

The telegram came to the Hilltop General Store. Because Goldie didn’t have a phone, a barefoot young boy ran it up to her farm.

Fifty-three years later Goldie’s sister Florine Moran told me that the neighbors could hear Goldie scream all that night and into the morning. The neighbors lived a quarter-mile away.

In Pennsylvania, the news of Mike Strank’s death was followed quickly by the revelation of his place in the iconic image. Brother John remembered how. “We were walking home from a memorial service for Mike,” he said. “We saw people all around our house. It was mass confusion with neighbors and local press. I was wondering, ‘What’s happening?’ Then they told us the story had just broken that Mike was in the photo.”

Far to the northwest, in rural Wisconsin, Kathryn and Cabbage’s neighbors called with their congratulations. Cabbage basked in his son’s fame, but Kathryn—closer to her son in temperament—worried about appearing immodest.

Soon, she found something else to worry about. When she had learned her Jack was in the photo, she reread some of the recent days’ press coverage about the event. She discovered the AP story datelined “Pearl Harbor” about Rene coming home, which had reported: “There are six men in the historic photo—five Marines and one Navy hospital corpsman.” Then the dispatch added the chilling sentence: “The Navy man later lost a leg in battle.”

Yet another error: The Navy man had not lost a leg. But he was indeed bedridden in a Honolulu hospital when he first glimpsed The Photograph. Years later, he recounted his reaction.

“I thought, ‘Holy man, is that ever a terrific picture!’” he recalled. “There was a lot of confusion. We weren’t sure who the flagraisers were. I couldn’t pick myself out. It was such an insignificant thing at the time.”

Insignificant to the boys in the Pacific, but not to the America that awaited their return. Doc Bradley’s life was about to start changing fast. Just before it did—on the eve of his homecoming—Doc received a visit from his longtime friend Bob Connelly.

“I searched for your dad in the hospital there,” Connelly told me. “I was walking through a ward when someone shouted at me. There he was, with his legs bandaged. He was very alert, very talkative. He told me that in the beginning of the battle he’d call for guys to cover him and heads would pop up, giving him covering fire. But as the battle went on, the replacements were too scared to cover him.

“He told me of running out to pull a wounded guy in and how he turned his back to the firing Japanese to protect his jewels.

“He talked about all the bodies laid out on the beach and how the Polish kid from Milwaukee was tortured. How they hammered his teeth, cut out his tongue, poked out his eyes, cut his ears off, almost dismembered him.

“He was aware that the photo was causing a ruckus. I admired his Marine boots. He said, ‘Take them. The Marine Corps will give me anything now.’”

On the same day, April 9, word reached the
Winged Arrow
that Ira’s days of anonymity were over. Sergeant Daskalakis was livid. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that you were in the photograph!?” he demanded of Ira. Ira could only shrug and mutter, “Oh, I don’t know.”

The transport put in at Hilo on April 12. Three days later, Ira reluctantly climbed aboard a plane for Marine Headquarters in Washington.

In Boston, the newspapers unknowingly began to perpetuate the single most tragic and painful of all the errors that adhered to the flagraising on Iwo Jima. The coverage offered solace—temporary solace, as it proved—to Hank Hansen’s grieving mother, Mrs. Joseph Evelley. Mustering a smile, she proudly held The Photograph for a reporter to see:

“See, see the photograph,” Madeline Evelley insisted. “That’s my son, with his left hand gripped around the flag’s staff. Henry put the American flag up on Iwo Jima.”

In Weslaco, Belle Block remained unconvinced by this assertion. When Ed Block, Sr., showed the photo to her, with Hansen’s identification attached, she just shook her head. “I don’t care what the papers say,” she repeated for perhaps the hundredth time. “I know my boy.”

Joe Rosenthal, a modest man who did not seek attention, continued to struggle with the price of his new fame. He always made clear that his photo was of the second raising; never discounted the factor of luck. Yet the occasional detractor surfaced, amidst the general flow of praise.

A commentator on the NBC Blue network baldly asserted that the image had been “carefully posed” by Joe. The assertion was later retracted, and the photographer tried to take it in stride. “It wouldn’t have been any disgrace at all,” he told
The New Yorker
in its April 7 issue, “to figure out a composition like that. But it just so happened I didn’t. Good luck was with me, that’s all—the wind rippling the flag right, the men in fine positions, and the day clear enough to bring everything into sharp focus.”

Before the flagraisers were known, the photo stood for a great military victory. Now, with names attached to all six figures, the public began to see in it a manifestation of eternal American values.

At the outset, it was Rene who satisfied America’s thirst for humanizing details of the figures in The Photograph. With Ira impenetrable and John Bradley not yet in focus, it was the lean-faced, dark-browed Manchester boy, his mother and fiancée at his side, who confirmed the fondest elements of American wartime myth: the fighting hero as wholesome boy-next-door, eager for marriage, picket fences, and Mom’s cooking.

The governor visited the Gagnon house and sat at Irene’s kitchen table. Rene addressed a wildly cheering New Hampshire Legislature. He visited a local Cub Scout pack and signed hundreds of autographs.

The crowning event was scheduled for Thursday, April 12. Rene awoke that morning excited by the prospect of a boy’s dream come true: His hometown was going to throw a parade in his honor. Bands, church leaders, and politicians from around the state were flocking into Manchester to take part. The disconnected kid from a broken family, the mill-factory “doffer” who had become a Marine Corps runner, had made it to the top of that world. Instead of drifting down Elm Street alone, on his way to the movies, looking at his reflection in store windows, Rene Gagnon was going in style, in an open limousine. And the crowds would do the looking.

It was not to be. A preliminary banquet went off as planned at six
P.M.
But then a shocking announcement changed everything. A news bulletin had flashed across the radio airwaves and was relayed to the banquet hall. The President was dead. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia. He had been wearing a certain dark cape when the seizure hit him, as he sat for a portrait in the living room of his cottage there.

Rene’s ride in the open limousine never happened. The letdown would form a motif for his abbreviated life: The parade he always sought would never quite get under way.

Jack Bradley slipped back into America without much fanfare. When he arrived in Bethesda he called home, speaking with his parents for the first time in months. He talked matter-of-factly of his wounds, and of how he was brought back to Washington by Presidential order. After the conversation, Kathryn was strangely sad. For a long time, she kept the reason to herself: She thought her son was trying not to hurt her feelings by speaking of the leg he had lost.

In Wisconsin, the State Senate passed a resolution on April 12, praising “John Bradley” as one who “helped plant the American flag on Mount Suribachi.” “Doc” was the nickname he would soon put aside, along with his wartime mementos. “Jack” he would still remain to his family and his Wisconsin friends; but it was as “John” he’d be introduced to all who met him from now on.

On Thursday, April 19, the final living flagraiser touched down in Washington. Ira arrived to find Rene, down from New Hampshire, and John, over from Bethesda on his crutches, awaiting him. Up to now the three had been serving the War Department. But now, by Presidential order, their services were transferred to the Treasury Department in a new battle, this one for money. And the Treasury Department did not believe in a gradual start: On the following day the three were to meet the new President, Harry Truman, in the White House.

During Ira’s initial briefing at Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I Streets, he was shown the enlarged photograph of the flagraising. Ira spotted the error of identification immediately. The figure at the base of the pole was not Hank Hansen; it was Harlon Block. Ira remembered what Rene Gagnon and John Bradley could not have remembered, because they did not join the little cluster until the last moment: that it was Harlon, Mike, Franklin, and himself who had ascended Suribachi at midmorning to lay telephone wire; it was Rene who had come along with the replacement flag. Hansen had not been a part of this action.

Ira acted on his first impulse, which was to set the record straight. He pointed out the error to the Marine public relations officer who’d been assigned to keep an eye on the young Pima. The officer’s response stunned Ira: He was ordered to keep his mouth shut. It was too late to do anything; the report had already been released.

L. B. Holly, who kept in touch with Ira for years afterward, told me: “When he got to Washington, Ira told them it wasn’t Hansen, that it was Harlon. A corporal told Ira to be quiet, that everyone had been identified. Ira later told me he was very upset to be ordered to lie. He said he complained but there was nothing he could do.”

Ira was ill at ease upon his reunion with Rene. He did not kill his former Easy Company mate, as he had sworn to do. But he didn’t forgive him for snitching, either. He gave the younger boy the silent treatment, speaking to him only through my father.

The American public never glimpsed this rift. To the crowds, the boys were like the Three Musketeers. Except that they had a different collective name: Sometimes they were the “Iwo Jima flagraising heroes”; usually, they were simply “the heroes.”

It must have felt surreal to the boys. Heroes? They had just returned from the protracted horrors of one of the deadliest and most intense battles in history, where heroes around them had acted with unimaginable bravery, suffered, and died almost by the minute. And here was an American populace driving itself into a frenzy over…what? Over an accidental photograph of a forgotten moment, an insignificant gesture in a month filled with significant ones.