Located
just 700 miles south of Tokyo, Iwo Jima (“Sulphur Island”) posed a threat to American
B-29 Superfortress bombers on their way to missions over Japan. A radar station on the island
gave the home islands two hours warning of approaching raids, and fighters on
its two airfields sometimes harassed U.S. bases in the Marianas. The U.S. Marine
Corps was tasked with taking the island to provide bases for long-range P-51 fighters
to escort the huge U.S. bombers and permit damaged B-29s to land there in case
of emergencies.
On
February 19, 1945, Time correspondent
Robert L. Sherrod, as he had on previous occasions, accompanied the marines as
they fought to take a heavily defended enemy outpost in the Pacific. Sherrod
set foot on Iwo Jima’s coarse, volcanic-ash beach late on the afternoon of the
first day of combat with fifteen officers and men of the Twenty-Fourth Marine
Regiment, Fourth Marine Division. The correspondent spent two days on the
island, where, among the American fighting men, as Admiral Chester Nimitiz said,
“uncommon valor was a common virtue,” before returning to his transport to
write his stories of a “very hot beachhead” for Operation Detachment.
On
February 23, after spending two days on the USS Bayfield, Sherrod was ready, “and moderately willing,” to return to
Iwo Jima. For his trip, he hitched a ride with Major General Clifton B. Cates,
Fourth Marine Division commander, on a Landing Ship, Medium (LSM), as the surf
had turned too rough for Higgins boats to navigate safely ashore. “Weather
today again stormy, cold, prohibits much landing of supplies. . . . Choppy,
mean water,” Sherrod wrote in the notebook he always carried with him into
battle. Soon after the craft was under way, Sherrod heard someone yell, “Look,
they’ve got the flag up on Mount Suribachi!”
Sherrod
and Cates looked up and saw the Stars and Stripes atop the extinct volcano,
which the correspondent described as resembling “an inverted, slightly melted”
ice-cream scoop. “Tears welled in the eyes of several Marines as they watched
the little flag fluttering in the breeze,” Sherrod said. The correspondent
jotted down in the notebook: “Approaching control boat. Can see troops standing
on Suribachi and flag flying.” Sherrod remembered seeing General Cates look at
the flag and commenting, “I’m glad—Keller Rockey [the Fifth Marine Division
commander] is a fine fellow.” Sherrod noted that Cates made his comment as
though he believed the capture of Suribachi signaled the end of the battle, and
he had missed it.
Cates
was mistaken—there were still plenty of Japanese left on the island, and the
70,000 marines who took part in the fighting endured additional suffering
before organized resistance ended on March 25. “Iwo Jima took a long time; it
was to seem like centuries before it was over,” said Sherrod.
Among those who
gave their lives on the island was Sergeant Ernest Thomas, the leader of a
detachment from Third Platoon, Company E, Twenty-Eighth Marines that had fought
its way up the steep slopes of Suribachi to raise the first flag, a twenty-eight by fifty-four-inch banner brought to Iwo
Jima from the attack transport USS Missoula
and attached to a Japanese pipe found on the mountain’s summit. A marine
combat cameraman, Sergeant Louis Lowery, had joined the patrol and was able to
take photographs of the stirring scene. “It was a dramatic moment. It seemed
that we could do anything if we could capture that vertical monstrosity at the
south end of Iwo,” said Sherrod.
Sherrod
made it ashore at 12:30 p.m. on February 23 and conferred with General Rockey
at his command post, joined there by Major General Harry Schmidt. The executive
officer of the Twenty-Eighth Marines, Robert H. Williams, briefed the generals
about conditions on the island’s southern end, and received congratulations on
capturing Suribachi. “It wasn’t so tough,” Williams said, “there wasn’t a great
deal of opposition after we got past the guns at the base of the mountain.” As
he continued walking toward Suribachi, Sherrod stopped to talk with an officer
who lamented the failure to capture any Japanese prisoners. “Before we blow a
cave we give them a chance,” noted Colonel Harry Liversedge. “We send an
interpreter up to the cave and he tells the Japs they’ll be well treated if
they surrender. They never do.”
With
several other correspondents, including John Lardner of The New Yorker, who had been with him in Australia earlier in the
war, Sherrod intended to climb the 556 feet to the top of Suribachi, but “it
was late in the afternoon and the way was steep for old newsmen in their
thirties.” Sherrod never made it to the mountain’s summit until a year and a
half later, via Jeep, and did not know at the time that the first flag had been
replaced by a larger, second flag. “Nearly everyone on the island faced
northward, away from Suribachi,” he explained.
In
addition to reporting on the fighting on Iwo Jima, described by General Holland
Smith as “the most savage and costly battle in the history of the Marine
Corps,” with every third man who landed either killed or wounded, Sherrod found
himself engulfed in another controversy. On this occasion, it involved what is
today considered the iconic image of
World War II—Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s shot of a group of six
Marines raising the flag atop Suribachi, actually the second flag to be placed on the mountain. A marine colonel had sent
one of his men to get a larger flag from one of the ships on the beach to
replace the first—a flag large enough, he said, so “that the men at the other
end of the island will see it. It will lift their spirits also.”
Sherrod
initially believed that Rosenthal’s image had been posed and Lowery had been
cheated of proper credit for his work. Sherrod even cabled Time on March 13 that the planting of the flag “didn’t quite happen
that way and the historical picture was a post facto rehearsal.” (Rosenthal
always correctly maintained that his image had not been posed, and even noted
that if he had purposely posed the shot, “I would, of course, have ruined it.
I’d have picked fewer men. . . . I would also have made them turn their heads
so that they could be identified for AP members throughout the country, and
nothing like the existing picture would have resulted.”)
Sherrod
noted he “could not have been more wrong” about Rosenthal posing the photograph
and was embarrassed about his error for years to come. Still, he believed that
the “implications of Rosenthal’s picture were all wrong.” Sherrod noted that
Iwo Jima had not been a matter of “climbing the parapet and heroically planting
the flag there.” Instead, he reflected after the war, it had been a “tortuous,
painful slogging northward on the pork chop-shaped island, which eventually
cost us 6,821 killed and 19,217 wounded. Suribachi was a symbol, and it was
nice to have our flag up there, but the action—and the horror—was elsewhere.”
Sherrod
left Iwo Jima on March 9 on Turner’s flagship, USS El Dorado, and managed to write several stories about his
experiences on the island before docking at Apra Harbor in Guam forty-nine
hours later. While on Guam, Sherrod became embroiled in a dispute about the
photograph Rosenthal had made of the second flag being raised on Suribachi. The
first flag to fly over the mountain had been carried to the top, and met with
Japanese resistance, by a forty-man combat patrol under the command of First
Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, who had been ordered to seize and occupy
Suribachi’s crest by Colonel Chandler W. Johnson. When the patrol reached near
the top, it engaged in a firefight with the enemy. While the skirmish still
raged, some of the marines found a Japanese iron pipe to which they could
secure the American flag, and picked the highest spot on which to raise it. “We
found a water pipe, tied the flag to it and put it up,” recalled Corporal
Charles W. Lindberg. “Then all hell broke loose below. Troops cheered, ships
blew horns and whistles, and some men openly wept. It was a sight to behold . .
. something a man doesn’t forget.”
On
the beach below, General Smith saw the flag flying atop Suribachi, and later
called it one of the “proud moments of my life.” Standing next to Smith was
Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who had accompanied the invasion forces.
Forrestal turned to the general and said, “Holland, the raising of that flag on
Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.” The entire operation
had been captured on four rolls of Eastman film by Lowery, a photographer for
the marines’ Leatherneck magazine,
who had accompanied the patrol and, after the flag raising, had broken his
camera diving away from a grenade thrown at him by a Japanese soldier.
On
his way down from the mountaintop, Lowery came across a marine resupply patrol
bringing a larger flag taken from LST 779 (a flag previously salvaged from the
attack on Pearl Harbor) to replace the smaller flag flying over Suribachi. Trudging
uphill with the patrol were three photographers—a civilian, Rosenthal of the AP,
and two marine photographers, Sergeant Bill
Genaust, a motion picture cameraman (later killed on Iwo Jima), and Private Bob
Campbell, a still photographer. “Rosenthal stopped me as I was heading
toward the ship with my film,” Lowery said. “He asked if anything was happening
up on the mountain. I told him a small flag had been raised and there was talk
that another patrol was taking off with a larger flag, to replace the first
one.” Rosenthal questioned Lowery if he should continue to the top, and he responded
by noting that he believed “there were good shots to be had because you could
see almost the whole beach, with a panorama of the ships and equipment below.”
Rosenthal thanked Lowery and resumed his climb. He later noted that he did not
“have any thought that there would be a second flag raising. Didn’t know it
until I got to the top.”
As
the trail steepened near the summit, Rosenthal said that his group’s
“panting progress slowed to a few
yards at a time. I began to wonder and hope that this was worth the effort,
when suddenly over the brow of the topmost ridge we could spy men working with
the flagpole they had so laboriously brought up about a quarter of an hour
ahead of us.” When the marines began to raise the second
flag atop Suribachi, Rosenthal shouted out a warning to Genaust that it was
going up and, as he later recalled, “swung my camera around and held it until I
could guess that this was the peak of the action, and shot.”
With
one click of the shutter, he caught an image that won him the Pulitzer Prize
for photography, became a symbol for a national war-loan drive, appeared on a
postage stamp, and served as the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial next
to the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia (dedicated on November 10,
1954). A decade after he had taken the photograph, Rosenthal said that out of
all the elements that went into making the image, the part he played had been
the least important. “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 reflected. “What difference does it make who took the picture? I took
it, but the Marines took Iwo Jima.”
One
of the first to see Rosenthal’s flag-raising image, First Lieutenant Jack
Bodkin, a naval picture editor on Guam and an AP photo editor in civilian life,
recognized immediately how powerful it would become, saying, “Here’s one for
all time,” before transmitting the photograph to San Francisco for publication
in the United States. Rosenthal left Iwo Jima and arrived at Guam on March 4.
There he saw, for the first time, his flag-raising photograph. Previously, when
news had spread that his photograph had become widely popular in the United
States, appearing on front pages in newspapers across the country, Rosenthal
had not known which one of the eighteen photographs he had taken was the one
winning all the glory. He even wondered if it could be the posed “gung-ho” image
he had taken of the marines gathered around the flag waving their helmets and
weapons.
Unfortunately,
the attention Rosenthal had garnered for his photograph of the second flag
raising caused the photographer who had taken images of the first flag on
Suribachi to wonder how his work had been upstaged. On Guam, Lowery questioned
what had happened to his photographs and took his complaints to Sherrod. The
correspondent’s publication, Time,
had led its March 5 issue with Rosenthal’s flag-raising photograph, but editors
at Life, particularly executive editor Daniel Longwell, were suspicious
about the authenticity of Rosenthal’s photograph, said Sherrod, believing it to
be a posed shot, and decided not to run it in their magazine. “Since I was
still on Iwo, I didn’t yet know of these decisions,” said Sherrod. “I didn’t
even know the flag’s picture had been taken.”
According
to Sherrod, Lowery was “more than lukewarm under the collar” about failing to
receive the proper credit for photographing the first flag raising. The
correspondent said that Lowery described Rosenthal’s photograph as “grand
photographically but, in a fashion, historically phony, like Washington
crossing the Delaware.” (The famous painting by Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, had
been painted from models on the Rhine River many years after the American
Revolution.) As someone who had supported the marines in his writing, and
shared dangers with them, it is not hard to believe that Sherrod chose to
support Lowery’s story and attempted to right what he perceived to be a wrong.
Years
later, however, Sherrod conceded he should have been more careful in accepting
a version of events from “a man who was boiling mad” and bitter about his work
being seemingly ignored. The correspondent made another mistake in believing rumors
he heard on Guam that Rosenthal had become so famous that he had already returned
to the United States to embark on a lecture tour; the AP photographer did not
leave the American base until March 15. (Sherrod subsequently received some
criticism from his fellow correspondents for his failure to talk directly to
Rosenthal about his suspicions.)
On
March 13 Sherrod cabled to Time that
the planting of the flag made famous by Rosenthal’s photograph “didn’t quite
happen that way, and the historic picture was a post facto rehearsal. The
flag—a medium-sized flag—was actually planted atop Mount Suribachi at 10:30 February
23rd (dog plus four). Photographer Joe Rosenthal of Associated Press climbed
the mountain that afternoon and took his excellent picture of a larger flag
being raised. At the same time he took a posed picture of a group of marines
standing together around the flag waving their hands like Miami chorus girls
posing for newsreels.”
Sherrod suggested the situation should make for a good
feature layout in Life, showing
Rosenthal’s “really great picture on one hand, then showing what really
happened on the other,” by using the images Lowery took of the first flag
raising. He also provided a timeline for how the first flag raising happened,
including the names of the combat patrol from the Twenty-Eighth Marines, as
well as caption information provided to him by Lowery for thirty-two of the
fifty-six images he had taken on the mountain.
Two
days later, in another cable to his magazine, Sherrod noted the story would not
make Time or Life popular with the AP, “naturally, so handle it carefully. To
clarify: Rosenthal didn’t arrange to have the larger second flag carried up the
mountain—he just went along.” In a March 17 cable Sherrod also called the
second flag raising “unquestionably genuine,” but added that in his opinion,
the famous picture taken by Rosenthal was posed, but that depended on “the
definition of posed and whether anything that is genuine can be posed. I would
say that it was posed, but the incident itself was perhaps not rigged. The
point is made here that a flag-raising is not supposed to be a battle scene—it
is a postbattle ceremony. That is correct.” He also wanted people to know that
what Rosenthal had captured had not been the original flag raising on
Suribachi, as that honor belonged to Lowery.
Luckily
for Sherrod, neither Time nor Life published any of his suspicions
about Rosenthal’s work—a fact for which he was later grateful. Unfortunately
for him, and for his employer, and unknown to the correspondent at the time,
his allegations about the image being bogus were broadcast by Time’s weekly radio service, Time Views the News, on WJZ radio in New
York on March 13. The broadcast cited a cable from Sherrod as the basis for its
declaration that the AP photographer’s “great picture was a whiz
photographically but historically it was slightly phony. Rosenthal climbed
Suribachi, after the flag had already been planted. . . . Like most
photographers, Rosenthal could not resist re-posing his characters in heroic
fashion. He posed them and snapped the scene.”
AP
officials were, unsurprisingly, displeased about having its photographer’s
integrity questioned, and threatened a million-dollar lawsuit if Life dared print any story repeating the
claims made by Time Views the News;
on March 17 the program broadcast a correction and apology to the AP and
Rosenthal, and said it had misunderstood Sherrod’s cable. Although Longwell
still had doubts about Rosenthal’s photograph, he noted: “The great thing was
that the country believed in that picture, and I just had to pipe down.”
In
its March 26, 1945, issue, Life finally
published Rosenthal’s photograph, what it called “one of the most talked-about
pictures of the war,” also including in its story about it Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware and
Lowery’s image of the first flag raising on Iwo Jima. The story also included
information supplied by Sherrod that war historians should note that at other
heights on the island the Lone Star flag of Texas and a Confederate flag “were
raised in pictorially unrecorded and spontaneous bursts of enthusiasm.”
Sherrod
noted that his editors never informed him about AP’s protest, and he did not
learn of it until twenty years later while lunching in New York with Alan J.
Gould, a former top executive with AP. He acknowledged he “went a bit
overboard” and also apologized to Rosenthal and AP. Still, he considered
Rosenthal’s renowned photograph as “the salon painting of World War II.”
