History Spotlight, 2/23

Joe Rosenthal

It was on this day in 1946 that Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped the famous picture of five US Marines and a Navy corps man rasing the US flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. The photograph would go on to be one of the few pictures to win the Pulitzer Prize in the same year it was taken. The picture would later be used as the inspiration for the USMC War Memorial in Washington, DC.The US strategy for the war in the Pacific was known as island hopping. Instead of taking every little occupied scrap of rock between Hawaii and Japan, certain strategically valuable scraps of rock were identifed and focused on. The island that weren't valuable were bypassed and isolated and left to wither on the vine. Iwo Jima was originally not on the island hopping menu, but the surprisingly quick fall of the Philippines left room in the schedule for another island. There was a Japanese early-warning radar station on the island that gave the Japanese home islands plenty of notice when the American bombers were on the way. Iwo Jima is about 750 miles southeast of Tokyo and the cruising speed of a B-29 is about 220 mph, so that's roughly four hours of warning. This made Iwo Jima a prime candidate for the next stop on the island hopping tour of the Southwest Pacific.

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On February 19, 1945, the invasion of Iwo Jima began. Shaped roughly like a pork chop, the island is dominated by the 546 foot cone of an extinct volcano called Mount Suribachi. Suribachi was riddled with tunnels and was an important Japanese outpost for artillery spotters. While they held the summit of this mountain, they were able to easily and accurately direct a rain of artillery fire on the landing beaches.

Using a combination of grenades and flame throwers to take out Japanese bunkers and pillboxes on the way, the Marines managed to secure the summit of Suribachi. A flag was raised, but it was deemed to be too small to be seen from a distance. So the famous picture was actually the second flag-raising on the summit of Mount Suribachi. A much larger flag was found in one of the landing crafts (nobody knew what it was doing there - most people figured it was leftover bunting from some stateside thing). The flag was brought to the summit and Joe Rosenthal tagged along. On the summit, while he was moving some rocks around to make a better place to stand, he saw the flag being raised out of the corner of his eye. He turned and, without thinking, "shot from the hip." He didn't know how the shot turned out until several weeks later after the film had been shipped back to Pearl Harbor and developed. It would go on to be one of the most recognizable pictures of the war. When Admiral James Forrestal saw the picture he said, "...the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years."