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The Story behind the most famous war photograph in History
(Editors note: this story was first published February, 1995 and Joe Rosenthal died on Aug. 20 2006 at 94 years old.)
By MITCHELL LANDSBERG,
AP National Writer
AP National Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fifty years ago this month, a young Associated Press photographer named Joe Rosenthal shot the most memorable photograph of World War II, a simple, stirring image of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising the flag at Iwo Jima.
It took but a sliver of time: 1-400th of a second.
It has consumed the past half-century of Joe Rosenthal’s life.
He has been called a genius, a fraud, a hero, a phony. He has been labeled and relabeled, adored and abused, forced to live and relive, explain and defend that day atop Mount Suribachi on each and every day that has followed, more than 18,000 and counting. “I don’t think it is in me to do much more of this sort of thing,” he said during an interview — his umpteen-thousandth — about Iwo Jima. “I don’t know how to get across to anybody what 50 years of constant repetition means.”
Rosenthal is 83 now, nearly blind, a pudgy man with a dapper white mustache and a horseshoe of white hair curving around the back of a largely bald head. He lives alone in San Francisco, near Golden Gate Park, in a little apartment largely given over to stacks of correspondence and documentation related to Iwo Jima.
Rosenthal is 83 now, nearly blind, a pudgy man with a dapper white mustache and a horseshoe of white hair curving around the back of a largely bald head. He lives alone in San Francisco, near Golden Gate Park, in a little apartment largely given over to stacks of correspondence and documentation related to Iwo Jima.
In 1945, he was 33, too nearsighted for military service, short and athletic, with a brushy brown mustache and a head full of tight brown curls.
As an AP photographer assigned to the Pacific theater of the war, he had already distinguished himself — and shown a streak of bravado — in battles at New Guinea, Hollandia, Guam, Peleliu and Angaur.
No one remembers Rosenthal for those pictures now.
There is only Iwo. Bloody Iwo. It is the battle that Joe Rosenthal will fight until he dies.
We remember Iwo Jima for two good reasons.
One is that it was the costliest battle in Marine Corps history. Its toll of 6,821 Americans dead, 5,931 of them Marines, accounted for nearly one-third of all Marine Corps losses in all of World War II.
The other is Joe Rosenthal’s picture.
It has been called the greatest photograph of all time. It may well be the most widely reproduced. It served as the symbol for the Seventh War Loan Drive, for which it was plastered on 3.5 million posters. It was used on a postage stamp and on the cover of countless magazines and newspapers. It served as the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., a symbol forever of the valor and sacrifices of the U.S. Marines.
As a photograph, it derives its power from a simple, dynamic composition, a sense of momentum and the kinetic energy of six men straining toward a common goal, which for one man has slipped just out of grasp. “It has every element. … It has everything,” marveled Eddie Adams, a former AP photographer who took another picture that helped sum up a war — one of a South Vietnamese police chief executing a suspect.
Of Rosenthal’s picture, he added: “It’s perfect: The position, the body language. … You couldn’t set anything up like this — it’s just so perfect.”
And therein lies the problem. Some people think Rosenthal’s picture is too perfect.
For 50 years now, Rosenthal has battled a perception that he somehow staged the flag-raising picture, or covered up the fact that it was actually not the first flag-raising at Iwo Jima.
All the available evidence backs up Rosenthal. The man responsible for spreading the story that the picture was staged, the late Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod, long ago admitted he was wrong. But still the rumor persists.
In 1991, a New York Times book reviewer, misquoting a murky treatise on the flag-raising called “Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories and the American Hero,” went so far as to suggest that the Pulitzer Prize committee consider revoking Rosenthal’s 1945 award for photography.
And just a year ago, columnist Jack Anderson promised readers “the real story” of the Iwo Jima photo: that Rosenthal had “accompanied a handpicked group of men for a staged flag raising hours after the original event.”
Anderson later retracted his story. But the damage, once again, had been done.
Rosenthal’s story, told again and again with virtually no variation over the years, is this:
On Feb. 23, 1945, four days after D-Day at Iwo Jima, he was making his daily trek to the island on a Marine landing craft when he heard that a flag was being raised atop Mount Suribachi, a volcano at the southern tip of the island.
Marines had been battling for the high ground of Suribachi since their initial landing on Iwo Jima, and now, after suffering terrible losses on the beaches below it, they appeared to be taking it.
Upon landing, Rosenthal hurried toward Suribachi, lugging along his bulky Speed Graphic camera, the standard for press photographers at the time. Along the way, he came across two Marine photographers, Pfc. Bob Campbell, shooting still pictures, and Staff Sgt. Bill Genaust, shooting movies. The three men proceeded up the mountain together.
About halfway up, they met four Marines coming down. Among them was Sgt. Lou Lowery, a photographer for Leatherneck magazine, who said the flag had already been raised on the summit. He added that it was worth the climb anyway for the view. Rosenthal and the others decided to continue.
The first flag, he would later learn, was raised at 10:37 a.m. Shortly thereafter, Marine commanders decided, for reasons still clouded in controversy, to replace it with a larger flag.
At the top, Rosenthal tried to find the Marines who had raised the first flag, figuring he could get a group picture of them beside it. When no one seemed willing or able to tell him where they were, he turned his attention to a group of Marines preparing the second flag to be raised.
Here, with the rest of the story, is Rosenthal writing in Collier’s magazine in 1955:
“I thought of trying to get a shot of the two flags, one coming down and the other going up, but although this turned out to be a picture Bob Campbell got, I couldn’t line it up. Then I decided to get just the one flag going up, and I backed off about 35 feet.
“Here the ground sloped down toward the center of the volcanic crater, and I found that the ground line was in my way. I put my Speed Graphic down and quickly piled up some stones and a Jap sandbag to raise me about two feet (I am only 5 feet 5 inches tall) and I picked up the camera and climbed up on the pile. I decided on a lens setting between f-8 and f-11, and set the speed at 1-400th of a second.
“At this point, 1st Lt. Harold G. Shrier … stepped between me and the men getting ready to raise the flag. When he moved away, Genaust came across in front of me with his movie camera and then took a position about three feet to my right. ‘I’m not in your way, Joe?’ he called.
“‘No,’ I shouted, ‘and there it goes.’
“Out of the corner of my eye, as I had turned toward Genaust, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera, and shot the scene.”
Rosenthal didn’t know what he had taken. He certainly had no inkling he had just taken the best photograph of his career. To make sure he had something worth printing, he gathered all the Marines on the summit together for a jubilant shot under the flag that became known as his “gung-ho” picture.
And then he went down the mountain. At the bottom, he looked at his watch. It was 1:05 p.m.
Rosenthal hurried back to the command ship, where he wrote captions for all the pictures he had sent that day, and shipped the film off to the military press center in Guam. There it was processed, edited and sent by radio transmission to the mainland.
On the caption, Rosenthal had written: “Atop 550-foot Suribachi Yama, the volcano at the southwest tip of Iwo Jima, Marines of the Second Battalion, 28th Regiment, Fifth Division, hoist the Stars and Stripes, signaling the capture of this key position.”
At the same time, he told an AP correspondent, Hamilton Feron, that he had shot the second of two flag raisings that day. Feron wrote a story mentioning the two flags.
The flag-raising picture was an immediate sensation back in the States. It arrived in time to be on the front pages of Sunday newspapers across the country on Feb. 25. Rosenthal was quickly wired a congratulatory note from AP headquarters in New York. But he had no idea which picture they were congratulating him for.
A few days later, back in Guam, someone asked him if he posed the picture. Assuming this was a reference to the “gung-ho shot,” he said,”Sure.”
Not long after, Sherrod, the Time-Life correspondent, sent a cable to his editors in New York reporting that Rosenthal had staged the flag-raising photo. Time magazine’s radio show, “Time Views the News,” broadcast a report charging that “Rosenthal climbed Suribachi after the flag had already been planted. … Like most photographers (he) could not resist reposing his characters in historic fashion.”
Time was to retract the story within days and issue an apology to Rosenthal. He accepted it, but was never able to entirely shake the taint Time had cast on his story.
A new book, “Shadow of Suribachi: Raising the Flags on Iwo Jima,” offers the fullest defense yet of Rosenthal and his picture.
In it, Sherrod is quoted as saying he’d been told the erroneous story of the restaging by Lowery, the Marine photographer who captured the first flag raising.
“It was Lowery who led me into the error on the Rosenthal photo,” Sherrod told the authors, Parker Albee Jr. and Keller Freeman. “I should have been more careful.”
Rosenthal, who was to become close friends with Lowery in the years after Iwo Jima, rejects this explanation. “I think that is a twist that has been put on by Sherrod,” Rosenthal said. He believes the source of the misunderstanding was his response to the question about his picture being posed.
It is probably moot. Rosenthal is the only party to the dispute who is still alive. His attitude now is mostly one of forgiveness and acceptance. So many years, after all, have passed.
There is still, of course, the issue of whether the second flag-raising was noteworthy enough to have been enshrined as a historical icon. Here, the facts are of little use; all that matters is interpretation.
To be sure, it didn’t help that the Marine Corps and most of the wartime press conveniently glossed over the fact of the first flag-raising. This helped foster a public notion of cover-up.
But whether or not there was a cover-up (Albee and Freeman are persuasive in arguing that the Marine brass decided to put a lid on the first flag-raising), was the second flag-raising worthy of Rosenthal’s picture?
Some vehemently argue no.
“They call that the Iwo Jima flag-raising, which it ain’t,” declared Charles Lindberg, a retired electrician in Richfield, Minn., who is the last surviving member of either flag-raising – in his case, the first.
“It’s a good picture,” Lindberg conceded. “I even told Joe Rosenthal that it was a good picture. But me and him get into a few arguments.”
That is because Lindberg, like others in the first-flag raising, believed that all the glory was showered on the second flag-raisers, who were less deserving.
Rosenthal doesn’t argue that one group was more deserving than another. “In my own opinion, any one of those troops who had their feet on Iwo Jima is a hero.”
The fact is that neither set of flag-raisers encountered serious resistance from the Japanese as they scaled Mount Suribachi that day. And in retrospect, the scaling of Mount Suribachi was not the great turning point in the battle that it may have seemed: The fighting at Iwo Jima continued for 31 more days.
The other, undeniable fact is that both groups took part in some of the fiercest combat of the war. Five of the 11 men in the two flag-raisings never left Iwo Jima alive.
Perhaps the best argument for Rosenthal’s photo is simply that it is powerful on a symbolic, not a literal, level. Americans responded to it because it was a stirring image of the victory they so badly craved. On that level, it is unassailable.
Marianne Fulton, chief curator of the International Center of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., said the photo must be seen in the context of a perilous time.
“You’re worried about your life, your family, the future of the nation, and this really incredible picture of strength and determination comes out. A picture like that is a real gift.”
For Joe Rosenthal, Iwo Jima brought fame but not fortune, acclaim but not overwhelming success. He spent the rest of his career as a workaday photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle, shooting politicians and drug dealers, fires and parades.
He scoffs at the notion of being included among the “great” photographers. But they include him in their company. Carl Mydans, the renowned Life magazine photographer, offers this explanation for Rosenthal’s immortality: “If you can get the right moment, the instant, it stays around forever.”
And so it will be with Rosenthal.
He doesn’t have a copy of the Iwo Jima picture hanging in his apartment; only an etching of it and two cartoons lampooning it. He is modest to the point of self-deprecation.
Still, when he was once asked if he would rather that some other photographer had taken the flag-raising shot, he shot back: “Hell, no! Because it of course makes me feel as though I’ve done something worthwhile. My kids think so — that’s worthwhile.”
On one wall of Rosenthal’s cluttered living room is a framed photograph of seven bleary war correspondents at Guadalcanal. They have just stumbled out into the bright light of morning after a night of drinking and card-playing. If they felt the way they look, it had been a long, long night.
In the center of the picture is Rosenthal, scratching the stubble on his chin, looking a little bemused and a little cockeyed, while a Newsweek correspondent next to him drapes a hand over his shoulder for support. The whole picture has a washed-out, overexposed look, perfectly matching the mood of its squinting subjects.
Standing now in his living room, Rosenthal looks at it fondly.
“That,” he declares with a proud chortle, “is the greatest photograph of World War II.”
THE PHOTOGRAPHS:
U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment of the Fifth Division raise the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945. Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
This black-and-white photo provided by the National Archives shows Marines raising the Old Glory on the summit of Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, is an enlargement from sixteen millimeter movie frame exposed by Marine Combat Photographer Sgt. William H. Genaust on February 23, 1945. Sgt. Genaust was attached to the Fifth Marine Division and worked shoulder to shoulder with Associated Press cameraman Joe Rosenthal at the time of the historic incident. (AP Photo/William H. Genaust) #
This black-and-white photo provided by the National Archives shows Marines raising the Old Glory on the summit of Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, is an enlargement from sixteen millimeter movie frame exposed by Marine Combat Photographer Sgt. William H. Genaust on February 23, 1945. Sgt. Genaust was attached to the Fifth Marine Division and worked shoulder to shoulder with Associated Press cameraman Joe Rosenthal at the time of the historic incident. (AP Photo/Files/William H. Genaust) #
United States Marines from the 5th Division of the 28th Regiment gather around a U.S. flag they raised atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima during World War II, Feb. 23, 1945. This was the first flag raised by the Marine Corps at Iwo Jima. The raising of a second, larger flag later that day was made famous in the prize-winning photo by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. (AP Photo/U.S. Marine Corp, Sgt. Louis R. Lowery, File) #
THE REACTION:
Joe Rosenthal, right, is greeted by his brother William upon his arrival in his home town, Washington, March 26, 1945. The Associated Press photographer, with the wartime still picture pool, who made the famous picture of the Marines hoisting the American flag over Mt. Suribachi on lwo Jima, spent one hour with his brother. (AP Photo/Robert Clover) #
AP war photographer Joe Rosenthal, bottom left, looks at color prints of his Iwo Jima flag raising photo at the Einsen-Freeman Co. in Queens section of New York, April 1945. With him, from left to right are Albert Hailparn, and William Adams, vice president of Einsen-Freeman. (AP Photo/Murray Becker) #
Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize winning AP photo of the Feb. 23, 1945 flag raising on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, was originally misidentified by military sources. Originally identified, from left, in this vintage graphic: Pfc. Franklin R. Sousley; Pfc. Ira Hayes; Sgt. Michael Strank; Pharmacist's Mate 2nd Class John H. Bradley; Pfc. Rene A. Gagnon; Sgt. Henry O. Hansen. The Marine at far right was later correctly identified as Cpl. Harlon Block, not Hansen. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
Marine Sgt. Henry O. Hansen, 24, of Somerville, Mass., has been identified as a participant in the dramatic flag-raising picture taken on Iwo Jima by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Hansen was identified by Marine Pfc. Rene Gagnon, one of the three surviving soldiers of the six-man group. (AP Photo) #
Pfc. Rene A. Gagnon, one of the six Marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima atop Mt. Suribachi, is seen April 5, 1945. He was rushing a new battery to a radio unit when he paused to help raise the flag and was immortalized in Joe Rosenthal's famous photo. (AP Photo/Staff Sgt. Fedrico Claveria/USMC) #
The three surviving Marines who were in the famous photograph of the flag raising on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, are reunited in Los Angeles for the first time since the war on July 25, 1949. They are en route to Camp Pendleton to reenact their heroic roles in a movie, "The Sands of Iwo Jima." Keft to right are: Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes and John Bradley. (AP Photo/Ira W. Guldner) #
Holding the original Iwo Jima flag shown in the flag-raising photo made by AP staffer Joe Rosenthal, from left to right: Pvt. Ira Hayes, U.S. Marine Corp.; pharmacist's mate John H. Bradley, U.S. Navy; Pvt. Rene Gagnon, U.S. Marine Corp. All three, seen in New York, May 11, 1945, appear in the Iwo Jima photo. (AP Photo/John Lindsay) #
Three survivors of the famous Iwo Jima flag raising on Mt. Suribachi attend a Washington Nationals-New York Yankees game in Wash. DC, April 20, 1945. From left to right: House Speaker Sam Rayburn, D-Tex; pharmacist's mate 2nd Class John H. Bradley of Wisconsin; Pfc. Rene A. Gagnon of New Hampshire; Nat's owner Clark Griffith, holding new 7th War Loan poster; and Pfc. Ira Hayes of Arizona. (AP Photo/Max Desfor) #
The flag raised by Marines on Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima and subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Joe Rosenthal, Associated Press photographer with the wartime still picture pool, flutters at half staff at the capital, where it was flown on May 9, 1945, in mourning for President Roosevelt. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
Marine Lt. Col. E.R. Hagenah, second from left, presents a bronze statue modeled after Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthals picture of Marines raising the American Flag on Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima to Pres. Harry Truman, left, at the White House, June 4, 1945, Washington, D.C. Rosenthal is second from right and Felix Deweldon, sculpture of the statue, is at right. (AP Photo/Robert Clover) #
Former Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal holds his famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi as he poses in San Francisco, Feb. 18, 1965. The flag-raising photo was taken 20 years ago after the Marines landed on Iwo Jima during World War II. Rosenthal is now photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The photo, often described as the best of World War II, won Rosenthal the 1945 Pulitzer. (AP Photo) #
Gen. George S. Patton acknowledges the cheers of thousands during a parade through downtown Los Angeles,Calif., June 9, 1945. Shortly thereafter, Patton returned to Germany and controversy, as he advocated the employment of ex-Nazis in administrative positions in Bavaria; he was relieved of command of the 3rd Army and died of injuries from a traffic accident in December, after his return home. Joe Rosenthal's famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph is visible on the war bonds billboard. (AP Photo) #
The Seabees left their imprints on this rock wall, featuring a sculptured duplicate of the famed flag-raising picture on Iwo Jima, Feb. 21, 1954. The Island of Iwo Jima is where the U.S. Marines climaxed their bloody victory by raising a flag atop the island's Mount Suribachi Feb. 23, 1945. The famed photograph was taken by Asscociated Press war photographer Joe Rosenthal. The sculpture is one of the sightseeing points on the island. (AP Photo) #
Assembly work started Sept. 13, 1954 on the huge Iwo Jima monument, depicting the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi, on a Virginia bluff overlooking the Potomac River across from the nation's Capital. The heavy bronze statue, based on the celebrated photograph by the AP's Joe Rosenthal, will stand on a bluff near Arlington National Cemetery. (AP Photo/William J. Smith) #
The statue has been nine years in the making. It is modeled after the photograph snapped by Joe Rosenthal, then with the Associated Press, on the morning of Feb. 23, 1945. Rosenthal was in the Pacific an assignment with the wartime picture pool. Almost immediately upon release of the picture which soon won world wide fame, Feliz De Welden, an internationally known sculptor on duty with the Navy, constructed a scale model of the scene. A life-sized plaster model followed. Heroic sized heads of the six Marines who participated in the flag-raising were then modeled in clay, over steel framework. Legs, arms, hands and shoes, in plaster, were added. The completed plaster model of the entire group in heroic size was cut into 108 pieces, then cast in bronze and welded together at the Bedi-Rassy Art Foundry in Brooklyn. Three trucks were needed to haul the statue to Washington for final assembling. Various stages in the making of the giant memorial are pictured on Oct. 9, 1954. (AP Photo) #
The Marine Band parades past the Marine Corps War Memorial -- a study in bronze of the Iwo Jima Flag raising on during a memorial to Marine dead in connection with a reunion of Veterans of four Marine divisions. The Marine Corps War Memorial is seen in Arlington, Va. Joe Rosenthal, The Associated Press photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima. Rosenthal's iconic photo, shot on Feb. 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. (AP Photo/Harvey Gorry) #
Mothers of two Marines who lost their lives after helping to raise the flag on Mt. Suribachi pose with three survivors and Vice President Nixon in front of the Iwo Jima monument, Nov. 10, 1954 at the dedication ceremony in Washington. From left to right: John H. Bradley of Wisconsin; Goldie Price of Kentucky, mother of the late Pfc. Franklin R. Sousley; Nixon; Belle Block of Texas, mother of the late Cpl. Harlon H. Block; Pfc. Rene A. Gagnon of New Hampshire; and Pfc. Ira Hayes of Arizona. (AP Photo) #
The three survivors of six men who raised that historic flag on Mt. Suribachi, on the island of Iwo Jima, are back in Marine uniforms as they make a Hollywood version of the bloody invasion at Camp Pendleton, Calif., July 27, 1949. Here with sound trucks in the background they watch the filming of a scene. The survivors are: left to right, Ira H. Hayes of Babchule, Ariz.; John Bradley of Antigo, Wisc. and Rene Gagnon of Manchester, N.H.. All three have small parts in the film, including a recreation of the flag raising. (AP Photo/Frank Filan) #
Six "Marines," including three of the original sextet, recreate the memorable flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi for a Hollywood motion picture version of the Iwo Jima invasion at Camp Pendleton, Calif., July 27, 1949. Assuming the positions they had in the iconic photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, are: Ira H. Hayes; John Bradley and Rene Gagnon. (AP Photo/Frank Filan) #
Photographer Joe Rosenthal poses for a photo at the New Pisa Bar and restaurant Monday, Dec. 20, 1994, in San Francisco. Rosenthal, the photojournalist whose Pulitzer Prize-winning image of World War II servicemen raising an American flag over Iwo Jima became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial, has died. He was 94. Rosenthal, who took the iconic photograph on Feb. 23, 1945 while working for The Associated Press, died Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006, of natural causes at an assisted living facility in suburban Novato, Calif., said his daughter, Anne Rosenthal. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) #
Rene Gagnon hands a stone from Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima to widow of Japanese Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, in Tokyo, Japan, Feb. 25, 1965. Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi committed suicide on the Island after the Japanese were defeated at Iwo Jima. Gagnon was one of six U.S. Marines in AP flag-raising picture on the Pacific Island. From left at presentation in Tokyo are: Taro Kuribayashi, the general's son; a marine interpreter; Mrs. Yoshii Kuribayashi, Gagnon; his wife, and Rene Gagnon, Jr. (AP Photo/Nobuyuki Masaki) #
Rene Gagnon comforts Nancy Hayes after the burial of her son Ira, one of the Iwo Jima flag-raisers, in Arlington National Cemetery, Feb. 2, 1955. Gagnon and Hayes were among six Marines who raised the flag atop Mt. Suribachi in 1945. Hayes, a Pima Indian, died of exposure last week on the reservation where he lived in Arizona. (AP Photo/Charles Gorry) #
Joe Rosenthal, left, AP photographer with the wartime pool, takes time out to rest, March 2, 1945, with Bob Campbell, a Marine from San Francisco, in front of a large Japanese gun knocked out by Marines at the base of Mt. Suribachi. Rosenthal scaled the mountain to make the picture of the U.S. flag being raised there. Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima. (AP Photo) #
Joe Rosenthal's black and white photo negative of U.S. Marines from the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945, is handled with gloves by Associated Ppress chief photo librarian Charles Zoeller while being shown from its secured archive at the Associated Press picture library in New York, Monday, Aug. 21, 2006. Rosenthal, an Associated Press photgrapher who won a Pulitzer Prize for the image. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews) #
Rene Gagnon, former Marine who participated in the invasion of Iwo Jima, is shown at New York's Kennedy Airport . Gagnon prepares to depart for the orient to attend ceremonies commemorating the 20th anniversary of the landing of the marines on that Pacific Island. The 39-year-old was one of six servicemen who helped raise the American flag on Mt. Suribachi during the Invasion. He is pointing to himself in a historic photograph taken at that solemn moment. (AP Photo) #
A U.S. Mint employee holds a new coin, Wednesday, May 25, 2005, in Philadelphia, which honors the 230th anniversary of the founding of the Marine Corps, the first time the government has struck a commemorative coin to salute a branch of the military. The new silver dollar will feature the famous photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima taken by Associated Press Photographer Joe Rosenthal, and on the other side the official Marine Corps emblem of an eagle, globe and anchor and the Marine motto, "Semper Fidelis," always faithful. (AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek) #
Ret. U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. Larry Snowden speaks during a memorial service for former Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal in San Francisco, Friday, Sept. 15, 2006. Rosenthal was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the photo he took of the Marines raising the flag on Mt Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, five days into the battle for Iwo Jima. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) #
JOE ROSENTHAL’S WAR PHOTOGRAPHS:
MARCH 3, 1945 U.S. Marines receive Communion from a Marine chaplain on Iwo Jima. The battle for the island was extremely costly for both sides: only about a thousand of the 25,000 Japanese defenders survived; the Americans suffered about 26,000 casualties. The island was not fully secured by the American forces until March 26, but the needed airfields were up and running earlier. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
U.S. Marines invade the Japanese stronghold at Iwo Jima, Volcanic Island, on Feb. 19, 1945. The fourth division Marines dig foxholes, center, uncovering dead bodies, and await further orders. The Japanese pillbox-blockhouse, which was considered unconquerable, can be seen at center in the background. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
U.S. Marines of the 4th Division charge ashore at the start of the Iwo Jima invasion, as they run for cover in shell holes and bomb craters made by pre-invasion bombardments, on Feb. 25, 1945 during World War II. Warships offshore give heavy gun support. At center in the background is a wreckage of a Japanese ship. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
With the capture of the elevated Japanese airstrip, at top right, American equipment and supplies are brought ashore on Feb. 28, 1945. U.S. Marines move forward with tanks and continue the invasion battle inland on Iwo Jima during World War II. Mt. Suribachi Yama can be seen beyond the airstrip. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
U.S. Marines of the Fourth Division shield themselves in abandoned Japanese trench and bomb craters formed during U.S. invasion and amphibious landing at Iwo Jima, Japanese Volcano Island stronghold, on Feb. 19, 1945 in World War II. A battered Japanese ship is at right in the background at right. (AP Photo) #
A wounded U.S. Marine soldier, lying on stretcher at left, is given blood plasma by American Navy hospital corpsmen on Iwo Jima, Japan, on March 3, 1945 during World War II. Two Marines can be seen walking away, at right, after getting medical attention. The aid station is surrounded by captured Japanese equipment. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
U.S. Corpsmen carry a wounded Marine on a stretcher to an evacuation boat on the beach at Iwo Jima while other Marines huddle in a foxhole during the invasion of the Japanese Volcano Island stronghold in this file photo of Feb. 25, 1945. A search team is on the island looking for a cave where the Marine combat photographer who filmed the famous World War II flag raising 62 years ago is believed to have been killed in battle nine days later, military officials said Friday, June 22, 2007. The team, from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, based at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, is on Iwo Jima looking for the remains of Sgt. Willam H. Genaust and "as many other American servicemen as they can find," JPAC spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Brown told The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
U.S. Marines kneel in prayer before they receive communion during a pause in the fighting for Motoyam Airstrip No. 1 on Iwo Jima, Volcano Island of Japan, March 1, 1945 in World War II. The soldiers, from left are , Pfc. Edmond L. Fadel, Niagara Falls, N.Y.; Pvt. Walter M. Sokowski, Syracuse, N.Y.; and Pvt. Nicholas A. Zingaro, Syracuse, N.Y. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal) #
