Raising The Flag On Iwo Jima - Legacy

Legacy

Rosenthal's photo won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography, the only photograph to win the prize in the same year it was taken.

News pros were not the only ones bedazzled by the photo. Navy Captain T.B. Clark was on duty at Patuxent Air Station in Maryland that Saturday when it came humming off the wire. He studied it for a minute, and then thrust it under the gaze of Navy Petty Officer Felix de Weldon. De Weldon was an Austrian immigrant schooled in European painting and sculpture. De Weldon could not take his eyes off the photo. In its classic triangular lines he recognized similarities with the ancient statues he had studied. He reflexively reached for some sculptor's clay and tools. With the photograph before him he labored through the night. Within 72 hours of the photo's release, he had replicated the six boys pushing a pole, raising a flag. Upon seeing the finished model, the Marine Corps commandant transferred de Weldon from the Navy into the Marine Corps.

Starting in 1951, de Weldon was commissioned to design a memorial to the Marine Corps. It took de Weldon and hundreds of his assistants three years to finish it. The three survivors posed for de Weldon, who used their faces as a model. The other three who did not survive were sculpted from pictures.

The flag-raising Rosenthal photographed was the second that day. This led to resentment from those Marines who took part in the nearly forgotten first flag-raising. Charles W. Lindberg, who participated in the first flag-raising (and who was, until his death in June 2007, the last living person depicted in either flag-raising) complained that he "was called a liar and everything else. It was terrible."

The photograph is currently in the possession of Roy H. Williams, who bought it from the estate of John Faber, the official historian for the National Press Photographers Association, who had received it from Rosenthal. Both flags (from the first and second flag-raisings) are now located in the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia.

Following the war, plagued with depression brought on by survivor guilt, Hayes became an alcoholic. His tragic life and death in 1955 at the age of 32 were memorialized in the folk song "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", written by Peter LaFarge and recorded by Johnny Cash in 1964. Bob Dylan later covered the song, as did Kinky Friedman. According to the song, after the war:

Then Ira started drinkin' hard
Jail was often his home
They'd let him raise the flag and lower it
Like you'd throw a dog a bone!
He died drunk early one mornin'
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes.

Likewise, Rene Gagnon's last years were bitter; he died an alcoholic in 1979 at the age of 54.

Following the war, John Bradley was staunchly tight-lipped about his experiences, often deflecting questions by claiming he had forgotten. During his 47-year marriage, he only talked about it with his wife Betty once, on their first date, and never again afterwards. Within the family, it was considered a taboo subject. He gave exactly one interview, in 1985, at the urging of his wife, who had told him to do it for the sake of their grandchildren. Following his death in 1994, his family went to Suribachi in 1997 and placed a plaque (made of Wisconsin granite and shaped like that state) on the spot where the flag-raising took place. At the time of Bradley's death, his son James knew almost nothing of his father's wartime experiences. As a catharsis, James Bradley spent four years interviewing the families of all the flag raisers, and published Flags of Our Fathers, a definitive book on the flag-raising and its participants. This book inspired a 2006 movie of the same name, directed by Clint Eastwood.