Joe Rosenthal/AP

U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division raise the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.

Seventy years ago, five Marines and a Navy corpsman climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi to plant the U.S. flag in the beginning days of the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Stars and Stripes is commemorating the iconic moment in this special interactive section.

• Raising flag photo secured Marines' future

  By Martin Kuz

  Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

  In retrospect, the quote seems almost too cinematic, as if a Hollywood screenwriter handed a one-sentence script to James Forrestal for the moment he reached Iwo Jima.

   

  The secretary of the Navy landed by ship on the Japanese island on Feb. 23, 1945. Four days earlier, 30,000 U.S. troops, most of them Marines, had invaded the heavily defended speck of volcanic rock 750 miles from mainland Japan. Another 40,000 came ashore over the following month in a battle remembered as one of the deadliest of World War II.

   

  At Iwo Jima’s southern tip stands its tallest point, Mount Suribachi, peaking at 554 feet. The morning of the secretary’s arrival, amid fierce fighting across the island, a Marine platoon climbed to the summit. As a handful of its members lifted a 20-foot-long water pipe topped with a small American flag, Forrestal, watching from the beach below with Gen. Holland Smith, spoke the line that enshrined him in military mythology.

   

  “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.”

   

  His words resonate as a source of historical pride within the Corps 70 years later. In Marine lore, the island siege counts as one of the Homeric battles, alongside Belleau Wood in France in 1918, Chosin Reservoir in Korea in 1950 and Hue in Vietnam in 1968.

   

  But it was what Forrestal did after his remark that ignited a series of events that elevated his prediction to, perhaps, something closer to a self-fulfilling prophecy: He asked for the flag.

  Lt. Gen. Holland M. Smith, right, commanding general, Fleet Marine Force Pacific, who commanded the Marines in the seizure of Iwo Jima, congratulates Maj. Gen, Graves B. Erskine,  commander of the 3d Marine Division on the for breaking the backbone of the Japanese resistance on the island. The photo was taken after the official flag raising on Mount Suribachi.Photo courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Chandler Johnson, the battalion commander who had sent the platoon up the mountain, wanted the flag for his unit.

   

  In the popular version of the tale, when told of Forrestal’s request, Johnson barked, “To hell with that!” He instead ordered another group of Marines to bring a second, larger flag to the summit that could be delivered to the secretary at a later date.

   

  So was born the most famous photo of the war, and possibly in all of U.S. history. Five Marines and a Navy corpsman raised the second flag on Suribachi that afternoon, a scene captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.

   

  His image wound up on the front page of hundreds of newspapers and virtually overnight became a national emblem of courage. The country’s visceral reaction to the photo created an opportunity for the smallest of the armed services to shape an outsized identity.

   

  Marine leaders realized that with a single image they could tell — and sell — a narrative to America that would redefine perceptions of the Corps and captivate recruits, politicians and Hollywood.

   

  They saw a chance to cultivate an enduring aura for the Marines and turn Forrestal’s 500-year forecast into a fait accompli, and in the ensuing decades, the Corps, once the nation’s least respected military branch in public opinion polls, has evolved into its most prestigious.

   

  “The photo’s message was, ‘We can take any amount of suffering for the country and win the battle,’ ” said Aaron O’Connell, author of “Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marines Corps,” and an assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Naval Academy.

   

  “The Corps knew they had a good product with that photo, and they aggressively used it to present their story to America,” he said. “They did then, and they do now.”

   

  Sudden veneration

   

  Those public-relations efforts received an early boost from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sought to exploit the popularity of Rosenthal’s photo to rally support for the war.

   

  At Roosevelt’s behest, a painting of the image, above the slogan “Now — All Together,” graced the posters and billboards that anchored the nation’s seventh war bond drive in spring 1945. In six weeks, the government raised more than $26 billion, the largest amount among the eight bonds issued during the war and nearly twice the projected total.

   

  The campaign saturated America in the blood-soaked saga of Iwo Jima. More than 6,800 U.S. troops were killed and some 19,000 wounded, with the Marines absorbing the vast majority of the losses. Japan’s strategy to fight to the death cost the lives of nearly 19,000 Japanese soldiers. The battle ended on March 26 and marked the only time in the war that the overall casualties of the invading force surpassed those of the enemy.

   

  Three of the Marines in the photo died on the island: Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley and Michael Strank. The two who survived, Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes, joined Navy corpsman John Bradley on a nationwide tour to promote the war bond. They were hailed as the embodiment of an ideal expressed by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz in the other well-known quote linked to the battle: “Among the Americans on Iwo island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

   

  Soon after the bond campaign, the U.S. Post Office depicted the flag-raising photo on a three-cent stamp, reinforcing the image in the nation’s collective memory. In Rosenthal’s shot, which won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1945, each man is visible only from the side or back. The vantage point obscures individual identity, yet together they emerged as the face of the war.

   

  “That photo drove home the idea of the Corps as people,” said Walt Ford, the former longtime editor and publisher of the Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck Magazine. “That was different from the other services, which were more associated with machines — airplanes, ships, tanks. The men on Suribachi reminded Americans of themselves.”

   

  The country’s sudden veneration of the Corps proved vital in the dawn of the post-war era, when the Marines were engaged in another kind of struggle for survival.

   

  Hollywood and the Beltway

   

  President Harry Truman hastened the war’s end when he authorized the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, five months after the Battle of Iwo Jima.

   

  The outcome convinced him that air superiority and nuclear weapons would decide future conflicts, and he slashed the defense budget for most of the country’s conventional forces. In 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, whom Truman appointed, broached plans to disband the Marines and Navy, dismissing both branches as irrelevant to modern warfare. (Truman, for his part, disparaged the Corps as “the Navy’s police force.”)

   

  The Marines countered with a two-pronged publicity offensive that parlayed the goodwill inspired by Rosenthal’s photo.

   

  In Hollywood, Corps officials collaborated with filmmakers on “Sands of Iwo Jima,” a dramatized account of the battle starring John Wayne as a Marine sergeant. As recounted in “Underdogs,” Corps consultants selected combat footage from Iwo Jima for the film and rewrote a pivotal scene to make Wayne’s character more appealing. Hundreds of Marines appeared as extras, and Gagnon and Hayes, along with Bradley, re-enacted their roles in raising the flag.

   

  The Corps’ marketing campaign for the movie’s release in 1949 reached into high schools and department stores, and the Marines set up lobby displays in theaters that included blow-ups of Rosenthal’s photo. The film finished among the year’s top 10 in box-office revenue and earned four Academy Award nominations.

   

  “The Marine Corps was much more culturally savvy than the other services,” O’Connell said. “They were much better at telling war stories. They gave attention to the human aspect of war.”

   

  Meanwhile, as “Sands of Iwo Jima” played in theaters, Marine liaisons screened another film in the offices of federal lawmakers in Washington.

   

  “Bombs Over Tokyo,” a 19-minute promotional documentary produced by the Corps, chronicled the war in the Pacific through combat footage and showed the flag going up on Mount Suribachi. Norm Hatch, a Marine photographer and Iwo Jima veteran who worked on the film, brought “Bombs” to Capitol Hill, lugging along a 16mm projector and portable screen.

   

  “I made sure all the important people in Congress saw it,” said Hatch, 93, who retired from the Marines in 1980 after 41 years and now lives in Alexandria, Va. “Every one of them told me, ‘We saw that picture of the flag on Suribachi. We’ll never reduce the funding for the Marine Corps.’”

   

  The pincer attack launched from Hollywood and the Beltway succeeded.

   

  Truman yielded to public and political sentiment while complaining that the Marines “have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.” The Corps remained intact, and when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Truman dispatched Marine units to aid the fight.

   

  Hatch believes the credit for Truman’s acquiescence begins with Rosenthal, who died in 2006 at age 94. (For decades, Hatch defended the photographer against spurious charges that he staged the shot, and combat footage confirmed its authenticity.)

   

  The photo’s universal symbolism transformed Iwo Jima into a shared experience for Americans. Their familiarity with the image deepened the impact of “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Bombs Over Tokyo,” and the films fortified a sense of loyalty to the Corps.

   

  “They had an effect because people had seen the photo first,” Hatch said. “That’s how they knew what happened on Iwo Jima. That’s how they knew the Marines.”

   

  ‘Did we live up to them?’

  ​A group of Marines posing by the flag, shortly after it was raised on Mount Suribachi.Photo courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps

   

  The Marine Corps War Memorial pierces the sky outside the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The 78-foot-tall, 100-ton bronze sculpture, completed in 1954, recreates the flag-raising tableau, reflecting the symbiosis between the Marines and Rosenthal’s photo.

   

  “Nobody calls the statue by its official name,” Ford said.

   

  “Everybody knows it as the Iwo Jima memorial. That tells you the meaning Iwo Jima has for both the public and the Corps.”

   

  Rosenthal’s photo also seared the island invasion into Corps culture. The Marines seized on the image’s emotional potency for recruiting purposes, reproducing the picture in ads and brochures, while drill instructors invoked the battle during boot camp.

   

  “Iwo Jima almost immediately became part of the fabric of being a Marine,” said Charles Neimeyer, director of Corps history at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va. “But it isn’t mentioned in a triumphalist way. It’s brought up to drive home what it means to wear the uniform and make you aware of those who came before you.”

   

  Author Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense, deployed to Vietnam as a 26-year-old infantry officer in 1966. He recalled trainers emphasizing that weeks of fighting — and dying — followed the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi.

   

  “Your sergeants taught you that some Marines had it worse than you did,” said West, who has written several books about the military, among them “The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy and the Way Out of Afghanistan.” “They told us, ‘The Marines at Iwo Jima took heavy casualties and kept going. It does not matter if you lose 70 percent of your unit — you will continue to fight like they did, and you will win like they did.’ ”

   

  America’s most recent wars offered evidence that the influence of Iwo Jima persists among Marines. In his 2013 book “The Leader’s Code,” Donovan Campbell, a platoon commander who served in Iraq, described an exchange with his 19-year-old radio operator after the unit’s first sustained firefight.

   

  “Hey, sir, do you think we fought well today?” the lance corporal asked Campbell. “I mean, do you think that all the Marines who fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa would have been proud of us? Did we live up to them, sir? Did we do our part?”

   

  Another soaring tribute to the raising of the flag accents the National Museum of the Marine Corps that opened in 2006 in Triangle, Va. A stainless steel spire attached to the roof extends 210 feet at a 60-degree angle, replicating the tilt of the metal pipe in Rosenthal’s image.

   

  The museum’s collection holds both flags that flew above Suribachi in 1945. In the end, James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy who coveted the first flag, received neither of them. Marine leaders, aware of the country’s response to the photo, recognized that the flags belonged to history — and might make possible Forrestal’s vision of a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.

   

  “That image has been a central piece of the Corps’ survival,” Ford said, “and it’s also an image of democracy. It’s America’s image.”

   

  kuz.martin@stripes.com

  Twitter: @MartinKuz

   

• Hershel Williams, Medal of Honor

   

  Interviewed by Joe Gromelski

  Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

  During the battle for Iwo Jima, more than 6,800 U.S. troops were killed and another 19,000 were injured. The bloodiest battle in the Pacific Theater during World War II, tens of thousands of Marines stormed the island, which was seen as pivotal to the success of defeating the Japanese military.

   

  In the end, 22 Marines were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions during the month long battle.

  Only one, Cpl. Hershel Williams, is alive today.

   

  Service as a demolition sergeant with the 21st Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, Williams “daringly went forward alone to attempt the reduction of devastating machine gun fire from the unyielding positions,” according to his Medal of Honor citation.

   

  “Covered only by 4 riflemen, he fought desperately for 4 hours under terrific enemy small-arms fire and repeatedly returned to his own lines to prepare demolition charges and obtain serviced flamethrowers, struggling back, frequently to the rear of hostile emplacements, to wipe out 1 position after another.”

   

  Stars and Stripes interviewed Williams last year. Here is his story:

   

  Into battle

  ​Hershel Williams, posing with the Medal of Honor he received for his actions during the battle of Iwo Jima.Courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps

  “Iwo Jima was a different kind of a combat. I’d been in a previous campaign, when we took Guam back, and Guam was still mostly jungle. Once we got off of the beach and over the first ridge line, we began encountering really thick jungle fighting. And that’s the way it was until we got to the other shore.

   

  But Iwo ... none of us, of course, had ever heard of it; they didn’t tell us that’s where we were going until they got us aboard ship and they brought out this board with a diagram on it that showed what Iwo Jima would look like. Guam was 19 miles from one shore to the other. This one, 2½ miles. It looked awful small, compared to what we had just been through. And of course, the officer during the briefing said we would probably never get off ship.

   

  We’d be gone about five days, as a reserve. Probably would never need us, never use us, but we were there, in case. So none of us were very anxious about this thing, ‘cause we’re just going for a boat ride.

   

  But after the first day, and the loss of casualties on that first day, they decided they were going to need some more Marines, and we were ordered then to prepare to go in.

   

  The second day, they didn’t have enough room for us. They hadn’t taken enough ground that we could get in behind them, so we went back aboard ship and spent another night. Then the next day, they did have enough ground. By that time they were surrounding Mount Suribachi, and there was enough beach area to get us ashore. And then we became the spearhead for the island. Our job was to go up the center and split it, drive them in each direction toward the other two divisions that were on there.

   

  And on the 23rd, I was a flamethrower operator, demolition individual. I was in charge of six Marines. I was a corporal. We had what we called a special unit, a special weapons unit. So we’d been trained to either blow something up or burn something up, and we could do either one. We could be an operator for the flamethrower, or we could be a demolition person.

   

  But by the 23rd of February, five days in the campaign, those guys ... I’d lost them. They’d either been wounded or killed. I didn’t have anybody left in the company. So we had lost a great number of our squad leaders, all but three of our officers. We were just ... it was devastating.

   

  So our commanding officer called a meeting. Wanted all the NCOs there. And as a corporal I was not classified as an NCO. But I was told because ... they didn’t say because, but I was told I should go to the meeting simply because there were so few of the NCOs left. So I joined the group and we huddled in a great big shell crater.

   

  Probably a bomb crater. But it was big enough that all of us could get below ground so that we couldn’t be shot at with grazing fire. That’s where we met, and of course the commanding officer was looking for ideas or ways in which we might be able to break through a series of reinforced concrete pillboxes that we’d encountered, and they were self-protecting.

   

  If you were to visit Iwo Jima today. you would find that they’re built in pods of three, and you can’t get to one without one of the other of them being able to see you. And that’s the way the general wanted it to be. But he asked me if I could do anything with a flamethrower, knock our some of those pillboxes, because they were reinforced with what we call rebar today. In those days we just called it iron rods.

   

  But they were reinforced with that, and bazookas and artillery -- even mortars dropping on the top of it -- that didn’t do anything. So the only way to eliminate it was, burn it out with a flamethrower or blow it up with demolition.

   

  I’ve said many times, I don’t know my response to him when he asked me that question: could I do anything with a flamethrower? Some of the men who survived said that I said ‘I’ll try’ ... so, I went to work.

   

  He gave me four Marines. Their job was to, as I would pick out the pillbox that I’m going to work on, their job was to shoot at that aperture in front of it, because that was their field of fire. That was their only field of fire, but it covered the whole area. That aperture was about eight inches wide, and across the front of the pillbox.

   

  So they could stick their rifles out, or machine guns, and have a whole field of fire out there. But their job was to fire at that, try to keep the Japanese from being able to fire at me. I would pick the pillbox and start toward it, and that was their job. Two of those Marines got killed that day, because the Japanese were shooting at them.

   

  One of them was an automatic weapons man, and the other was a rifleman. Automatic weapons, they didn’t like those any more than they liked flamethrowers, so we lost a couple of those guys. So actually they gave their life protecting mine. There’s no way I could ever repay that.

   

  You go in automatic drive when something like that happens, I think. Much of that four hours, I don’t remember. I attribute that to fear. Because to say I wasn’t scared would be the biggest lie that’s ever been told. Because you do experience fear.

   

  But one great experience -- I guess you could call it a great experience, certainly one of the more scary experiences ... I was crawling up this ditch, trying to get to a pillbox that was shooting at me with a nambu machine gun. And their nambu was like our .30 caliber, but it had a very distinct noise. You could distinguish a nambu ... any time it fired, you knew that was a nambu. It was a .31 caliber, ours was a .30 caliber. Ours fired about 750, theirs fired 1000 rounds a minute.

   

  They were firing at me with that thing. And I’m crawling up this ditch, and all of a sudden the guy with the nambu lowered it to the point where he was ricocheting bullets off of my air tank on my back. It was just ... we didn’t know jackhammers back in those days; they didn’t have such a thing. But as I got older it kind of reminded me of a jackhammer because it was “brrrrrrrrrr,” you know? Real fast. I mean, a thousand rounds a minute is pretty fast. And it was ricocheting off my air tank, and fortunately, they went up instead of down.

   

  Fortunately ... and I don’t think I had anything to do with this in the way of conscious thought, don’t back up. Go forward. Because if I’d have backed up, I would’ve brought myself more into the field of fire, because he could’ve lowered his nambu a little more. As I went forward, apparently he had it down as far as he could get it, and when I went forward, I got out of his field of fire. Do I have any explanation for that? Not in the world.

   

  The Master took care of that. So we don’t ... there is no explanation. Facetiously, I’ve said those other Marines back there, where the supplies were, and where they were sitting in holes and other than the four guys protecting me, waiting for me to do something out there, I’ve said “I don’t think they liked me.”

   

  Because not a one of them ever said -- after I expended a flamethrower and rolled out of it, because once you expend it, you just drop it, forget it -- I said they didn’t like me because not a one of them ever said “hey, wait out there, I’ll bring you another one.

   

   No, I had to go back and get my other one. So I made six trips back ... well, five trips, really, to get flamethrowers that were already serviced. We always kept a whole bunch of them serviced and ready to go, so that when you needed them they were ready. And that was part of my job as the person in charge of this group. And we had lots of flamethrowers -- 25, 30 flamethrowers all the time, sitting around, ready to go.

   

   

  Killing the enemy

   

  They were not “people.” I think if you had thought of them as a fellow human being, for me it would have been very difficult to shoot to kill, even though that’s what the Marine Corps said you are going to have to do ... if you are going to survive this thing, you are going to have to get them first.

   

  But they just became an object ... something that was restricting, something that didn’t want you to do what you wanted to do. You lose the sense of a person being another human being. I think you have to do that, or you can’t take the life of that person. So where that comes from, I have no explanation for that, except over and over we’re told and we’re firmly convinced that if you’re going to live, you have got to kill him first.

   

  Whatever he is. You’ve got to kill him first. And it loses that identity as another human being. The Japanese — and there’s a little bit of, I suppose, I don’t like to think of it as hate, certainly resentment ... but when we went to Guam, we were told before we got there that the Japanese, when they took Guam in 1942, they killed every American on the island.

   

   Well, that builds up ... I don’t like to think of it as a hate, I don’t even know these people. But it certainly builds up a resentment, and to the point where you’re not going to give him an opportunity to do to you what they did to them.

   

  And one of the other things about the Japanese that we resented very strongly is that they would trick people, particularly corpsmen, into thinking they were wounded or needed help, and you’d try to help them, and then they would take your life, and yours, too. Because their philosophy of dying was an honor. Our philosophy of dying is not an honor.

   

  We’ve never thought of it as an honor. So as I said, you just look at them as an object that keeps you from being able to do what you want to do, what you’re supposed to do, so you have to eliminate that object. I tried not to think of it as a person.

   

  Did the Navy stop shelling too soon?

   

  That’s not true. That really isn’t. For the last three days before they hit the beach, it was almost 24-hour, around-the-clock bombing and strafing, and there was nothing left on the top of that island. They had obliterated bushes or trees or anything else. And the Japanese were underground in caves, so it didn’t really affect them a great deal. But for three days they really blasted it. And it had been bombed and strafed a number of days before that, because they were flying from carriers and bombing it and strafing it and that sort of thing.

   

  Sometimes they would catch Japanese running between holes or on the ground, and they would strafe them, but I have no idea how many tons and tons and tons of ammunition was expended before we got there. Some of the 12-inch shells that the battle wagons in those days were firing ... whether they were so far that they couldn’t get elevation, nobody knows, or at least I don’t know. But some of those 12-inch shells had never exploded.

   

  They were just laying there. Some dumb Marine would get up there like he’s riding a horse. So no, they really did pour the metal to that thing. You read different things, but somewhere around 19 miles of tunnel that had tunneled out of that thing, and some of it down as far as 32 feet below surface level, bombing didn’t do anything. Rattled their ears, maybe, but it didn’t do anything. And they had really prepared. He knew we were coming a long time before we ever got there. Because that was in the route. You almost had to go by it to get to Japan.

   

  They had holes between pillboxes. They had caves that you could come up in this pillbox and get back in the cave, and go to the next pillbox and come up. So it was just tunnels everywhere.

   

  Medal ceremony at the White House

  ​Hershel Williams, shakes hands with President Harry S. Truman after being awarded his Medal of Honor for his actions on Iwo Jima. Courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps

  “I’ve said many times, I don’t know if I was more scared then than I was in combat. I know my body shook more. I was so frightened that my body would not be still. I’ve had this experience a couple of my times in my life when I had a near-accident or something. After it’s over, your body shakes. That’s the way I was when I went up to the president (Harry S. Truman).

   

  Shaking so that my body wouldn’t stand still, and I’d roll up on my toes to try to keep it quiet, and back on my heels to try to keep it quiet, and they read the whole citation. It seems like it’s forever and ever and ever that you’re standing there. But when they finish with the citation, someone brings him over the medal, and he takes the medal, and ... he did it differently then than they do today.

   

  Today the president stands behind the person and puts it on. That didn’t happen there. He pinned it from the front. Well, if you’ve ever seen the Medal of Honor hook, finding that little hole to put that little thing in is a very difficult thing in the beginning. When you’re doing it behind someone’s back, it’s even more difficult. So he had quite a difficult time trying to find that little hole in that ribbon.

   

  But eventually he did, and when he got it pinned, why of course he shook hands and he said to me, as he said to every one of us -- there were 13 of us there that day -- and one of his standard statements was, ‘I would rather have this medal than to be president.’ And he said this over and over to the people who received it. He said that to me. I made no response. I was so scared I couldn’t even think, let alone respond.

   

  One of the fellows receiving the medal the same day I did was a 17-year-old Marine, Jack Lucas, and Jack never had a bashful day in his life, I don’t think. And the story is that when he said that to Jack -- and we went alphabetical, so I was next to last. A guy named Zimmer was last of the 13. So Jack was about halfway through. When he said that to Jack, Jack’s response was, ‘I’ll trade you.’ (laughs) I could’ve never done that. That’s not my nature.

   

  gromelski.joe@stripes.com