Episode 72: Joe Rosenthal, “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” (1945)

Joe Rosenthal: This is Joe Rosenthal, former photographer in the Pacific for The Associated Press.

On top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima is a monument to the men of the corps who fought the Battle of Iwo Jima. On this monument is engraved a quotation from Admiral Nimitz. It says, quote, among the Americans who served on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue. Quote, as an Associated Press photographer. I was privileged to see truly heroic actions by men who stormed the heights and won that island on the fifth day of the battle. When I made my way to the top of Suribachi, I was late for the first flag raising that was planted there about 10:30 in the morning, and at the time I arrived, the men were preparing to replace the first flag, measuring about three feet by five feet, replacing it with a larger one about five feet by eight feet, so that it could be better seen by fighting men over the rest of the island. They, of course, would realize that Mount Suribachi was theirs. Definitely a morale booster. While the men prepared to replace the first flag, I was able to position myself for a picture. The elements of which were composed by the men themselves, and the wind, weather, midday lighting, and the luck of timing. I was the photographer reacting to a dramatic scene. Certainly, I'm glad that the photograph does serve to remind that the fighting men on Iwo Jima gave so much of themselves gallantly, heroically, and so patriotically for the rest of us.

This is The Lonely Palette, the podcast that returns art history to the masses, one object at a time. I'm Tamar Avishai. Episode 72. Joe Rosenthal's Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima from 1945.

One of the first Dada images you’re ever taught in the second semester of your intro-level art history class is one that never really made sense to me. I know, that’s a little rich when talking about Dada, the movement whose entire MO is to make as little sense as possible, but this one breaks the rules even of its own nonsense. It’s by a French artist named Jean Arp, and it’s a collage called “Untitled” with the subtitle “Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance.” It looks like a big piece of gray construction paper laid with white and dark blueish gray squares with ragged edges, like they’ve been torn, rather than cut. Arp described this artwork in weirdly coherent terms, given that he’s not an art historian explaining Dada, but an actual Dadaist artist. He talks about embracing chaos, rejecting rational artistic control, making art that is decidedly anti-art. In his telling, he was angry with his original drawing, tore it up, dropped the pieces on the floor, thought they looked better that way, and pasted the pieces where they lay as a tribute to the laws of chance, the beauty of luck.

But, like, there’s no way that story is true. I’m sorry, but look at it. Despite the title, these squares look rather artfully arranged. None are overlapping, none have fluttered halfway off the sheet. If someone gave you a pile of differently-shaped glazed square tiles and said, make them all fit nicely onto the subway tile over your stove, this is what my aesthetically-minded sister-in-law would have produced. And this image of randomness, of chance, that actually appears so un-random and calculated, to me, kind of gave away the whole game. Arp is performing nonsense, not actually living it, or making art from it.

To his credit, Arp later conceded this. The gig was up: there are glue traces on some of his collages where you can see that he shifted the pieces to make it more aesthetically pleasing. A curator at MoMA says his work is better described as “assisted chance” and credits Dada as being a movement of contradictions, which lets it get away with anything. And I’ll concede that the ideas he raises are important ones: the value of artists giving up the illusion of control, how even the world that they are themselves creating is modulated and constrained and expanded by chance, by luck, by happenstance. That’s a fundamental truth about artmaking, and a good thing for all artists to remember.

But still, give me the Dadaists who practice what they preach, who can barely describe their breakfasts in coherent terms, let alone their art. Give me the Dadaists who really seem like World War One scrambled their brains, so that everyone else could look at with their similarly scrambled brains, and relate to it. Because war does that. Soldiers came home from the front utterly destabilized, having seen the other side of what’s rational, and believing, with whatever faculties were still intact, in the nature of chance, and of luck. Why am I alive and he’s dead? Why am I on this side of the line and he’s on that? Nothing can be controlled, not really. Not in life, and especially not in war. And that’s nonsense that makes sense to me.

Okay. All this preamble might seem like an odd way to begin an episode about this hugely famous, iconic, artwork of a photograph. Yes, it’s a wartime photo, and yes, war is hell and all that, but to be fair, war is hell is not exactly the overarching message you’d take away from this photo. This is a photo about war’s nobility, about why we fight, about the unified triumph of good over evil. It’s a photo of men that looks like a photo of a sculpture: crystalized and permanent, not only in public memory, but by the nature of its very composition – like those soldiers were placed there by Michelangelo himself, and are still standing there, still hoisting this flag. It’s not a photo that speaks to randomness, chance, what cannot be controlled. But hear me out. This is an episode about luck. And how you can set yourself up for it.

This photo is, unequivocally, probably the most famous American photograph ever taken, and certainly from World War II. It’s not just an iconic photograph, it’s a photograph that was transformed into a literal icon – a massive 32-foot-tall bronze statue, the U.S. Marine Corp War Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in DC. It’s every postage stamp, every war bond poster, every establishing shot in a movie about military unity and sacrifice, scored by a bugle playing not-quite-Taps. It’s every book cover on the U.S. in World War II, every paperweight, if you’re my age, on your grandpa’s desk. And it reaches across generations, beyond living memory. The academic Lance Bertelsen surveyed his own college class a decade ago, and of the 150 students, 141 said they recognized this photo, 111 knew it was from WWII, 79 knew the combatants were Marines, and even 56 knew it was specifically Iwo Jima. Only two thought it was from the American Revolution, which is a win in my book.

And what it’s actually capturing is yes, six Marines raising an American flag on February 23, 1945, atop Mt. Suribachi on the small, otherwise completely inconsequential volcanic island of Iwo Jima in the Pacific – that is, inconsequential until the war. American soldiers had landed on Iwo Jima three days earlier and would continue to fight for another 31 more days. 4500 soldiers had already been killed or wounded by the time this photo was taken. And what we’re seeing is the securing of the mountain, not the mission accomplished, by any means. As far as World War II goes, this is a moment that matters, and we’ll get into why, but it’s not like the biggest moment in the war, or at least no one knew exactly how important it was at the time. So why is this photo so famous? So important to and emblematic of the war? Why did it need to be? And what role did the media play? All excellent questions. And to best understand the size and scale of this photograph as it relates to the relative size and scale of the moment being captured, let’s start on the outside and work our way in. The war, the island, the mountain, the media, the men.

I don’t think I need to give a synopsis of World War II, other than to localize us in the time and place within it: we’re in February of 1945. The war in Western Europe is reaching its decisive conclusion; Hitler is a mere two months away from suicide in his bunker. But this is the Pacific theater, which is a world entirely of its own. The fighting between the Americans and the Japanese was absolutely gruesome and nowhere near over. Japanese military culture was adamant that they could never surrender. America would accept nothing less than total surrender. The proverbial immovable object meets an unstoppable force, and all of this, it must be said, is on the other side of the world from what Americans could really wrap their heads around. This was a foreign war, with a deeply foreign adversary, even if you had a son or a brother or a husband off fighting in it. How can you possibly conceptualize the conflict, let alone feel it in your heart, when it took days, even weeks for images and news of the war in the Pacific to reach the United States? You can’t. But put a pin in that.

Capturing the island of Iwo Jima was both a strategic and symbolic aim for the Americans. Located halfway between Japan and the Mariana Islands, where American long-range bombers were housed, Iwo Jima was being used as a base for an early warning station, which would warn the homeland of those long-range bombers. What’s more, Iwo Jima is also, legally, part of the prefecture of Tokyo, despite being located about 750 miles away. Capturing Iwo Jima, which the US made the decision to do in late 1944 under the code name Operation Detachment, would mean not only disabling the Japanese warning system, but also, symbolically, getting troops on the ground in Tokyo, so to speak. It would mean, finally, a proper victory on the soil of the Japanese home islands, and hopefully the beginning of the end.

Naturally, that meant that Iwo Jima was fortified to the teeth. Japanese generals knew they’d never be able to hold the island if Americans made an amphibious assault, but they would still prepare themselves to take down as many soldiers as they could – like I said, it was a particularly gruesome and ruthless conflict. Japanese troops held out in a vast tunnel network throughout the island, bunkers and pillboxes ready for sustained, bloody resistance. The island itself is five miles across, the remnants of a now-dormant volcano. When American troops arrived, they described the island from above as “a lopsided black porkchop,” but from the ground, it was nothing more or less than hell itself, blanketed in loose, black volcanic ash, crumbly as the surface of the moon, but hot to the touch and reeking of Sulphur. The cold February air collided with the heat from the ground. The incessant fighting, shells, and explosions, they said, made it feel like the volcano was active.

This was Mount Suribachi, a 546-foot dormant volcano on the island’s southern tip, and the prize within the prize. Securing the mountain was the lynchpin to capturing the whole island, the only place from which to survey the whole scene, and the primary, concentrated goal of American troops from the moment they sunk their feet into the stinking black ash. It took four full days of extremely heavy, extremely bloody fighting to capture that mountain. Relentless explosions, bodies and body parts everywhere, little cover, and the enemy in their tunnels and nowhere in sight. 4500 casualties in four days. Four days. And on February 23rd, victory. Or at least the end of the beginning. Iwo Jima wouldn’t be properly captured for another 31 more days, on March 26th. But for now, the tide had turned. As it would turn out, for the entire war. But this day was just this victory. And this victory deserved a flag.

At 10:30am, once the mountain had been secured, a forty-man patrol from 2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment, 5th division arrived at the summit, accompanied by Staff Sergeant Louis Lowery, a magazine photographer, and the lieutenant in command, Harold Schrier, who had a small American flag, 54 x 28 inches. They attached it to a piece of pipe and raised it up, while Lowery snapped the photo. It’s a pretty neat photo, actually, I think. Had there never been another one, to my eye it would have made for a pretty decent war photo on its own merits. Individual soldiers in different poses, a marine actively holding his gun in the foreground and intently looking off while the remaining troops deal with the flag in the background. It’s a photo both of the event, the flag raising, but really of the soldiers themselves. The few, the proud, but also the dirty, the focused, the adolescent and awkward. Almost like it was staged by a different kind of Sargent, that is, John Singer Sargent, who, in episode 11, caught the Boit daughters awkwardly, but authentically – even if it meant a chunky, inelegant composition.

But the flag itself was too small. Too small for an occasion that was so strategically and psychologically important. And, practically, too small for the island – most people couldn’t really see it from a distance. Also, apparently the military wanted the flag back, since it was now a piece of history. And so, a second flag was ordered and dispatched, bigger this time, 56 x 96 inches, and a handful of chroniclers made the ascent to capture the second raising that they’d missed the first time around. This group included Joe Rosenthal from the Associated Press, who himself had been rejected from the armed services due to, of all things, poor eyesight, armed with a Speed Graphic camera, with a lens setting between f/8 and f/11 at 1/400 of a second. It was a slog to get up the mountain. “As the trail became steeper,” he recalls, “our panting progress slowed to a few yards at a time. I began to wonder and hope that this was worth the effort.” The new flag was attached to a heavy piece of pipe that had been part of a ruined radar installation. Rosenthal, who was only 5’5, assembled a small pile of rocks and sandbags to stand on for a better height, and was in the middle of doing that when the flag started rising. Sergeant Bill Genaust, one of the other photographers, set up a 16-millimeter film camera. The men hoisted the flag, Genaust’s camera started to roll, and Joe Rosenthal swung around and lucked into the greatest spontaneous snapshot of all time.

Yes, I said spontaneous snapshot. Did you know it was a snapshot? This is where we start to get into an interesting element of mythmaking. If people know anything about this photo – beyond that it’s not the American Revolution – it’s the mistaken belief that it was staged. The whole idea of raising two flags confused the story: that they raised a flag first and didn’t get the shot they wanted and so they raised another and composed it within an inch of its life. You know now that the truth is more complicated than that, but you can also understand the appeal of the myth. Because really, how else could you get such a perfect photo?

Okay, let’s talk about this perfect, superlative, chef’s kiss of a photo. It’s less a war photo, a document of a wartime event, than a sublime aesthetic composition, comparable to the highest order of history painting. It’s just exquisite. It was taken at noon, the sun directly overhead, its pure distribution of light evenly illuminating the scene and highlighting the high-contrast drapery of their uniforms. Caravaggio couldn’t have detailed it better. The flagpole cuts across the scene in a perfect diagonal, allowing our eyes to sweep across the archetypal pyramid of action, from the rubble of war upwards to the flag of liberation. The Marines, echoing the shape of the mountain itself, are perfectly faceless, universal, no single hero, and each playing out their roles to perfection, from the exquisite crouch at the base to the elegant, perpetually reaching hands at the top. The sculptural composition seems almost carved out of the neutral background of black and white and sea and sky. Even the flag itself understands the assignment, caught perfectly mid-plume, about to blow free from its triangular tangle, a moment of pure movement above soldiers who themselves are mid-movement yet look as though they could otherwise stay frozen in this iconic pose of heroism, objective, and resolve, forever. I mean, it’s just a goddamn perfect image, what else can be said?

Well, actually, a lot. Brace yourself, here comes the art historians, champing at the bit to contextualize this modern-day history painting in aesthetic convention. Compare the reaching hands to the soldiers in the Neoclassicist Jacque-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, themselves creating a crisp, frozen, pyramidal pose of duty and sacrifice. All the limbs and swords mirror the flagpole to converge in this one, central event, that flag. We Americans love us a flag – obviously, just think about our national anthem. And as the literary historian Paul Fussell writes, it’s this powerful and simple communal purpose of the photograph, the sense of one man raising that flag, not six, that gives it semiotic value beyond Iwo Jima, beyond even America. “Change the flag to red” he writes, “and you have Soviet Art. Strip the men and you have Italian fascist sculpture.” Change the flag to a French tricolor and you have Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” Change the flagpole to a body and you have a modern-day Pieta, the long figure lovingly stretched and tenderly held across the soldiers, transforming the flag and the suffering underlying it into something almost sacred.

But this is whole lot of postgame academic analysis. Obviously, there were no art historians in flak jackets on Iwo Jima, referencing history paintings through rectangle-framed fingertips, helping to compose this perfect shot. Nothing helped compose this perfect shot. I can’t stress this enough. This perfectly framed, perfectly balanced, and perfectly captured war image should never have happened. Rosenthal, placing his rocks and sandbags, saw the flag was going up and whirled around to snap it without even looking into the viewfinder. He didn’t even know how the photo had turned out until he saw it on the front page of the New York Times on the other side of the world the next day. And this is another layer of the myth – Rosenthal had taken a number of photos atop Mt. Suribachi, in front of that flag, including a photo he’d taken of the whole company, facing the camera, arms around one another and weapons pointed upwards in what’s called a “gung-ho” pose. When he was asked if the world’s most perfect photo seen ‘round the world, that is, the flag raising, had been staged, Rosenthal, who thought they were talking about the gung-ho photo, replied, hilariously, “sure.” Sure. Greatest generation indeed. But still, I’ll say it again, the flag raising photo was not staged. And for you doubting thomases out there, we can actually prove it. Just watch the film footage, we can see that exact, locked-in moment when this photo grabbed that split second from history.

But think about why we can do this at all. It’s a rare and novel set of technological circumstances that allowed for us to be able to see this moment, the filming of the photo, and re-watch it again and again. In the literal heat of battle on a remote volcanic island, who sends multiple photographers and a camera crew? Well, the United States military, that’s who. Remember I said to put a pin in Americans being unable to conceptualize the war that felt so distant. The operation on Iwo Jima was given extraordinary, intentional media coverage. Iwo Jima needed to be seen, and experienced, on the home front. Like I said, the war in Japan, so distant, so loosely understood, was still going strong even as the war in Western Europe was coming to a triumphant end. People were tired; the government was running out of money. Americans needed to understand what was being fought for, and where. So there was a deliberate technological and PR correction, a concerted, heroic effort to document the war in the Pacific, and moreover, to turn these photos around in record time. Rosenthal’s photo showed up on newspaper covers seventeen-and-a-half hours after it was taken. That’s unimaginable, both to us, in our instantaneous visual world today, and in the literal weeks it would have taken back then.

Fortunately, that photo did its job. “Here’s one for all time!” cried Associated Press photo editor John Bodkin as soon as he saw it that next day, before immediately wiring it out. It subsequently became a sensation, a borderline national frenzy. It appeared on every major front page, with more than 48,000 requests for reproductions to the New York Sun alone. The war bond poster it was featured on went on to help raise $26 billion. There were proposals to make it a national monument almost immediately. The Pulitzer Prize board, which usually considers only journalism from the previous year, made an exception to award it only two months after it was taken. “To the best of my knowledge,” wrote F.A. Resch, the AP executive photo editor who submitted it, “no newsphotographer on any assignment before or during this war has achieved such high results either in terms of so many newsworthy pictures taken under dangerous conditions, or in terms of consistently high technical quality of the product.”

This is such a kind thing to say about your photographer. And I included this statement because we need to take a moment and actually give Joe Rosenthal his due. All this talk about luck, serendipity, chance, poor eyesight, no viewfinder… even if it’s all true, it’s more than a little condescending. Rosenthal was an acclaimed war photographer. This kind of luck doesn’t happen to an amateur. Like Jean Arp’s glue marks, the “assisted chance,” Rosenthal possessed the ability to set himself up for success. Not only did he possess the bravery to do his job in the middle of a warzone, he trusted in the value of his own eye. If a soldiers’ job is to be fully immersed in the fighting, Rosenthal’s job was the bring the fighting home, to stand both in it and far enough outside of it to tell its story. He knew that it was possible to use a camera – the right camera, the right shutter speed, the right lens – to capture what he called “the peak of the picture.” And he knew he possessed the talent and the expertise to capture it. It’s okay if the rest was divine providence, a freakishly lucky collision between a carefully-prepared media operation and an extraordinarily photogenic moment. Even the best photographers know when to get out of the way of the miracle. Like Arp espouses, if not practices, the laws of chance are a part of art, that’s a fundamental truth about artmaking, and a good thing for all artists to remember. The result is a photograph, in the words of art historian Robin Kelsey, “that exceeds the intentions of the producer, with too much successful detail for a photographer, any photographer, to apprehend all at once. It delivers truth that is otherwise invisible to the naked eye.”

And perhaps this is why this photo hits so hard. We needed something so artistically sublime to help us make sense of our scrambled brains. We needed something beautiful. Taking the unimaginable – the sheer number of deaths even just from combatants in World War II, never mind civilians, never mind those systematically murdered, and the intimate impossibility of losing your own child – and seeing an immediately and strikingly readable, timeless, blood-free – that was important – and perfectly composed image that manages to tell your own, personal story, your singular pride and anguish, alongside everyone else’s. Because an enormous part of the power of this photo is its universality, its anonymity. These soldiers, in their facelessness, could be anyone’s brother, any mother’s son, working together for the good of the whole, the good of the nation. Everyone took these men as their own; Rosenthal talked about all the families who wrote to him claiming that a Marine in the photo was his or her son. There was real, powerful value to that.

But there was also something lost. Something always gets lost when the specific gives way to the universal. These were real men, real boys, really, with real mothers. As Lance Bertelsen writes, Hollywood central casting couldn’t have picked a more diverse group of soldiers – of brave, dirty, traumatized, adolescents serving from around the country, from all walks of life, all with different reasons for enlisting, all with different, unique stories. And maybe it’s the reality of their individual stories that truly makes this the great war photo it is. Because the truth behind the icon is a far better reflection of what was fought for, and what was lost.

These are the soldiers raising the flag:

Crouching at the base of the flag is Corporal Harlon Block. Block was born in Yorktown, Texas, the son of a dairy farmer, the third of six kids. He was a star football player. He and seven of his high school friends decided to join the Marine Corp before they graduated high school, so the school held a special graduation ceremony for them in January 1943. He was killed by a shell on March 1st, not quite a week after this photograph was taken, with no idea it was a national sensation. He was twenty years old.

The second in line, almost hidden from view save for that strong, stabilizing leg, is Corporal Harold Keller, nicknamed Pie, from Brooklyn, Iowa. He survived the war, although almost never spoke about it, or his role in it. He returned to Iowa, to his wife Ruby, and together they raised two boys and a girl. He was the only flag raiser to have children.

Blocking Keller is PFC Franklin Sousley, from Hill Top, Kentucky, who lost his older brother to appendicitis when he was only two, and then his father to diabetes when he was nine, and was forced into role of man of the house, helping his mother raise his little brother. He was working in a refrigerator factory after graduating high school, before enlisting. On March 21st, three weeks after the flag raising and five days before the island was secured, he was shot in the back, and died instantly. He was 19 years old. I can’t even begin to imagine what his mother went through.

Behind him, Sargent Michael Strank, who was born in Slovakia and moved with his family to Pennsylvania, where his father had found work in the coal mines for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. He enlisted in the Marines early in the war, before the U.S. even entered it, and fought throughout the Pacific before landing in Iwo Jima. Strank was described as “a Marine’s Marine,” “the kind of Marine you make movies about,” who often told his men, “follow me, I’ll try to bring you all safely home to your mothers.” He was killed by friendly artillery fire from on offshore American ship on March 1st, the same day as Harlon Block, a week after the photo was taken. He was 25.

Behind him is Corporal Harold Shultz, born and raised in Detroit. Schultz was wounded in action on March 13th, evacuated off Iwo Jima, honorably discharged, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he was a mail sorter at the post office until he retired in 1981. After losing his fiancé early in life to a brain tumor, he married his neighbor Rita in his 60s. He was the last surviving man in the photograph until his death in 1995 at the age of 70.

Finally, reaching up, in perpetuity, is PFC Ira Hayes, from Sacaton, Arizona. A Pima Indian and a member of the Gila River Indian Community, Hayes was the first Pima to receive paratrooper wings, earning the nickname “Chief Falling Cloud.” He was a shy and sensitive kid and could go days without speaking, but also a precocious and voracious reader, who, later on, was determined to serve in the Marines after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On Iwo Jima, he was one of only five survivors of his entire 45-man platoon, which haunted him for the rest of his life. He could never shake the survivor’s guilt; he could never make the nonsense make sense. He became an alcoholic, was arrested 52 times for public intoxication, and ultimately died of alcohol poisoning and exposure in 1955, a story later described by Peter LaFarge in his folk song, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which would then go on to be covered by Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan. Hayes was only 32 when he died, unable to bear the weight of war hero, of flag raiser, of national symbol. Of being one of the lucky ones.

CREDITS:

The Lonely Palette is written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai.

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The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a fiercely independent collective of mind-expanding, thoughtful podcasts. And I have two H&S announcements: the first is to welcome the newest members of our collective, Lowlines, a sonic scrapbook, a gorgeously produced limited series out of the UK, and Stories of Sound, an interview show that delves into sound arts and audio storytelling, offering a window into the creative process that will leave you incredibly inspired. Both shows are exceptionally high quality and produced by exceptionally high-quality producers, and we’re so thrilled that they’ve brought their talents to us. You can listen to Lowlines and Stories of Sound at hubspokeaudio.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

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