The Press: Story of a Picture

By last week, the picture of the Iwo Jima flag raising, which had already made almost every front page in the land, was turning up again in fancy, full-page color in U.S. Sunday papers. It was easily the most widely printed photograph of World War II. One Senator proposed it for a 3¢ stamp; a Congressman wanted it used as a model for a national monument.

Kansas City, forgetting its resolve to build something more useful than its execrable World War I memorial, had the same idea. A lyrical Rochester, N.Y. art critic compared it to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. The less erudite Danville (Va.) Register was reminded of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Newspaper poets wrote earnest, bad verses about it. The New York Sun superimposed The Spirit of ’76 in one corner of the shot, got 48,000 requests for copies.

Navy Secretary Forrestal called Joe Rosenthal, who took the picture, “as gallant as the men going up that hill.” In San Francisco, Rosenthal’s draft board switched him from 4-F (bad eyes) to 2-AF (essential deferment) because the picture entitled him “to a classification better than 4-F.”

Along with the praise came inevitable murmurs that the sculptural symmetry of the picture was “too good to be true.” Last week short (5 ft. 6 in.), bespectacled, mustached Associated Press Photographer Rosenthal, 33, camera veteran of Guadalcanal, Guam and Peleliu got back to the U.S. Said he: the picture was taken without one word of direction by him, was completely unposed.

Along with him came the full story of the first flag raising on Mt. Suribachi (Rosenthal’s was the second) and the bad luck of Marine Photographer Louis R. Lowery. On D-plus-four, Sergeant Lowery, the only photographer present, scrambled to the top of 546-ft. Suribachi, took 56 pictures of marines raising a 3-ft. American flag under heavy fire. A Jap grenade landed at Lowery’s feet; he ducked, tumbled 50 feet down the side of the volcano, wrenched his side, smashed his camera. For all his pains, his shot of Iwo’s first flag raising was far from dramatic. A few hours later, when firing was less severe but still continuing, a second band of marines made their way to the top, planted a larger flag in the same spot. This time A.P.’s Rosenthal was along, got his great picture.

(Neither of these flag raisings was official: last week, when Admiral Nimitz formally took possession of the island, the U.S. flag was run up near the base of Suribachi with traditional ceremony.)