Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima: Behind the Photo

It was a picture so perfect that some people thought it must have been staged. But Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s image of six Marines raising the American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945, was very much the real thing.

The battle for the small but strategically important island had been one of the bloodiest of the war. Nearly 7,000 Americans were killed, more than 19,000 wounded. On the Japanese side, casualties were even higher.

Rosenthal learned that the Marines planned to plant a flag atop the island’s Mount Suribachi after securing the volcanic peak, a major early objective in the brutal battle for the island. He had started up the mountain when a Marine photographer making his way down told him the flag raising had already occurred. Rosenthal decided to keep climbing and see for himself.

When he got to the top, he found that the Marines had obtained a larger flag that would be visible from a greater distance and were preparing to replace the first one. To get in a better position to record the raising, he improvised a small platform for himself out of a Japanese sandbag and some rocks. When he saw the Marines angling the pole to drive it into the earth, he swung his clunky 4x5 Speed Graphic camera and took the shot.

When he later bundled up his film and sent it off to Guam for processing, he was unaware of the historic image he’d captured. The Associated Press immediately realized, however, as did newspaper editors across the U.S., many of whom ran it on their front pages. By the time Rosenthal got to see the picture himself, it was already world famous.

The photograph would earn Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize for news photography and be immortalized on war bond posters, a postage stamp and as a statue at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, among many other honors.

When the photograph's too-good-to-be-true authenticity was challenged, motion-picture footage of the same event from Marine Sgt. Bill Genaust put the matter to rest.

At the war’s end, Rosenthal came home to a job as a staff photographer on the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked until his retirement. He died in 2006.

Although he had taken what might be the most famous war photograph of all time, Rosenthal remained modest. “When a press photographer takes a photograph, it’s because the subject has done something good or bad enough to be worthy of notice,” he told an interviewer in 1978. “The important thing is the subject, not the photographer… The photographer is the least part of it.” He was, he insisted, simply lucky.

Ironically, Rosenthal went to war as a civilian photographer instead of a soldier because his draft board had classified him as 4-F, or not qualified for military service. The reason it cited: poor eyesight.