You know this photograph. Six young Marines pushing a flagpole up on a black volcanic hill, the American flag snapping in the wind above them. It was taken on February 23, 1945, on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. It won the Pulitzer Prize, it was printed in thousands of newspapers, it helped sell war bonds, and it became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What most Americans never knew is that for almost 70 years, two of the six men in that photograph were named wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Battle of Iwo Jima began on February 19, 1945. The island was small, only about eight square miles, but it held two airfields the Americans needed on the way to Japan. Mount Suribachi, a 550-foot dormant volcano at the southern end of the island, dominated the landing beaches. Four days into the battle, on February 23, Marines from E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, fought their way to the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A small American flag was raised on the summit at about 10:30 that morning. It was too small to be seen clearly from the beaches below, so a few hours later a second, larger flag was brought up to replace it. Rosenthal was there for the second raising. He almost missed the shot. He looked up, saw the men straining against the pole, and pressed the shutter. He did not know then that he had taken one of the most famous photographs in American history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The six men in that second photograph were Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, Private First Class Franklin Sousley, Private First Class Ira Hayes, Private First Class Harold Schultz, and Private First Class Harold Keller. Three of them \u2014 Strank, Block, and Sousley \u2014 were killed in action before the battle ended. The island was not declared secure until March 26, 1945. By then, 6,821 Americans had been killed and nearly 20,000 wounded. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded for Iwo Jima, more than for any other battle in American history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the names attached to the photograph were not all correct, and the mistakes lasted for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harlon Block was first identified as Sergeant Hank Hansen until January 1947, when the Marine Corps corrected the record. That was only the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more than 70 years, the man at the base of the flagpole was listed as Navy corpsman John Bradley. He was not. In June 2016, after a Marine Corps investigation, the Corps announced that the man was in fact Harold Schultz, a Marine from Detroit. Schultz had been there that day, he had helped raise the flag, and then he had gone home, gone back to work, and never told most people about it. He died in 1995, never publicly recognised as one of the flag raisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, in October 2019, the Corps corrected the record a second time. The man long identified as Rene Gagnon was in fact Harold Keller, a Marine from Brooklyn, Iowa. Keller, too, had returned home after the war and said little about Iwo Jima. He died in 1979, also without the recognition that should have been his.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How did the mistakes happen? The photograph was taken in seconds, in smoke and confusion, on a mountain still under fire. The men were in helmets, covered in ash, their faces turned away from the camera. In the days after the battle, the survivors were rushed home for a war-bond tour, and identifications were made quickly, from memory, under enormous public pressure. The poster made from Rosenthal’s photograph helped raise more than $26 billion for the war effort in 1945. The country needed heroes, and it needed their names fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ira Hayes, one of the three survivors who was correctly identified, carried the weight of that fame for the rest of his life. A Pima Native American from Arizona, Hayes never sought the spotlight. He spoke often about the men who did not come home, and about how the photograph was not about him, but about all of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, the corrected list stands as a reminder that history is not always finished when the photograph is taken. The men were Michael Strank, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, Ira Hayes, Harold Schultz, and Harold Keller. Three died on Iwo Jima. Three came home. Two of the three who came home waited decades \u2014 one of them waited until after his death \u2014 for America to get his name right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If your father or grandfather served in World War II, in Korea, or in Vietnam, you know what that silence meant. Many of them came home and never spoke about what they saw. They went back to work, raised families, and kept the hardest part of their lives to themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is why this photograph still matters. It is not only a picture of a flag going up. It is a picture of six young men, three of whom would be dead within weeks, doing a job on a mountain while the battle was still raging around them. And it is a reminder to get their names right, while we still can, and to say them out loud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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