jumped from a cave to heave a grenade. He was shot dead. An officer charged waving his sword. He was shot into the crater.
“Let’s go!” Schrier called. “We haven’t got any time to waste around here. Let’s get back to work.”
For the next four hours fierce fighting raged at every level of Suribachi, but by half-past two the volcano was fairly secure, and it was then that the most dramatic picture of World War Two was recorded.
From below Suribachi the Marines could barely see the little 54-by-28-inch flag. One of them went aboard LST 779 beached near the eastern base of the volcano. He borrowed a big flag 96 by 56 inches and took it up Suribachi. Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press saw him going, and followed with his camera. When Rosenthal reached the summit he saw six men raising the new flag. They were Pfc. Ira Hayes, Pfc. Franklin Sousley, Sergeant Michael Strank, Corpsman John Bradley, Pfc. Rene Gagnon and Corporal Harlon Block. Rosenthal photographed them in that order, left to right—and the great battle photograph of American arms had become history.
The flag had risen at Iwo Jima, and although the inevitable scoffers of the inevitable postwar reaction have spit on the event as “a phony,” there was very little fakery about the death which shortly overtook Sergeant Strank, Corporal Block and Pfc. Sousley, or in the wound of Corpsman Bradley. Nor was the first flag-raising a piece of stagecraft any more than the subsequent deaths of Sergeants Hansen and Thomas and Pfc. Charlo, or the wounds suffered by Pfcs. Robeson and Michels. The flag went up in the first place because the sight of it would cheer Marines below who knew that the Japanese looked down their throats so long as they held the highest land on Iwo. When the first flag proved too small to be seen, a second and bigger flag went up. This raising was photographed by Rosenthal with no attempt to stage it—else why everyone’s face away from the picture and thus unidentifiable for the newspapers?—and it turned out to be superb. The fact that the famous flag-raising was the second, not the first, no more affects its place in history than the fact that the Suribachi flag-raising was itself intermediate to the first flag-raising on Guadalcanal and the last on Okinawa. The facts were that Suribachi fell because American Marines suffered and died to conquer it, and that some of them raised flags above it to proclaim the victory.
It was the second, famous flag which was seen by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal as he stepped on the warm soil of Iwo Jima, just as it was caught and flung by the strong north wind whipping Suribachi’s crest. Forrestal had followed the battle aboard the command ship
“Holland,” he said, “the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”
To the Marines slowly slugging into the First Belt in the north, the news came over the loudspeaker used by the beachmaster to direct unloading operations. The speaker blared:
“Mount Suribachi is ours. The American flag has been raised over it by the Fifth Marine Division. Fine work, men.”
Those who could, turned dust-rimmed staring eyes to their rear. They squinted and saw the flag. They looked to the north once more, the loudspeaker blared again:
“We have only a few miles to go to secure the island.”
The young-old eyes blinked.
“Only,” one Marine repeated.
5
All but three of the 26 Medals of Honor awarded to Marines and their Navy corpsmen on Iwo Jima were won in that nightmarish up-island battle which began the day the Twenty-eighth Marines swept south to Suribachi and the rest of the assault troops slugged north into General Kuribayashi’s First Belt.
That was on February 20 and on that day young Jacklyn Lucas saw his first and last combat. He moved with three other men in the Fifth Division’s strike up the western coast. They came to a ravine and were ambushed. The air was filled with enemy hand grenades. One landed among the four Marines. Lucas dove over his comrades to smother it with his body. Just as another grenade landed…
He pulled this one to him and he had begun to think, “Luke, you’re gonna die,” when the bombs exploded and his own hoarse trailing scream rose above the roar. The three other Marines attacked and forced the enemy position. Lucas was left for dead behind them, but seven months later he was well enough to receive his Medal of Honor.
On that same day Captain Robert Dunlap was leading his company against a steep, cave-pocked cliff commanding the western beaches. The Japanese pinned them down. Dunlap crawled forward for 200 yards while the bullets sang above him. He spotted the enemy guns, crawled back, relayed the information to naval gunfire and artillery observers, crawled up again and spent two days and nights among the enemy’s rocks —calling down the fire which did most to knock out the guns and secure the western beaches. He, too, won a Medal of Honor.
On the right flank the Fourth Division fought a fierce battle to overrun Airfield Number One as well as to push deeper into the cliffs north of the landing beaches. The airfield fell by nightfall of the first day, but the high ground along the east coast was not so swiftly seized. Here it was flesh and blood and will opposing steel and concrete; here captains commanded battalions, lieutenants and sergeants led companies, corporals and privates rallied platoons. Here there were also Medals of Honor won—by Jumpin’ Joe Chambers, who was wounded leading his last attack; by Captain Joe McCarthy, who gathered a picked band of Marines to take a vital ridge in a hand-grenade charge; by little Sergeant Ross Gray, taking six pillboxes and 25 Japanese soldiers before he fell fatally wounded. Hundreds of other Marines received their mortal wounds in this bitter three-day advance through the eastern anchor of General Kuribayashi’s First Belt.
But on the fourth day, February 23, the very day on which the flag flew over Suribachi and the loudspeaker voice prattled of “only” a few more miles to go, the Fourth Division made its biggest gains. The Marines broke into the ridges at the point where the pork chop bellies out. They seemed to have pierced Kuribayashi’s inner line, but they had actually reached The Meatgrinder.
By February 23 the Marines began to suspect that they had made no beachhead on Iwo Jima because Iwo was all beachhead. The familiar rhythm of break-in, break-out, breakthrough would not be repeated here. Lieutenant General Smith had said: “We will be ready for an early counterattack in one of three places. We welcome a counterattack. That is generally when we break their backs.”
But there had been no counterattacks and it was the Americans whose backs were breaking on the rock of the Japanese center.
A regiment of the Third Division had been committed there on February 21. The Twenty-first Marines, veterans of the big banzai on Guam, dashed again and again at the center just below the southwestern tip of Airfield Number Two. Small breakthroughs often became disasters. Penetrating Marines were raked from the flanks, chewed up—sometimes wiped out. Tanks that butted through were knocked out by guns blasting from interlocking pillboxes, or were hoisted on the spouting fire-balls of exploding land mines. Engineers crept forward on their knees, probing the black sand for the kettle-shaped killers which the Japanese had buried so abundantly, but they couldn’t find them all. Nor could Marines with flame-throwers and dynamite knock out all the pillboxes. Corporal Hershel Williams won a Medal of Honor by blasting or burning out position after position, but there were 800 pillboxes in this sector 1,000 yards wide and 200 yards deep.
Yet, the center had to move. It was holding up the Fifth Division on the left and the Fourth on the right. When Major General Erskine came ashore with Major General Schmidt on February 23 he ordered the Twenty-first Marines forward the next day “at all costs.”
Lieutenant Colonel Wendell Duplantis had commanded the Third Battalion during that wild night on Guam when Major Yukioka’s suicide troops had shot the gap and surrounded his command post. Now, on Iwo Jima, Duplantis was awaiting the tanks which would lead his battalion forward at nine o’clock.
But the tanks didn’t show.
“Attack must proceed without the tanks,” he signaled his company commanders.
Captain Clayton Rockmore led out I Company and fell dead with a bullet through the throat. Captain Dan
