Today is the anniversary of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. The flag was raised by five U.S. Marines and a Navy corpsman, immortalized in a photo by Joe Rosenthal. Three of the men in the photo were killed in battle.
The Battle of Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and the only battle in which U.S. casualties exceeded those of the Japanese.
64 years later, the raising of the flag, and its photo, continues to be one of the greatest symbols of courage in the United States Marines.
All six of the men in the Rosenthal photo (Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, and Michael Strank, John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes) are gone now, with Rosenthal joining them in 2006.
The three men who survived the battle played themselves in John Wayne’s “The Sands of Iwo Jima”. There was also a movie about Ira Hayes in 1961 that I recall seeing as a kid. Sadly, of the three survivors, Hayes’ life came to a tragic end.
All of the men involved in the flag raising, both those involved in the raising of the smaller flag and the subsequent raising of the larger flag that Rosenthal immortalized, are men to be remembered and honored.
This date in 1945 also marks the anniversary of the U.S. raid on Los Banos, liberating over 2,000 civilian and military prisoners. This raid came close on the heels of the Raid on Cabanatuan, a few weeks earlier.
