Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
(For copyright reasons, the original image cannot be shown here. It is linked to web links below )
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima ( German translation: "Hoisting the flag on Iwojima") is the title of a photograph made by the American war photographer Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945 showing the raising of a US flag by six soldiers on a mountain shows during the Battle of Iwojima . All six soldiers, three of whom were killed during the fighting on the island, are considered war heroes in the United States . Although the process photographed is actually just an exchange with a larger flag, its importance has made the image one of the most famous war photographs in the world and holds an important place in the collective memory of the United States of America . It is also probably the most reproduced image of all time.
history
prehistory
Politically, Iwojima is part of Tokyo Prefecture and is administered by the Tokyo Governor. For many Japanese, it was a matter of honor during World War II to prevent the enemy from taking part of the Japanese mainland for the first time. The island is dominated by the 166 meter high extinct volcano Suribachi , which is located in the southern part and was one of the most important positions on the island. From here, the Japanese defenders were able to coordinate artillery fire at the attackers from well-developed bunkers and also direct them to the landing beaches .
American efforts therefore first concentrated on isolating and taking the Suribachi. This goal was achieved four days after the battle began - the day the photo was taken. Despite the capture of the Suribachi, the fighting continued as the Japanese army continued to offer bitter resistance from heavily fortified bunkers and a large number of small machine-gun nests. It was not until March 26, 1945, that Iwojima was declared safe by the US troops, although there were isolated further skirmishes afterwards. A total of 6,821 American and around 18,000 Japanese soldiers died in the battle of the island, which is only about 21 km² in size.
Setting up the flag
Four days after the invasion began, on February 23, 1945, a train led by Lieutenant Harold Schriers climbed the summit of Suribachi , the highest point on the hard-fought Japanese island of Iwojima. The hour-long ascent was photographed by war photographer Lou Lowery . At 10:30 am, the soldiers hoisted an American flag on the mountain, using a water pipe that was lying around and used by the Japanese as a stand. The situation was recorded by Lowery, his picture shows the flag already standing upright with the soldiers standing next to it. The raising of the flag was cheered by soldiers on the island and by the ships anchored on the beach with gun salutes and ship horns . The noise made some Japanese soldiers aware of the action and attacked the troop, but were killed in a subsequent skirmish.
However, the battalion leadership located on the beach saw the flag as too small and therefore difficult to recognize and ordered it to be replaced with a larger flag. Then a second group made their way to the summit, accompanied by the war photographer Joe Rosenthal . Rosenthal took 18 photos of the action. The exchange of the flag was considered completely unspectacular by those involved. Even in the daily minutes of the battalion headquarters the action was not mentioned.
distribution
Rosenthal's photos were flown to Guam after the descent and transferred from there to the USA. Those in charge of the propaganda department recognized that one of the 18 photos had a high potential for recognition and determined it for official distribution. Just two days later, almost all Sunday issues of the major US magazines appeared with the picture on the front cover. Due to the heavy losses in the war, the picture came at the right psychological moment, followed by independence. The image became the main topic in newspapers, the focal point of banquets, and the basis of the hugely successful song Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima by the Texas Playboys . On July 7th, a stamp was issued with the motif, which is still the most produced stamp in the history of the US Post with a total of 137 million items.
Content and meaning of the recording
The picture shows six soldiers who raise the United States flag together on a mountain on the Japanese island of Iwojima during the Battle of Iwojima . The faces of the soldiers cannot be made out. The man on the right focuses on keeping the mast in the ground while the other five raise the pole with the flag. The soldier on the far left, who has obviously just let go of the flagpole, seems to be reaching into the air.
The scene in the picture is completely different from the one in the photo when the flag was first raised. The first picture with the upright flagpole and the soldiers around it is considered static. The snapshot taken by Rosenthal, however, conveys a strong dynamic, as the movement of the soldiers seems to be directed to the right or top right and the mast, in contrast, points to the sky at the top left. The dynamism is increased by the waving flag. While hardly anything can be seen of the floor and the objects lying around, such as pieces of wood and rubble, the upper part of the photo is completely empty. This wide space seems to be waiting to be filled with the raising of the flagpole, which in western culture is tantamount to a sacred pose.
The great symbolism of the recording is based on the fact that it conveys to represent the final turning point in the battle, since the raising of a flag in wars is considered a victory. In fact, however, the picture was taken at a time when the outcome of the hostilities was still open. In the end, it didn't even show the actual hoisting, just the replacement of the original flag for a larger one a few hours after it was set up.
In addition to Joe Rosenthal's photo, there is also a color film sequence filmed at the same time by the marine cameraman Bill Genaust , on which the second flag deployment can be seen in full. Since the two reporters were standing next to each other, the angle of view is almost identical in both shots.
Involved soldiers
The flagpole was erected by six soldiers from the United States Marine Corps . The names of the soldiers and even their number were initially unknown and were only determined later. The individual soldiers involved were:
- Ira Hayes
- Harold Schultz (instead of John Bradley )
- Michael Strank
- Franklin Sousley
- Harold P. Keller (instead of Rene Gagnon )
- Harlon block
Strank, Sousley and Block were killed in the course of further fighting on Iwojima. The surviving Hayes, Bradley, and Gagnon were immediately withdrawn from the fighting after identification, taken home, and sent on a campaign to promote war bonds . All six soldiers became American celebrities through the war propaganda .
However, the Pima Indian Ira Hayes failed to cope with his surprising fame, became an alcoholic and died in 1955 at the age of only 32. Rene Gagnon, who had initially tried to gain financial advantages from his prominence, also became alcoholic and died after several failed jobs unemployed and impoverished in 1979.
John "Doc" Bradley withdrew from the public eye in the 1960s and, until his death in 1994, hardly commented on the events on Iwojima. It was only after his death that his son James Bradley reconstructed the events and wrote a book about his father called Flags of Our Fathers . There it is described that those involved did not feel like heroes themselves, but were only stylized as heroes. It wasn't until 2016 that a Marine Corps investigation, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Channel, revealed that John Bradley was falsely identified in the photo. In fact, Harold Schultz was not involved in raising the flag.
In October 2019, following advice from amateur historians, the Marines corrected the identity of a second person in the photo. Instead of Rene Gagnon, Harold P. Keller can be seen. But Gagnon was responsible for bringing the second flag to the top of the mountain and bringing the first flag back for safekeeping. Keller died in 1979.
Advertisement for war bond
While preparing to issue the stamp, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the idea to use the motif as an advertisement for the upcoming Seventh War Loan . During this planning, a general commented whether it might not be better to use real heroism than the premature raising of a flag, but he was left with his own opinion. On April 20, 1945, the painting was presented in the Oval Office by the new President Harry S. Truman and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau . The three survivors were also present. It was a colored picture, with the drama enhanced by dark clouds. The award under the poster was NOW ALL TOGETHER ( All together now ). The aim was to address the entire nation, which should enable the war to continue through its donations. The printing of the advertising images for the seventh and last issued war loan began on May 14, 1945, a week after the end of the war in Europe. A total of 3.5 million posters were printed and hung all over the country. No picture before has reached such a wide distribution. It reached 30,000 train stations, 20,000 companies and 16,000 cinemas and, as a reduced image, was used in countless public transport systems. Because of this enormous distribution, it is believed to be the most widely reproduced image of all time.
At the same time, a promotional tour (Bond Tour) for the war bond with the three survivors was started. The hoisting of the flag was re-enacted in stadiums or at well-known places to the great cheer of the audience. On the day of the final surrender of the German Wehrmacht on May 9, 1945, the three survivors hoisted the original flag brought from Iwojima on Capitol Hill in front of the White House in Washington. Two days later, to frenetic cheers, they unveiled an oversized plaster replica of the photo in Times Square , New York. The highlight of the Bond Tour took place on July 4, 1945 on Independence Day. There were over 350,000 visitors around the Washington Monument when the flag-raising scene was projected into the sky. With $ 26 billion in revenue, the Seventh War Loan was a huge financial and important success for the empty war chests. This was also due to the fact that the war did not end faster than assumed by an invasion of Japan ( Operation Downfall ), but by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki .
Aftermath
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima became one of the most iconic photos of World War II and earned Joe Rosenthal the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 . Rosenthal was later accused - wrongly - of the fact that the photo had been made. The reason may be that it was initially neglected to mention that the flags were merely exchanged. They did not want to make up for this immediately after the media hype began because they feared that the war loan would be a success.
Yevgeny Chaldej's similar photo taken two months later at the Berlin Reichstag on May 2, 1945 , when Red Army soldiers hoisted the Soviet flag on the Reichstag building . Whether Chaldej knew Rosenthal's photo is controversial.
A photo of the improvised " ink flag " hoisted in the Palestine War in 1949 was later compared to the Iwo Jima photo.
In the USA the motif is considered an icon . The photo is one of the most frequently reproduced images worldwide and has served as a model for numerous official and unofficial replicas, some of which are larger than life. The most famous replicas can be found in Washington, DC and on the grounds of the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in the US state of Virginia , which borders the Arlington National Cemetery .
The artist Edward Kienholz used the motif in his 1968 installation The Portable War Memorial .
The original flag that Rosenthal photographed is now in the National Museum of the Marine Corps .
Implementations
Ira Hayes ' life was filmed in 1961 as The Outsider (German title: The outsider ) with Tony Curtis in the lead role. The opera The Shining River by the Austrian composer Johanna Doderer also focuses on the fate of Ira Hayes; the work was premiered in Erfurt in October 2010. The song The Ballad of Ira Hayes by Peter La Farge was interpreted by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan , among others .
Flags of Our Fathers (2006, director: Clint Eastwood ) is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by James Bradley, son of John "Doc" Bradley, and depicts the historical events surrounding the flag-raising on Iwojima in flashbacks.
literature
- Jost Dülffer : Über-Helden - The image of Iwo Jima in the representation of victory. A study of the American culture of remembrance since 1945 . In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History . 3 (2006), issue 2. pp. 247-272 ( full text online , accessed on June 18, 2011).
Web links
- Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima The original photograph held in the United States National Archives
Individual evidence
- ^ Robert S. Burrell: The Ghosts of Iwo Jima, p. 83.
- ↑ a b c Christian Seidl: The false flag hoist from Iwo Jima. Berliner Zeitung, February 23, 2017.
- ↑ Jost Dülffer: Über-Helden - The image of Iwo Jima in the representation of victory. A study of the American culture of remembrance since 1945. In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies In Contemporary History . Section 3.
- ↑ a b Michael S. Schmidt: Man in Iwo Jima Flag Photo Was Misidentified, Marine Corps Says . In: The New York Times . June 23, 2016, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed June 23, 2016]).
- ↑ a b Marines correct ID of second man who raised flag at Iwo Jima. In: apnews.com , October 17, 2019.
- ^ Fifty Years Later, Iwo Jima Photographer Fight His Own Battle ( Memento from April 12, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ War Propaganda: Diffuse Icons of Victory at handelsblatt.com, accessed on May 16, 2012.
- ↑ Martin Mehlhorn: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima”, the history of the creation of an icon and its significance for the American culture of remembrance from 1945–2006 , 2011, p. 14, limited preview in the Google book search
- ↑ Jost Dülffer: Über-Helden - The image of Iwo Jima in the representation of victory. A study of the American culture of remembrance since 1945. In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies In Contemporary History . Section 5.
- ↑ Anti-war memorial. museenkoeln.de, accessed on September 5, 2016 .
- ↑ Media information. Johanna Doderer - The shining river . doderer.at, accessed on April 16, 2016 .