The Untold Stories Behind Iconic Photos: Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

For more than seventy years, the world had the wrong names for some of the men in one of history’s most famous photographs. Yeah. And that’s not even the most surprising part of the story. Last week, we said that every iconic photo has a story the image itself can’t tell. This one, Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, might be the ultimate example of that. It’s an image everyone thinks they know. Right. You see six Marines, a flag, a mountain. You see victory. But what the picture doesn't show you is the thirty-six-day battle. It doesn't show you the twenty-seven thousand American casualties. It doesn't show you that on February twenty-third, 1945, when Rosenthal clicked the shutter, the fight was FAR from over.

So set the scene for me. What’s actually happening in that single frame? It’s chaos. Joe Rosenthal, he's an Associated Press photographer, and he's just scrambled up Mount Suribachi. But here’s the first thing the photo doesn't tell you: this is the SECOND flag being raised that day. Wait—the second? I thought this was the moment of capture. It was, but the first flag they put up was too small. The commanders down below couldn't see it through the smoke and the haze of battle. They needed a bigger one, for morale. So a second, larger flag was sent up. What Rosenthal captured wasn’t so much a spontaneous act of conquest, but… um, a logistical replacement.

So the iconic moment was really about visibility. Exactly. And Rosenthal almost missed it. He was busy piling up rocks and a sandbag to get a better angle, thinking he was just getting a shot of the second flag going up. He swung his camera around and shot it without even looking through the viewfinder. One four-hundredth of a second. He had no idea he’d just captured one of the most famous images of all time. And the men. We see their shapes, this incredible composition of effort, but we don’t see their faces. Who were they? The six men eventually identified are Harlon Block, Harold Keller, Franklin Sousley, Ira Hayes, Michael Strank, and Rene Gagnon.

But the tragedy behind the symbol is staggering. Sergeant Strank, Corporal Block, and Private Sousley were all killed in action on Iwo Jima within days of that photo being taken. Oh, wow. So they never even knew the fame that picture would bring. They never saw it. They raised a flag, and then they went back to fighting, and they died. And that brings us to the identities. For decades, the Marine Corps officially misidentified some of them. It wasn’t until investigations in 2016 and 2019 that they were all correctly named. How does a mistake like that last for seventy years? Fog of war. Survivor’s guilt. The rush to turn these men into national heroes.

Remember, the photo hit newspapers on February twenty-fifth, just two days later. It became a symbol overnight. It was on posters, stamps… it helped fund the war effort. The country needed heroes. And one of those heroes, Ira Hayes… his story is different. Yeah. Ira Hayes was a Pima man from a reservation in Arizona. He survived the battle, but he was haunted by it. Noah McMullen, a Legion commander who just honored Hayes this year, said he was always a “reluctant hero.” The fame was a heavy burden for a man who’d seen so much death. He felt he hadn't earned it. It’s such a strange contrast. You have this image that becomes the absolute pinnacle of American heroism and sacrifice, winning a Pulitzer Prize.

And then you have the reality behind it: it’s the second flag, some of the men died days later, and others were misidentified for decades. It’s the classic tension of photojournalism. The picture is true. It happened. Six men really did struggle to raise that flag. But it’s not the whole truth. The photograph freezes a moment of hope. But the war kept grinding on. The film footage of that moment, shot by Sergeant Bill Genaust? He was also killed in action nine days later. So the image becomes a stand-in for the entire brutal, costly victory. It has to. A single frame can’t contain a thirty-six-day battle. It can’t show you the twenty-one thousand Japanese soldiers who died defending that island, or the survivor’s guilt that plagued Ira Hayes for the rest of his life.

It shows one moment of collective effort. And maybe, you know, that’s what people needed to see. It's a reminder that a photograph is a starting point, not an ending. Always. It’s the beginning of a question. And we owe it to the people in the frame to go looking for the answers.