Behind the Shutter: The Untold Story of Iconic Photos

the man who took the most iconic photograph of world war two joe rosenthal captured it without ever looking through his camera's viewfinder he almost missed it entirely and that right there is the whole story last week on behind the shutter we talked about chaos and chance creating history well this photograph from iwo jima is the absolute peak of that mountain okay so set the scene for me 02/23/1945 what is happening on this tiny island pure hell the battle of iwo jima had been raging for days taking the highest point mount suribachi was a critical objective it was a brutal bloody slog up that volcano rosenthal an associated press photographer had heard a flag was going

up he got there late late but he took the picture he was late for the first flag raising a smaller flag had already been put up earlier that morning a marine photographer named lewis lowry got that shot but a commander wanted a bigger flag one the ships at sea and the men all over the island could actually see so a second group of men was sent up so this was a do over a reenactment not a reenactment that's the myth that haunted rosenthal for years it was a replacement he was standing there piling up some rocks to get a better angle for a group shot he planned to take after they raised it he turned and as he said out of the corner of my eye i had seen the man start the flag up woah he just swung his camera guessed the exposure and pushed the button one shot he didn't even know if he'd gotten it he had no idea what was on that film until it was developed thousands of miles away

so in that one spontaneous shot you have six servicemen who were they we see them as this unified group this monument and that's where the fog of war really rolls in for decades the world knew them as five marines and a navy corpsman harlan block ira hayes franklin saulsley michael strank renee gagnon and john bradley but the truth it's messier what do you mean messier three of those six men strank block and saulsley were killed on iwo jima within the next few days and weeks they raised the flag and then went right back into the fight they never saw the photograph they never knew they were famous my god and the other three they survived

the war but even their stories are complicated ira hayes a native american man was haunted by the fane and died young and then decades later amateur historians started looking closer at the photo at the photo itself yeah they noticed things the type of gear the way a rifle was slung they argued that two of the men had been misidentified for over seventy years and in 2016 and again later the marine corps they agreed they announced that navy corpsman john bradley wasn't in the photo it was a marine named harold schultz and another renee gagnon was actually harold keller wait so the official history was wrong for seventy years the fog of war it doesn't just

obscure the battlefield it obscures memory it obscures the facts think about it from a photographer's perspective it's chaos you're trying not to get killed while also doing your job identifying people in a split second moment it's nearly impossible the photo becomes the truth even if the details underneath are shifting sand so this image born from chaos and corrected seventy years later goes on to do what it becomes the entire symbol of the war effort on the home front it was published just two days later it won the pulitzer prize that year but more than that it was used for the seventh war bond tour and raised $26,000,000,000 26,000,000,000 with a b it rallied a nation

that was getting profoundly weary of war it gave them a symbol of collective effort of inevitable victory it was so powerful it was eventually cast in bronze creating the marine corps war memorial in arlington it's a pattern we see again and again isn't it a single visceral image comes to stand in for a vast complicated event it simplifies it it has to you can't put the full thirty six day battle the 6,500 americans killed the 21,000 japanese killed into a single frame you just can't so you get this a moment of upward motion of hope rosenthal himself said you don't come away saying you got a great shot you don't know mhmm and what that

photo doesn't show what no photo can show is the cost of getting that flagpole to the top of that hill the image is about triumph the story behind it it's about sacrifice the photo shows six men the battle was fought by 70,000 and i think that's the real legacy of the image it asks us to remember not just the six we can see but all the others we can't