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| Robert Sherrod, TIME Magazine War Correspondent. Pacific Theater: Attu, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. |
by Robert L. Sherrod
For what it is worth, here is the way it looked to me. I set
foot on Iwo’s coarse, black sand late on the afternoon of D-Day, 19 February
1945, with fifteen officers and men of the 24th Marines, 4th Division, the
senior of whom was Lieutenant Colonel Austin R. Brunelli, the regimental
executive officer. Of our LCVP load, incidentally, only one was killed and one
wounded during the twenty-six-day Iwo battle, which must have been the lowest
casualty rate for any unit of any description.
I spent two days on that very hot beachhead, then I walked
back to the water line to catch a boat back to my transport, the Bayfield,
where I would write stories about the battle’s bloody beginning.
On 23 February, after two days on board the Bayfield, I was
ready—and moderately willing—to go ashore again. This time I hitched a ride
with the 4th Division commander, Major General Clifton B. Cates, in an LSM; the
surf had become so heavy an LCVP could not penetrate to the beach. Soon after
our craft was underway I recall that a photographer took a picture of the
general and me. Just then we spotted a flag flying atop Mount Suribachi, which
I recorded in the pocket notebook I always carried: “Approaching control boat.
Can see troops standing on Suribachi and flag flying.” The time was 1140; I
thought the flag had just been raised but others say it went up at 1030.
General Cates looked at the flag and said, curiously, “I’m glad—Keller Rockey
[the 5th Marine Division commander] is a fine fellow”—as though he believed the
capture of Suribachi signaled the end of the battle, and he had missed it.
It was 1230 before General Cates and I got ashore on Yellow
Beach 1. I left Cates because I had already spent two days with his division,
and I wanted to see how the Fifth was getting along (the three division command
posts—the Third was also beginning to land now—were within spitting distance of
each other anyway). The V Marine Amphibious Corps commander, Major General
Harry Schmidt, had also come ashore by now and was conferring with General Rockey
at his command post (CP).
The executive officer of the 28th Marines, Lieutenant
Colonel Robert H. Williams, came in to brief the generals on conditions on the
southern end of the island. They congratulated Williams on the capture of
Suribachi. “It wasn’t so tough,” he said, “there wasn’t a great deal of
opposition after we got past the guns at the base of the mountain.” He lamented
the shortage of prisoners; the 28th had captured only two, both badly wounded.
When I continued walking toward Suribachi I stopped at the
command post of Col. Harry (“The Horse”) Liversedge, the tall, Lincolnesque
commander of the 28th, who said his men tried hard to capture prisoners:
“Before we blow a cave we give them a chance. We send an interpreter up to the
cave and he tells the Japs they’ll be well treated if they surrender.” He
added, “They never do.”
With several other correspondents, among them John Lardner
of the New Yorker and Alwyn Lee, a droll Australian, I had intended to climb
the 556 feet to the top of Suribachi but it was in the late afternoon and the
way was steep for old newsmen in their thirties. We slept in a hole in the G-2
area of the 5th Division command post, courtesy of Lt. Col. George Roll. I
didn’t reach the top of Suribachi until a year and a half later, via jeep.
I find nothing more about the flag raising in my Iwo notes;
I don’t recall being conscious of the change to a second flag—the one made
famous by Joe Rosenthal’s photograph. Nearly everyone on the island faced
northward, away from Suribachi.
The Rosenthal photograph, unquestionably the visual triumph
of World War II, made its mark on the United States only two days after Joe
clicked his shutter—it hit the front pages on 25 February, I later
learned—because by 1945 the process of transmitting film had been speeded up. A
plane took film once a day from Iwo to Guam, where the Navy had a good
darkroom. The developed photographs were then wirephotoed to San Francisco for
world-wide distribution.
On Iwo we—rather I—didn’t know anything about the tremendous
impact of the Rosenthal photograph, and Joe himself has always candidly
admitted that he initially thought the flood of congratulatory messages he
received referred to the “gung-ho” shot of helmet-waving Marines that he posed
after the flag raising. (Rosenthal complicated matters by replying “Yes” to the
AP’s query, “Was the photograph posed?”)
My editors on Time led the 5 March issue of the magazine (on
the newsstands 1 March) with Joe’s photograph but the editors of Life were more
suspicious: it had to be posed, they believed, so they didn’t run it. Since I
was still on Iwo, I didn’t yet know of these decisions. I didn’t even know the
flag’s picture had been taken.
I left Iwo Jima 9 March on Adm. Kelly Turner’s flagship, El
Dorado, and managed to get several stories written before we docked at Apra
Harbor, Guam, forty-nine hours later. It was an exciting time on Guam:
photographs of the B-29’s first firebombing of Tokyo, flown during the night of
9-10 March, showed sixteen miles of Tokyo burnt out—and Iwo was already being
used as a haven for those AAF planes which had been damaged over Japan.
I find the first mention of Rosenthal’s masterpiece in my
notes of 12 March: Joe had become so famous he was going stateside for a
lecture tour, although some said the photograph was a fake. “But what a
picture,” I scribbled.
Among those disturbed by the authenticity of Rosenthal’s
photograph was Staff Sergeant Louis Lowery of Leatherneck, who came to see me.
He was more than lukewarm under the collar, calling the Rosenthal photo “grand
photographically but, in a fashion, historically phony, like Washington
crossing the Delaware.” What Lowery was sore about was the failure to credit
him with photographing the first or “real” flag raising. The quality of the photographs
was for him a secondary issue.
The AP got wind of my dispatch to Time, Inc., from Guam, and
made rather stiff representations to the editors: Rosenthal’s photograph was
neither phony nor posed, and Time and Life had better not say so. Oddly, the
editors never told me of the AP’s protest, and I didn’t find out about it until
nearly twenty years later, when I was lunching with an AP editor in New York.
There is no doubt that I went a bit overboard and I hereby apologize to the AP
and Joe Rosenthal. I’m glad my dispatch was published in neither magazine.
Time ran the “Story of a Picture” in the “Press” section of
its 26 March issue, and Life, same date, also explained the confusion about
who-got-there-first, using Rosenthal’s and Lowery’s photographs as well as
Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” which shows the Father of
His Country standing up in the boat; it was painted from models on the Rhine
River many years after the American Revolution. These stories were based
chiefly on dispatches I filed from Guam.
This was the first time the public had a chance to
distinguish between the first and second flag raisings, I believe. Muddying the
water was an AP story from Iwo which coincided with the wirephoto of
Rosenthal’s photograph: this story identified Platoon Sergeant Ernest I.
Thomas, Jr. of Tallahassee, Florida, as “the Marine who raised the flag atop
Mount Suribachi.” The photograph dominated page 1 of the New York Times 25
February; the news story about Thomas, on page 28, did say the “small flag was
supplanted soon by a larger one on a high staff,” but that told readers very
little. A third story, on page 22, identified Rosenthal as the AP photographer
who took an “outstanding series of pictures of the Iwo invasion.” A reader
would be justified in believing that Rosenthal of page 22 photographed Thomas
of page 28 as the chief flag raiser on page 1. What was needed was someone to
point out that Rosenthal didn’t photograph the original flag raising—which was
the one which Thomas helped to raise.
Sergeant Thomas was the platoon sergeant of the platoon that
helped raise the flag, though certainly not “the Marine who raised the flag.”
(He took over the platoon after his lieutenant was wounded on D-plus-two and
won a Navy Cross posthumously for his heroism that day.) When his death (on 3
March) was revealed by AP (from Tallahassee, 29 March) Thomas had become “the
Marine who planted the United States flag on Mount Suribachi… he put the flag
on the mountain top, then had his men dig in around it and guard it through the
night.” It is no wonder that the bewildered Florida legislature demanded that
Thomas be given the credit he failed to receive when the names of Rosenthal’s
flag raisers were published.
Ever since 1945 the citizens of “Boots” Thomas’s home town,
Monticello, Florida, led by his boyhood friend Dr. James Sledge, have grimly
insisted that Thomas be given his due; his gravestone in Roseland cemetery, I
learned when I visited Monticello in December 1980, is inscribed “Ernest I.
Thomas Jr., Sgt. USMCR, Mar. 10, 1924-Mar. 3, 1945. Killed in action on Iwo
Jima five days after raising the first flag on Mt. Suribachi.” (Actually it was
eight days.) Furthermore, plans were being made to erect a memorial alongside
Highway 90 on 22 February 1981; it would carry a bas-relief of a Lowery
photograph that showed Thomas standing atop Suribachi, rifle at the ready. At
one time Dr. Sledge and friends hoped to collect $100,000 from the public for
the memorial but they decided to go with the $7,000 in hand.
Not everyone on Guam favored enlightening the public. Edward
Steichen, the illustrious photographer, pleaded with me not to reveal that
Rosenthal’s photograph wasn’t the real first one; for the greater glory of the
Marine Corps it was better unsaid, he said. Steichen also showed me movies made
by the late Sergeant William Genaust, who stood alongside Rosenthal atop
Suribachi. It was remarkable that Genaust and Rosenthal recorded almost
precisely the same action on their film—a clip from the movie could substitute
for the still—yet the movie man’s work (and his name) are lost in the dimness
of time.
I admired Captain Steichen, USNR, at age 66 probably the
oldest officer in the Pacific—a year older than Douglas MacArthur—and I admired
the photographic team he had put together, quite a few of them former
colleagues of mine on Life whom he had commissioned lieutenant commanders and
lieutenants. The photographic record of the latter stages of the Pacific war is
certainly enriched by their efforts. But I had to disagree with him: I said the
truth about the flag hoistings would come out eventually, and it was better now
than later. I filed the story.
According to Robert Elson in the official company history,
The World of Time, Inc., Daniel Longwell, Life’s executive editor, who had
rejected the Rosenthal photograph, repented, saying, “The country believed in
that picture, and I just had to pipe down.” Not all Time, Inc., editors joined
him; five years after the war Arthur Tourtellot refused to publish the
photograph in Life’s Picture History of World War II.
I sometimes encounter veterans of Iwo who label Rosenthal’s
photograph as “posed, re-enacted, fake” and some nagging doubts do remain (why
would six husky men be required to raise a flag on a thin piece of Japanese
pipe with a following wind?). As for myself, I have long since accepted Joe’s
version as stated in his oral history interview with Ben Frank: “All of the
fortunate things that can happen in one picture happened together without any
urging on my part.”
The validity of the photograph is something else again. In
my opinion—and I find many Iwo types who feel the same way—the implications are
all wrong. Iwo wasn’t a matter of climbing the parapet and heroically planting
the flag there. It was tortuous, painful slogging northward on the
porkchop-shaped island, which eventually cost us 6,821 killed and 19,217
wounded. Suribachi was a symbol, and it was nice to have our flag up there, but
the action—and the horror—lay elsewhere—where three of the Rosenthal flag raisers,
as well as Sergeant Thomas, were killed. The inaccuracy was quaintly compounded
by the fact that the photograph that characterizes Iwo depicted the second flag
raising.
Of the clashes between British and French cavalry at
Waterloo John Keegan writes in his book, The Face of Battle: “A little inquiry
reveals, in any case, that formations were much less dense and speeds much
lower than casual testimony, and certainly the work of salon painters,
implies.” The renowned Iwo photograph is the salon painting of World War II.
