Following an investigation, the U.S. Marine Corps announced last week that it had misidentified one of the six men in the famous 1945 Wold War II photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.
“Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts six United States Marines raising a U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.
The photograph was first published in Sunday newspapers on February 25, 1945. It was extremely popular and was reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication and came to be regarded in the United States as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and quite possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time.
Rosenthal didn’t have time to get the names of the men in it. That was left to the Marines, and it turns out they didn’t get it right. Three Marines depicted in the photograph, Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, and Private First Class Franklin Sousley were killed in action over the next few days. The three surviving flag-raisers were Private First Class Rene Gagnon, Private First Class Ira Hayes, and Private First Class Harold Schultz who was not identified as being in the photograph until 71 years later (June 2016). David Martin at CBS Evening News reports.
[Via CBS Evening News]
