The Daily Mail in the U.K. is reporting that WWII veterans are furious over next week’s cover of TIME and the manipulation of the famous photo of marines raising the United States flag during the battle at Iwo Jima after TIME replaced the flag with a tree for the article, “How to Win The War on Global Warming”.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jimo, photo by Joe Rosenthal

One Imo Jima veteran, 81-year-old Donald Mates, felt the Times’ cover was “an absolute disgrace” and that “Whoever did this is going to hell.” He went to say it was a “mortal sin”.

Why would veterans be upset about TIME magazine essentially photoshopping, or digitally altering a photo, albeit a rather famous one from so long ago?

We decided to take a look back at the history of the photographer and the photo that spoke more than a thousand words.

World War II, the Battle of Iwo Jima, and Joe Rosenthal

Joe Rosenthal was a photojournalist in San Francisco when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Joe had been classified 4-F which meant he couldn’t be drafted due to physical limitations. Joe, with his nearsightedness and thick bi-focal glasses, enlisted in the U.S. Maritime Service after a friend waived the eye exam.

In 1944 Joe managed to obtain his credentials as an Associated Press war photographer where he was shipped out to the Pacific and covered the United States’ invasions of Peleliu, Angaur, and Hollandia.

February 19, 1945

Iwo Jima was the single most bloody battle of the Pacific War, a battle that lasted thirty days and ended in the deaths of over 6,000 Americans and 20,000 Japanese on a volcanic island the size of eight square miles.

In order for the United States to be able to continue B-29 raids on mainland Japan, the small island of Iwo Jima was crucial. The island contained three airstrips used by the suicidal Japanese Kamikaze pilots. After 3 days of heavy bombing by carrier based planes and medium based bombers, 70,000 Marines began an invasion against an estimated 22,000 Japanese soldiers.

The Japanese had built over 800 bunkers or “pillboxes” and constructed over 3 miles of tunnels. Volcanic ash made the 100pd packs almost impossible for the Marines plus the steep slopes of the beaches that were heavily covered by Japanese gunners.

Some of the most intense fighting occurred as the Marines moved up Mt. Suribachi on the south end of the island. Flamethrowers and satchel charges had to be used against Japanese entrenched in the tunnels while bombs were dropped by Navy and Marine pilots, at times only a few hundred yards from the advancing Marines. Navy cruisers and destroyers bombarded the island while the Marines fought the Japanese in a battle that lasted for a month.

At the same time Kamikaze attacks were intense against the American fleet, the carrier Bismark was sunk, the Saratoga, damaged. The fighting on the island resembled trench warfare from WWI.

Rosenthal arrived on Iwo Jima several hours after the Marines landed. It took the Marines five days to reach the summit of Mt. Suribachi, on the southern end of the island, a gain of only 500 meters. It was then that the first photo was taken of the original flag planted by the Marines. Photographer Louis Lowery had snapped the picture for the Marine publication, Leatherneck.

Louis Lowery’s photo of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jimo

Lowery asked Rosenthal if he’d like to walk up to the site, in Rosenthal’s words, “for the view”.

The two reached the top after a 550-foot climb where the men had to sidestep “Jap mines” and “pillboxes” or Japanese bunkers that Marines were working to clear. Rosenthal recounted that the Marine commanders had decided to replace the original flag with one that could be viewed from offshore. Rosenthal said he was “too short to get a full shot so he had to “pile up rocks and sandbags from a pillbox” and it was then that he took the now famous Pulitzer prize winning shot.

Total casualties were 6,821 U.S. personnel dead, 19,217 wounded, combat fatigue, 28,686, with an estimated 20,000 Japanese military dead and 1083 taken as prisoners of war.

Over one-third of the 77,000 Marines were either killed, wounded, or suffered from combat fatigue.

Rosenthal’s photo is considered the most famous image of WWII and garnered a Pulitzer Prize in 1945. The photo of the five Marines and one Navy corpsmen raising the United States flag at the peak of Mt. Suribachi was chosen for a 3-cent stamp and used on 3.5 million Treasury Bond posters for the war bond drive. It was also used as the subject of the Marine Corp Memorial Bronze sculpture near Arlington National Cemetery.

Rosenthal’s photo immortalized one moment in time, when American men and women fought in a war that raged across the globe, it captured the intense, deadly, and vicious 30 day battle waged on 8 square miles of volcanic rock in the Pacific ocean. The photo symbolizes the hard, long, but in the end,victorious struggle of the men and women of our military who fought WWII and the citizens at home who stood behind them.

The fact that veterans are upset means that TIME has monkeyed around with something that means a hell of a lot to the men and women whose opinion on this matter should count for something. After all, without their actions the outcome could have been far, far different with the loss of most, if not all our precious freedoms, including one where TIME has the right to screw around with the single most symbolic photo of WWII.

By LBG

Source – New York Post
Source – Battle of Iwo Jima
Image – Louis Lowery Iwo Jima Photo
Image - Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
Source – Washington Post – Joe Rosenthal: Shot Flag Raising at Iwo Jima

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