The Photograph That Changed Everything

On the morning of February 23, 1945, on a volcanic island eight miles long in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, six men raised an American flag on a mountaintop they had just helped capture at tremendous cost.

One of them was a twenty-two-year-old Akimel O’odham man from the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.

His name was Ira Hamilton Hayes.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal was on the mountain that morning.

He had climbed Suribachi not knowing exactly what he would find, carrying his camera and doing the job he had done on dozens of Pacific island battlefields.

When he saw the men preparing to raise a larger replacement flag on a length of heavy pipe, he scrambled to position himself on a mound of dirt and volcanic rock, aimed, and pressed the shutter at what he later described as a moment he almost missed entirely.

The resulting photograph — six Marines and Navy corpsmen raising a flag against a grey Pacific sky — became the most reproduced photograph in American history.

It appeared on stamps, posters, war bond materials, and eventually became the basis for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.

It was transmitted around the world within days.

It landed on the front pages of newspapers from New York to London to Sydney.

Franklin Roosevelt saw it and understood immediately what it meant for public morale in a war that still had eight brutal months to run.

Ira Hayes is on the far left of the photograph, one hand on the pole, his face turned slightly away from the camera.

He would spend the rest of his life inside that image — and find that there was almost no room left for the actual person.

He was twenty-two years old when the picture was taken.

He would be dead before he turned thirty-three.

What happened in between is a story that the famous photograph, frozen at its moment of triumph, has never been able to tell.

Where He Came From