The flag was small — roughly three feet by four and a half feet — but the men on the beach could see it.

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had come ashore that morning to observe the assault.

When he saw the flag go up, he turned to General Holland Smith and said, according to later accounts, that raising the flag on Suribachi meant that the Marine Corps would exist for the next five hundred years.

He wanted the flag as a souvenir.

The Marine battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, heard about the plan to take the first flag and decided to replace it with a larger one — a flag that the whole beachhead could see, and one that would stay on the mountain rather than disappear into a military collection.