It Was the Second Flag, Not the First: The Real Story Behind the Iwo Jima Memorial

The Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, depicts what most Americans assume was a single triumphant moment: six Marines planting the flag atop a hard-won mountain. In reality, the photo immortalized in bronze captures the second flag-raising that day, not the first, and the full story behind it is far messier than the monument's clean lines suggest.

On This Day

On this day in 1939, baseball legend Lou Gehrig delivered his famous "luckiest man" farewell speech at Yankee Stadium after being diagnosed with the disease that would later bear his name, a reminder that American resilience shows up in arenas far beyond the battlefield.

A Battle Few Expected to Be So Costly

American forces invaded Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, expecting a relatively short fight for a small volcanic island strategically positioned between American bomber bases and mainland Japan. Instead, the battle dragged on for 36 brutal days, becoming one of the bloodiest engagements in Marine Corps history. Roughly 7,000 Americans were killed and over 19,000 wounded taking an island just eight square miles in size, while Japanese casualties ran even higher among a garrison ordered to fight to the death rather than surrender.

There Were Actually Two Flags

On the morning of February 23, after Marines fought their way to the summit of Mount Suribachi, a small group raised a modest American flag taken from a Navy ship, the USS Missoula. Cheers erupted from Marines below and ship horns sounded offshore. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, watching from a vessel nearby, decided he wanted that historic flag as a personal memento, prompting Marines to send up a second, larger flag, more visible from a distance, to replace it. It was this second, far less dramatic replacement raising that photographer Joe Rosenthal happened to capture.

A Photo Rosenthal Almost Missed

Rosenthal had been climbing Mount Suribachi when a Marine coming down told him the flag-raising had already happened. He decided to continue climbing anyway, purely to get a view of the island from the summit. Arriving just as Marines were preparing to swap the flags, he swung his camera around and captured the image without any time to compose a careful shot, snapping it from the hip in roughly a quarter of a second. He didn't realize what he'd captured until well after the film had been processed back on Guam.

Decades of Mistaken Identity

For more than 70 years, the Marine Corps misidentified several of the men in the photograph. Corporal Harlon Block was mistaken for a different Marine, Sergeant Hank Hansen, an error not corrected until 1947. In 2016 and again in 2019, historians using painstaking photo analysis identified two more men in the image incorrectly credited for decades, including discovering that Pfc. Harold Schultz, not Navy corpsman John Bradley, the figure made famous in the bestselling book "Flags of Our Fathers," was actually the man at the base of the flagpole.

Ira Hayes and a Hero's Welcome He Never Wanted

One of the six men in the photograph, Ira Hayes, was a member of the Pima tribe from Arizona. Pulled off the island to tour the country promoting war bonds alongside the other surviving flag-raisers, Hayes struggled deeply with the attention and with survivor's guilt over comrades who never made it home. He developed severe alcoholism in the years that followed and died in 1955 at just 32 years old, found in a ditch near his Arizona reservation. His story was later memorialized in Johnny Cash's recording of "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," a song that bluntly captured the gap between the country's celebration of the photograph and the quiet collapse of one of the men in it.

A Memorial Honoring Every Marine, Not Just Six

Sculptor Felix de Weldon spent years creating the bronze memorial based on Rosenthal's photograph, dedicated in Arlington in 1954 on the 179th anniversary of the Marine Corps' founding. Though modeled on six specific men, the memorial is officially dedicated to every Marine who has died in service since 1775, a far broader purpose than the single famous image suggests.

RV Families Visiting Arlington

The memorial sits just outside Arlington National Cemetery, drawing RV and traveling families who often pair a visit there with a walk through the cemetery itself and a stop at the nearby Netherlands Carillon. Arlington's location just across the Potomac from Washington means strong, reliable cellular coverage, a welcome break for families navigating a packed multi-stop day among the capital region's dense cluster of monuments and cemeteries.

Staying Connected Beyond the Capital Region

Families combining a D.C.-area memorial trip with a longer RV journey through more rural Virginia or Maryland countryside often find the connectivity gap reappears quickly once they leave the city behind. A no-contract cellular internet setup bridges that gap, useful for researching the next stop, checking campground details, or simply staying in touch with family once the strong urban signal fades into quieter countryside.

A Quick Voice-Search Answer: Was the Iwo Jima Flag Photo Staged?

Ask a voice assistant this and you'll often hear a flat no, which is accurate, but incomplete. The photo wasn't staged in the sense of being arranged for the camera, but it does depict a second, planned flag-raising rather than the spontaneous first one most people assume it shows, a nuance worth understanding rather than dismissing as either fully staged or fully spontaneous.

A Verse for the Mountain

Psalm 121 speaks of lifting one's eyes to the hills, asking where help comes from. The Marines who fought their way up Mount Suribachi answered that question with their own lives, six of whom became briefly famous for a photograph that captured only seconds of a battle that cost thousands of men far more than a single iconic image could ever convey.

A First Flag That History Mostly Forgot

The smaller, original flag raised that morning, the one Secretary Forrestal wanted as a keepsake, is rarely mentioned alongside its more famous replacement. That first flag eventually made its way to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, where it's displayed today, a quieter artifact overshadowed almost entirely by the photograph taken of the flag that replaced it just hours later.

27 Medals of Honor in 36 Days

The Battle of Iwo Jima produced 27 Medals of Honor, more than any other single battle in American military history, a statistic that reflects both the extraordinary valor displayed there and the sheer brutality of fighting an enemy ordered never to surrender. Of the roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders on the island, only a few hundred survived to be taken prisoner, a near-total casualty rate on the Japanese side that made Iwo Jima one of the costliest battles of the entire Pacific war for both sides combined.

Worth Remembering at the Memorial Wall

Standing in front of the bronze memorial today, most visitors see exactly what the Marine Corps intended in 1954: a triumphant, idealized moment of victory. Knowing the fuller story, the mistaken identities, the forgotten first flag, and Ira Hayes's tragic life afterward, doesn't diminish that moment. It just makes the men who lived it feel like men again, rather than figures permanently frozen in a single, simplified pose.

A Final Detail Worth Knowing

Joe Rosenthal, the photographer behind the image, spent the rest of his life deflecting credit for it, insisting the Marines themselves deserved the recognition, not the man who happened to be standing in the right place with a camera at the right second.

If your family's trip to Arlington or any veterans memorial needs reliable internet, Backroads WiFi has no-contract options at www.BackroadsWiFi.com.

One More Fact Worth Knowing

The war bond drive built around Rosenthal's photograph and the surviving flag-raisers' cross-country tour raised a record $26 billion, funding that helped finance the remaining months of the war against Japan before the conflict's end later that same year.

A Closing Thought for Arlington

A photograph taken in a fraction of a second, of a flag most of the men involved barely thought twice about at the time, became the most reproduced image of the entire war. The real story behind it, mistaken identities, a forgotten first flag, and a Native American hero who never wanted the fame it brought him, says more about the cost of that island than the bronze statue alone ever could.