Rye, New York -- Fifty years ago this weekend I was among 75,000 Marines who landed on the black, volcanic sands of Iwo Jima. A month later, the island secured, 25,851 fewer men boarded the transports that took us back to Maui. It is these men, more than 19,000 wounded, 6,821 killed in action, who are largely forgotten as time erodes memory. What we remember is the celebrated flag-raising on the fourth day of battle; or rather the restaging of it for posterity and the greater glory of the Marine Corps.
Every war has its defining battle which in time transcends its own reality to become part of the mythology of the period. Joshua's trumpet at Jericho; the Trojan horse; Washington crossing the Delaware -- these images remain fixed in the fluid events that encompassed them. We do not "long remember" the dead at Gettysburg so much as Lincoln's address. The Battle of the Bulge, technically a defeat for the Allies in World War II, was turned into victory in our minds by the peppery language of Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, who said "nuts" when asked to surrender.
Iwo was such a defining battle, in the scale of modern warfare perhaps the last pitched battle in history. It was not the bloodiest or most costly. The short-lived invasion of Tarawa was fiercer, the months of jungle warfare on Guadalcanal more grueling. Far more men were killed or wounded in the drawn-out conquest of Okinawa.
Yet Iwo remains the Mother of all Battles, the best remembered and most glorified of the Pacific war. Although it had its share of carnage, by which we too often measure victory, Iwo had something else. It had a mountain -- small as mountains go -- and it had a flag. In fact, two flags; and it is the latter that became the sanctified symbol of our march toward Japan, a dramatic tribute to the bravery of men who were brave out of necessity. It is this happenstance re-enactment of the flag-raising that we have honored for 50 years.
Iwo Jima thus became a battle waiting for John Wayne. From it, as Karal Marling and John Wetenhall so eloquently write in their book, "Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories and the American Hero," sprang the iconography of valor that persists to this day: Three movies re-enacting the re-enactment, uncountable replicas on postage stamps, war-bond and recruiting posters, dinnerwear and a variety of souvenirs. Statues of the flag-raising stood proudly in Times Square and on Constitution Avenue, not to mention a floral replica that rolled through Pasadena in a Rose Bowl parade.
The climax occurred when an 850-ton bronze statue was dedicated in Arlington National Cemetery nine years after the battle. The sculptor, Felix DeWeldon, spent the remainder of his career turning out "statues" of all sizes to meet the demand.
At the time, the true story of the flag-raising was not well known. The capture of Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the island, took place against scattered opposition by a patrol of 40 Marines and was little noted in the heat of battle elsewhere. Those who made it to the top carried a makeshift staff and to it rigged a small flag. The Marine photographer, Lou Lowery, caught the event's casual spontaneity with his camera and ambled back down the mountain.
Had matters stopped here, Iwo Jima would have gone down in history as just another hard-won battle. As it happened, the "brass," ever aware of the publicity value of a flag-raising, and the singularity of this one, seized the chance to glorify Old Glory once more.
When word reached the command on the beach, it was relayed to Marine General "Howlin' Mad" Smith. With him at the time was James V. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, who had come ashore to review the operation. For their benefit, a second flag-raising was ordered. A larger flag, borrowed from the Navy, and a more durable staff were secured and carried up Mount Suribachi in time for Smith and Forrestal to witness the theatrics of conquest. Not by chance they were accompanied by an Associated Press photographer named Joe Rosenthal.
The original flag-raisers had by this time returned to battle and a new crew was hastily assembled. In the whipping wind, as they struggled the staff into place, Rosenthal clicked his Speed Graphic to produce what is arguably the most widely reprinted photograph in modern times. Rosenthal was given a raise by his superiors and, deservedly, achieved fame. Lowery faded into obscurity. Thus was the original event airbrushed from history and retrofitted with a photogenic replay that substituted for the increasingly bloody and unfinished battle itself.
Soon afterward, three of the stand-in flag-raisers were flown home to be lionized on war-bond and recruiting drives, dined by Hollywood celebrities and otherwise exploited by the Marine Corps in the service of public relations. One of these men was Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, originally trained as a paratrooper and a reluctant hero who resisted return to the States. However, in war orders are orders and in the end Hayes found himself wearing the silver slippers of fame.
The question must be asked, was Iwo worth the price? At the time, there seemed little doubt that it was. It came when a war-weary public was by no means certain that the end was in sight, and the flag-raising, if not the battle itself, was a morale booster. The Bomb had not been dropped and the Japanese showed no signs of surrendering.
In hindsight, the answer is not so simple. Iwo was captured so that B-29 bombers taking off for Tokyo from Saipan might have an emergency landing field, if crippled, on their return flight. In the end, Iwo cost more lives than it saved. Thus the flag-raising, in its visual splendor, became the sacred text that justified dubious sacrifice.
It remains so to this day. Highways are named Iwo Jima, and Iwo Jima Survivors Associations have sprung up around the country, as though, somehow, it is more honorable to have survived than to have been killed. Today, the Marine Corps is Iwo Jima. All but ignored is the Army regiment that took over at battle's end (capturing an additional 1,605 prisoners), the Pacific fleet that blasted Japanese bunkers, the Coast Guard transports that delivered thousands of Marines to the beaches under fire.
"This will give us a Marine Corps for the next 500 years," Secretary Forrestal exclaimed at the flag-raising. Always fearful of losing its independence, the Corps was happy to agree. It remains, in the spirit of the flag-raising, probably the best trained and toughest group of fighting men we have.
But the last act of the battle had not been played out. One final casualty was yet to be recorded. Ira Hayes, dispatched by President Truman on his path of ersatz glory, was to play the role of human icon.
Public appearances, television interviews, a walk-on flag-raiser in movie, overnight stays in the best hotels -- all this and the honor bestowed on him by Vice President Nixon at the dedication of the Iwo Jima Memorial at Arlington National cemetery took their toll. Hayes was not cut for these ostentatious demands of media-made valor, which contradicted the simple life on the Arizona reservation where he had grown up. Cast adrift from his tribal past, sacrificed to our need for heroes, Hayes came down from his second climb up the mountain wounded by friendly fire. Alcohol had become a crutch in these ordeals and when he died alcohol was listed as the cause of death.
Perhaps. A more painful reason may be the pressure imposed on him by the hero's role he never sought. Hayes was the last Iwo marine to die in action. Buried at Arlington, he lies in the shadow of the bronze likeness that haunted him during the final years of his short life.
David Dempsey, a retired journalist, was a combat correspondent with the Fourth Marine Division at Iwo Jima.