“Denver
has had its share of war-hero visitors in the past week. Gens. Patton and Doolittle paraded down the
main stem of the city before giving an interview that was front page news in
the city papers. Then, yesterday, heros
of the Iwo Jima flag-raising were in town. (Survivors was the word I meant to
use.)”
--Letter
from my father, Boulder, Colo., to his father, Bloomington, Kans., Saturday,
June 16, 1945. Iwo Jima is a small
Japanese island, of about eight square miles, located in the Pacific 700 miles
south of Tokyo. The Battle of Iwo Jima
lasted from February 16 to March 26, 1945, during which time 21,844 Japanese
and 6,821 Americans were killed. U.S. forces raised two flags on Mount
Suribachi, on the south end of the island, on February 23, 1945. Both flag-raisings were photographed and the
second flag-raising was captured in an iconic photograph, taken by Joe
Rosenthal. Only three of the six
flag-raisers in the photo survived the battle.
The flag-raising and the subsequent participation of the surviving
flag-raisers in a war bond drive were the subject of Clint Eastwood’s movie, Flags of Our Fathers. My father’s choice of words ("survivors," perhaps not "heros") is very
interesting. He, like the flag-raisers
themselves, seems not to have seen the flag-raising as especially heroic, given
the context of the entire battle.
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