Who Were the Iwo Jima Flag Raisers? How Two Amateur Historians Corrected the Record

By Todd DePastino

On February 23, 1945, five days into the Battle of Iwo Jima, a patrol of U.S. Marines raised an American flag atop Mount Suribachi. A few hours later, a second, larger flag was raised, and Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the moment in what would become the most famous American war photograph of the twentieth century.

For seventy years, Americans believed they knew the identities of the six men in that image. They did not.

The history of the Iwo Jima flag raisers is a story of battlefield chaos, propaganda, memory, and the painstaking detective work of two smart amateur historians who’ve only recently corrected the record.

On the morning of February 23, Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Marine Division, fought their way to the summit of Mount Suribachi, a modest hump of 500+ feet on the pork-chop-shaped island’s southern tip. To signal the capture of the high point, a small American flag was raised around 10:20 a.m.

This was a big deal. Never before had the U.S. flag flown on Japanese soil. Iwo Jima was considered one of Japan’s home islands.

So, when the flag went up, Marines across the island cheered. Ships offshore blew their horns. And Marine photographer Lou Lowry captured the triumphant moment. It felt like victory, even though the battle would rage for another 32 days.

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal was there, having either just arrived on the beach or still on a landing craft, depending on which version of the story you read. Forrestal immediately understood the significance of the moment, turning to Major General Holland Smith to say, “the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.”

The Secretary demanded the flag as a souvenir.

“The hell with that!” exclaimed Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson when he heard of Forrestal’s order. Johnson was commander of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, which had planted the flag on Suribachi. He wanted to keep the flag for the battalion, so he ordered a second, larger flag, up the mountain so he could keep the original. (Johnson got his wish, and the flag is now at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.)

A rifle squad, communications wire, batteries, and a new 96″ by 56″ flag gotten from USS LST-779 headed back up Suribachi.

Also hustling up the hill was AP photographer Joe Rosenthal. Rosenthal had heard there was to be a flag raising, but Lou Lowry, who was coming down the hill, told him he missed it. Rosenthal climbed to the summit anyhow.

He’d missed the first flag raising, but not the second. Stacking rocks to improve his view, Rosenthal caught out of the corner of his eye Marines gathering quickly to raise the second flag. He swung around and snapped a photo without looking through the camera’s viewfinder. He later said, “When you take a picture like that, you don’t come away saying you got a great shot. You don’t know.”

He believed another photo he took moments later, the celebratory “Gung Ho” image, would be the famous one. Instead, one of his candid frames became an icon.

Back on the black-sand shore, Rosenthal removed the roll of film he’d shot and placed it in a courier bag destined for development on Guam. AP Guam, in turn, wired the famous photo to New York. Twenty-four hour after Rosenthal took the shot, the picture began appearing in newspapers across the country, electrifying the homefront.

Word got back to Rosenthal that his Iwo Jima photo was famous. Someone asked him if he staged it. Assuming it was the “Gung Ho” photo, Rosenthal said, “Well, yeah.”

That comment lives on as the source of the myth that the Flag-Raisers of Iwo Jima was a posed picture.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. No photographer in their right mind would have staged a photo of men’s sides and backs with faces all obscured.

The photo caused such a sensation that President Franklin Roosevelt himself ordered that the men in it be identified and brought home for the Seventh War Loan Drive.

The immediacy Commander-in-Chief’s demand triggered a mad rush to find six Marines now scattered across Iwo Jima, either deep in combat, or wounded, or dead. Public Affairs (PA) officers needed names quickly. Bond drives required living heroes.

The interrogations started.

“Were you part of the second flag raising? Do you know the names of the men who were?”

Pfc. Rene Gagnon, the “runner” or messenger for Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, had carried the second flag up Suribachi (along with replacement radio batteries). PA brass asked him: “Who was with you?”

Gagnon was afraid to answer.

Pfc. Ira Hayes, who was in the photo and didn’t want to leave his men on Iwo Jima, threatened to cut Gagnon’s throat if Gagnon betrayed him. But the Marine Corps warned that Gagnon faced criminal prosecution if he withheld names, so Gagnon identified Hayes, Henry Hansen, Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, and Michael Strank as being part of the flag raising.

The result was an unconfirmed lineup that hardened into official history:

• Michael Strank

• Henry Hansen

• Franklin Sousley

• Ira Hayes

• John Bradley (Navy corpsman)

• Rene Gagnon

Only after the war, in 1947, would the USMC quietly make one correction: Harlan Block replaced Hank Hansen as the man at the base of the flagpole. Gagnon had mistaken him for Harlan Block. The error had only been exposed because Block’s mother had recognized his rear end in the photo. “That’s my boy,” she said.

The other mistakes in this list of flag raisers remained untouched for decades.

Part of the error stemmed from battlefield confusion and trauma. Both Hansen and Block were killed on Iwo Jima on March 1. So was Michael Strank. Sousley died on March 21. The only ones who lived long enough to return to the States were Gagnon, Hayes, and Navy corpsmen John Bradley.

The culture and ethos of the Marine Corps itself also contributed to historical error. The Marines exist to fight as one, not to keep historical records. When the Marines announced the names of the flag raisers, those became the names, no questions asked. Even Marines who knew otherwise kept quiet, as the ethos of loyalty demanded.

Eric Krelle and Harold Schultz

The official Marine Corps version of the flag raising story remained unchallenged until 2014, when Eric Krelle, a toy designer for Oriental Trading Company, took a fresh look at the evidence and began asking impertinent questions.

At home in Omaha, he began systematically reviewing every photograph taken on Iwo Jima in February and March 1945.  He ran across a photo of John Bradley taken on February 23—same days as flag raising—and compared it to the famous Rosenthal shot.

It was obvious to Krelle that Bradley was not the same man in the flag-raising picture.

The discrepancies were too apparent to deny:

• Cuffed Pants: Bradley’s trousers were cuffed high with leggings; the man in Rosenthal’s photo wore uncuffed trousers.

• Soft Utility Cap: The man in the photo wore a soft utility cap under his helmet; Bradley did not.

• Equipment Belt: The man carried standard rifleman gear (ammo and wire cutters); Bradley carried medical equipment.

• Body Type and Posture: The silhouette matched Franklin Sousley, not Bradley.

Krelle concluded that the man identified as Bradley in the third-from-the-right position was actually Franklin Sousley, who would die on Iwo Jima.

But, if that was the case, then who was the unidentified Marine in Sousley’s supposed second-from-the-left position?

To solve the mystery, Krelle studied Bill Genaust’s color film of the flag raising frame by frame. He noticed a distinctive leather strap dangling from one Marine’s helmet—something no one else wore. That Marine appeared repeatedly in Suribachi photos.

Eventually, a caption in one photo identified him: Harold Schultz.

Shultz was from Detroit and had lied about his age to join the Marine Corps in 1943. He’d been wounded on Iwo Jima on March 13—eighteen days after the flag raising–and sent home. After his discharge, he got a job in Los Angeles as a postal sorter and lived a quiet life, hardly mentioning the war. His step-daughter recalls him making mention of Iwo Jima and the flag raising only once shortly before he died. The step-daughter exclaimed, “My God, Harold, you were a hero.”

“No,” Schultz shot back. “I was a Marine.” Then, he fell silent.

When Krelle went public, historians dismissed him. The Marine Corps tried to ignore him. But the evidence was overwhelming.

In 2016, the Marine Corps convened a special investigative panel, which reviewed the case and officially recognized Harold Schultz as a flag raiser and removed John Bradley from the photo.

Brent Westemeyer and Harold “Pie” Keller

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Another amateur historian, Brent Westemeyer of Iowa, noticed something else: Rene Gagnon did not match the almost entirely hidden figure on the far side of the flag pole in Rosenthal’s photograph.

Like his friend Krelle, Westemeyer began analyzing film footage frame-by-frame, and poring over all the photographs taken on Iwo Jima.

Westemeyer found repeated visual discrepancies with the man labeled “Gagnon.” In particular:

• The figure in Rosenthal’s photograph wore a wedding ring—something Gagnon, who was not married at the time of the battle, did not have.

• Gagnon’s face—which was captured in other photographs that day—did not match the man in the flag-raising film and photo.

• Uniform details and bandoliers, body composition and posture, all suggested to Westemeyer that the hidden man was Harold “Pie” Keller, a Marine Raider veteran from Iowa.

Keller had served at Midway, Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Iwo Jima. He initially denied being a flag raiser. Like Ira Hayes, he wanted to stay with his unit, not be sent on a Stateside bond tour.

Like Schultz, Keller survived Iwo and returned home to lead a quiet life. He married his wife Ruby, raised three children, and built a life of service in his hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa, including 30 years on the volunteer fire department, ultimately becoming fire chief before his death in 1979.

But there were strong hints all along that Keller was one of the flag-raising six. He wrote as much to Ruby while he was still on Iwo. After he returned home, everyone in his town acknowledged his role in the photo. There was even an intriguing piece of personal history in Keller’s private scrapbook: a stern letter from Major General Philip H. Torrey, dated 17 September 1945. Torrey was then commander of the Marine Barracks at Quantico, Virginia:

Any unproved and malicious gossip about any member of our Marine Corps is a direct reflection on you as a member or former member of our Corps. Nothing is more malicious and indecent than the tearing down of characters and lives through the spreading of untruths.

The letter in Keller’s scrapbook highlights the pressures faced by Marines who knew they had done something extraordinary but were discouraged from speaking up or correcting errors in the public record. There was, no doubt, an institutional resistance in the Marine Corps to question the initial identifications of the flag raisers.

As with Eric Krelle’s work, that of Brent Westemeyer compelled the creation of a new Marine Corps board of investigation. The investigators concluded that Westemeyer was correct: Pie Keller, not Rene Gagnon, was the flag raiser second from the right.

The photograph of the flag on Iwo Jima was forced to carry more meaning than any one image or moment could bear. It is not simply a record of a turning point in the war or a symbol of triumph. It was elevated to a transcendent expression of service and sacrifice, patriotic unity and purpose. It was freighted with so much cultural baggage, it practically invited debunking.

The Marine Corps, to its credit, ultimately accepted the evidence and corrected the record.

The Marine Corps’ Commandant, General Robert Neller, was so eloquent and insightful in acknowledging their mistake that he deserves the last word:

Our history is important to us, and we have a responsibility to ensure it’s right. Although the Rosenthal image is iconic and significant, to Marines it’s not about the individuals and never has been. Simply stated, our fighting spirit is captured in that frame, and it remains a symbol of the tremendous accomplishments of our Corps — what they did together and what they represent remains most important. That doesn’t change.