Half a dozen Marines raise the American flag on Iwo Jima. It is Feb. 23, 1945. Wire service photographer Joe Rosenthal captures the image: the flag, at a 45-degree angle, beginning to unfurl in the wind as the Marines struggle to push it upright high atop the Japanese island.
The photograph stirred a nation still reeling from Pearl Harbor.
"Nobody in Missoula seems to know the story," he says now.
And this is it.
A few hours before Rosenthal snapped the photo that captivated Americans, another group of Marines were dispatched to scale the mountain and raise a flag.
"If you get to the top," Col. Chandler Johnson told them, "put it up."
"He didn't say 'when you get to the top,' " Capt. Dave Severence remembered in "Flags of Our Fathers" by James Bradley. "He said 'if.' "
The flag came off the USS Missoula, a tank transport ship that was serving as a floating field hospital during the first days of the Battle of Iwo Jima, an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 Japanese soldiers.
The Marines made their way to the top. Among the half-dozen men: Louis Charlo, a Marine from Evaro.
They found a piece of pipe from a catch-system for rainwater the Japanese had constructed. Tied the flag to it.
And, at 10:20 a.m., hoisted the pole into position in the gusty wind, the first foreign flag to fly over Japanese soil.
That, Bill Worf and most of the 35,000 Marines on the island, noticed.
"It went through the ranks like an electric shock," says Worf, who was 18 years old that day and is now 78. "We were getting really chewed up by artillery strikes that had been called in from the top of Mount Suribachi. So it was a big deal to see that flag go up. When it went up, a lot of us thought in another day or two we'd wrap things up and go home."
That turned out to be far from the truth.
"The Japanese commander told his troops to fight to the death, and take 10 Marines with them," Worf said. "They were dug in more deeply than we had anticipated, and they fought hard. It was the first piece of the Japanese homeland they were losing."
The battle lasted another month after the flag went up.
Louis Lowery, a photographer for Leatherneck Magazine, took photos after the flag from the USS Missoula was raised. He posed the Marines, having one of them stand guard with a carbine.
At one point, he ran out of film and asked the Marines to wait while he reloaded his camera. They weren't happy. Men holding flags are easy targets.
Far below them, word spread that the flag had been raised. Thousands of Marines cheered and whistled. Ships offshore opened up their horns. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, on the island and caught up in the emotion, decided he wanted the flag as a souvenir.
"The hell with that!" announced Chandler Johnson, who figured the flag belonged to his Marine battalion. He sent an assistant to the beach to scare up another flag so the historic flag off the USS Missoula could be secured.
"And make it a bigger one," Johnson said as an afterthought.
Rosenthal and two combat photographers heard that another platoon was heading to the top of Suribachi with a flag and decided to join them.
No one else paid any attention. Replacing one flag with another, according to "Flags of Our Fathers," "had all the significance of a new football being tossed into a game in progress."
The second flag was larger. The new batch of Marines found a pole that weighed more than 100 pounds and tied the new flag to it.
The flag from the USS Missoula came down, and the new one went up. Rosenthal, milling around nearby, nearly missed the moment.
Pvt. Bob Campbell got the shot he wanted: the first flag coming down in the foreground, the new one going up behind it. Sgt. Bill Genaust, who had a movie camera, filmed the moment.
Rosenthal, who later did as Lowery had and posed the Marines around the flag, had no idea if he had a decent photo in the batch and wouldn't for quite awhile.
Besides, the flag replacement was such a non-event on Iwo Jima that day that the 2nd Battalion's Action Report for Feb. 23 - which detailed the first flag-raising, covered reconnaissance patrols, the blowing up of caves, the resistance by Japanese - never even mentioned it.
Rosenthal's film from that day was shipped off to Guam, 1,000 miles away. Technicians from a "pool lab" would develop it, censors would scrutinize it, there were several steps where someone could discard it.
Of the 12 exposures Rosenthal took on the mountain, two were ruined by streaks of light that had leaked through the camera housing. The two were adjacent to the famous image.
Slow as the process was, Rosenthal's dramatic photograph made its way onto the front pages of newspapers across America long before Lowery's military photos of the initial flag-raising found their way home.
It was almost a case where a picture lied. The photograph of what to everyone who was on Iwo Jima that day was a non-event, came to represent everything it was not: It was not the first foreign flag to fly over Japanese soil, it was not those Marines who headed up Suribachi unsure if the enemy was still waiting. There were the half-dozen Marines who actually raised the first flag on Iwo Jima, and then there were the half-dozen who were pictured in the famous photograph.
The flag from the USS Missoula that flew over Iwo Jima that day sits in storage, waiting for a new home in a Marine museum under construction in Virginia.
Bill Worf wanted to bring the flag to the ship's namesake - it was named for Missoula County - for the 60th anniversary of the flag-raising this Wednesday.
"Have a little pomp and circumstance," says Worf, who's retired from the U.S. Forest Service. "I went to work, and all I got was bureaucratic stonewall."
He was told the flag never leaves the museum, then learned it was sent to Florida last year for an event there. He was told he'd have to hire an armored car to bring it to Missoula.
"One of the folks said they'd find a flag with the same number of stars that had flown during some other battle and send it," Worf says. "I told him it may look the same, but it's not the same flag. It's like Secretary Rumsfeld having his letters of condolence to families who've lost their children in Iraq and Afghanistan signed by a machine. Maybe nobody can tell the difference, but it's still a fake. We wanted the flag that actually flew."
He enlisted the help of Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Conrad Burns, but it was too late to get the USS Missoula flag here by Feb. 23.
Worf's not giving up. He wants to get the flag that gave hope to 35,000 Marines on Iwo Jima 60 years ago to Missoula for Memorial Day.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 523-5260 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com
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