Group seeks to name Navy ship for popular Iwo Jima photographer

SAN FRANCISCO — The iconic image of six Marines raising an American flag over Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945, is recognized around the world, credited with boosting morale at a critical moment of World War II, and generating record fundraising for war relief at home.

It’s also the first photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize in the same year it was taken.

After 72 years, though, some worry that the man who made it, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, may fade from American memory. A group of veterans and photographers want to avoid that with their longshot petition to the U.S. Navy asking that a warship be named for him.

Rosenthal had requested the dangerous wartime assignment after he was rejected for service because of poor eyesight.

After photographing the fighting on Guam, Peleliu and Angaur, he nearly drowned en route to Iwo Jima as he transferred from the command ship El Dorado to an amphibious landing craft the day he took the photograph.

All accounts paint Rosenthal as a hands-on practitioner of his craft, not content to sit on a ship and take photos from afar.

“He was a 33-year-old man basically volunteering for combat and not carrying a weapon, but carrying his camera,” said Tom Graves, chapter historian of the USMC Combat Correspondents Association in the San Francisco Bay Area. “He was exposed to great danger and in fact, was nearly killed several times.”

After coming ashore in Iwo Jima, Rosenthal and others learned an American flag had made it to Mount Suribachi, a volcanic cone at the southwestern tip of the island and a key objective of the Marines. Unfortunately, another photographer had already captured that image.

“I wanted a flag going up on Iwo, and I want it badly,” Rosenthal later recalled.

When he learned that a second, much larger flag was on its way to the site, he began mentally composing what would become his iconic photo: Where would the men be? Where would the flag be? How tall would it be?

He built a platform of stones and sandbags to stand on, adjusted his shutter timing and tuned his aperture. It was about noon, with the sun directly overhead and a strong wind.

“I see what had to be gone through before those Marines, with that flag, or with any flag, got up to the top of that mountain and secured the highest point, the most important point, perhaps, in the entire battle, the most important ground to be taken by those Marines,” Rosenthal said in a 1997 interview.