Mistaken identity in iconic WWII photo
Man in Iwo Jima shot misidentified for 70 years
WASHINGTON— An internal investigation by the U.S. Marine Corps has concluded that for more than 70 years it wrongly identified one of the men in the iconic photograph of the flag being raised over Iwo Jima during one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War.
The inquiry found that a private 1st class named Harold Schultz was one of the six men in the Pulitzer Prizewinning photograph. And it determined that a navy hospital corpsman, John Bradley, whose son wrote a bestselling book about his father’s role in the flag-raising that was made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood, was not actually in the image.
Schultz, a mail sorter who died in 1995 at the age of 70, never publicly acknowledged that he was in the photograph. According to his stepdaughter, he discussed it only once with his family, mentioning it briefly one night during dinner in the early 1990s.
“My mom was distracted and not listening and Harold said, ‘I was one of the flag raisers,’ ” his stepdaughter, Dezreen MacDowell, said on Wednesday. “I said, ‘My gosh, Harold, you’re a hero.’ He said, ‘No, I was a marine.’ ”
The investigation was opened in response to questions raised last year by producers working on a documentary, The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima. The iconic photo was taken on Feb. 23, 1945, by Joseph Rosenthal of The Associated Press.
Just days later, the image appeared on the front pages of major national newspapers, quickly becoming a symbol of military sacrifices.
In January, the documentary’s production company provided the chief historian of the marines with detailed evidence that laid out the case for mistaken identity.
Other photos of the men that day, along with forensic analysis, showed that the gear Bradley was wearing was different from that worn by the man identified as Bradley. Facial recognition technology used also showed that the man wasn’t Bradley.
The marines will now alter any places where they reference the flag raisers, substituting Schultz’s name for Bradley.