Second misidentified man confirmed in Iwo Jima photo
It’s among the bestknown photographs in American military history: six U.S. Marines raising an American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during World War II.
But for the second time in more than three years, the Marine Corps said that one of the men in the picture had been misidentified for decades.
The Marine Corps said the man, mostly obscured behind the Marine who is second from the right, is not Pfc. Rene Gagnon, as had been previously thought. Rather, it is Cpl. Harold Keller, according to the Marine Corps.
The corps had formed a board to review the possibility after private historians presented new evidence, the Corps said in a statement Wednesday.
“The identities of the flag raisers is something the Marine Corps has always been obligated to confirm, and the board findings do so,” Gen. David Berger of the Marine Corps wrote in a letter to Keller’s daughter last week.
The finding was reported Wednesday evening by NBC News.
Days after the photograph was captured Feb. 23, 1945, during the battle of Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest in World War II, it appeared on the front pages of major national newspapers.
Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for the picture.
In June 2016, the Corps said that it had wrongly identified one of the men in the picture after an internal investigation that was opened in response to questions raised by producers working on the documentary “The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima.”
The Corps found in 2016 that Pfc. Harold Schultz was one of the six men in the photograph. It also determined that a Navy hospital corpsman, John Bradley, whose son wrote a best-selling book about his father’s role in the flag-raising that was made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood, was not in the image.
The Marine Corps began investigating the photograph again in July 2018 after three researchers — Stephen Foley, Dustin Spence and Brent West-emeyer — unearthed new photographs and film footage of the scene atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.