The "Raising of the flag on Iwo Jima" Story

Norman Hatch is inset in the "Raising the Flag on

Iwo Jima" at the USMC War Memorial.

It was an ordinary day.  Just got back from the store with my groceries as well as a Washington Post newspaper.  I love to read the Post when I visit with my daughter and her family in Maryland, so I thought I'd would pick up a copy and enjoy it at home in my favorite lounge chair.  There on one of the first pages of the paper was a story about one of my favorite photographs of all time which depicted the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima by the Marines On February 23, 1945.  It has been 68 years since the photo was taken and still is one of the most recognizable photos in history.  The photo was taken by Joe Rosenthal and won a Pulitzer Award.  But, the story just doesn't end there.  The article in the Post tells of the unsung hero behind the photo named "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima."  While sitting in the basement den of his Alexandria, VA home where he has lived in for 62 years, 91 year old Norman Hatch described the day the photo was taken as if it was just yesterday.  Norm was a combat photographer. At the battle of Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, he was the first cameraman to hit the beach and therefore filmed most of the first hand action.  "When looking through the viewfinder, I was living in the movie.  I was disassociated from what was going on around me.  You can't take pictures laying down.  Being a cameraman was like having a target on your back.  We were walking upright shooting film, while everyone else was down at helmet level in the water.  There was one moment when someone shouted, 'here come the Japs.'  I turned slightly and kept shooting.  It was the first time that both fighting sides were caught in the same frame of film," he recalled.  Eventually that footage was edited by Warner Brothers studios in Hollywood into a short movie titled "With the Marines at Tarawa."  It won the Academy Award in 1944 for documentary film. But, it was Norm's part in the famous flag raising photo that I want to share with you today.  There was a small flag flapping atop Mount Suribachi, the volcanic peak on the island, and was too small to be seen by the troops fighting below. Norm received an order from the brass to get a bigger flag up on the mountain.  Hatch grabbed two other photographers, Staff Sgt. Bill Genaust and Pfc. Bob Campbell, and ordered them to join the Marine detachment trudging to the summit of Suribachi with a larger flag.  While on their way to the top Bill and Bob encountered bespectacled photographer for the Associated Press, Joe Rosenthal.  The three headed toward the top.  The Marines reached the top without a fight from the Japanese and took the small flag down while another group of five Marines plus a Navy corpsman began to hoist the larger flag.  Campbell snapped away in the foreground while Genaust cranked away on his 16mm movie camera.  Rosenthal put his bulky Speed Graphic camera, which was set for 1/400 of a second with an f-stop of between f8 and f16, on the ground so he could pile rocks to stand on for a better position.  He nearly missed the shot!  As the six soldiers struggled to raise the flag, Rosenthal snapped a photo.  Rosenthal took 18 photos that day and among them was one shot that was posed by the men of the 28th Marines.  Within 36 hours his photo was on the front page of just about every newspaper in the country.  A few days later the picture editor from the AP asked if the prize winning flag raising photo was posed.  Not realizing that the editor meant the one he snapped while it was actually happening and not the posed one he took later, he answered in the affirmative.  The testimony of Rosenthal himself and of the eyewitnesses who survived the battle attest that the flag raising photograph was in no way rigged.  But, the photo might not have assumed its place in American history had Hatch not have been involved.  Eventually a story surfaced that said the photo had been staged.  That story followed Rosenthal to his death in 2006.  But Hatch has been trying to set everyone straight for nearly 70 years now.  From that eventful day to the present, he insists that nothing was posed about the flag photo.  Even though he wasn't on the scene, his two assistants, Genaust and Campbell swore that it was not posed.  "One of those two would have told me that the picture was posed if it had been.," Norman said.  And then there was a mysterious third man involved in the creation of the photo.  Rosenthal's film of the event had been taken to Guam for processing and an unidentified editor thought the horizontal photo would look better cropped as a vertical and removed the dirt and rocks in the foreground.  "The editing improved the composition, emphasizing the exertions of the men," Hatch said.  Hatch ended up serving 41 years in the Marines and spent 15 more years as the audiovisual adviser to the Secretary of Defense.  He retired in 1980 and opened a photographic consulting business, but he still is asked many times to give his side of the story of one of the greatest photographs ever taken.  Hatch says Rosenthal's photo endures for a simple reason: "It's a picture that tells a story.  It shows the urgency of getting a flag up.  It's got a felling in it."  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima