Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/08/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]In a message dated 8/21/06 2:10:27 AM, rangefinder@screengang.com writes: << Joe Rosenthal, 1911-2006 He shot the iconic war image of US troops raising the flag at Iwo Jima in 1945. >> Anyone who hasn't should read the book "Flags of Our Fathers" by James Bradley, the son of one of the six Marines in the photograph, a medical corpsman who was the only one of the six to survive the remainder of the campaign, the war, and the aftermath physically and psychologically intact. The famous photo was not "staged" in the negative sense that detractors have alleged, but it does picture the placement of a second, much larger, flag on the summit of Suribachi, replacing a smaller one previously emplaced there, so that it could be seen, both by Americans and Japanese, from virtually any location on the island. The book describes the several days of additional vicious fighting that was necessary, after the flag-raising, to finally secure the island, which was the single most densely fortified place in the Pacific, maybe in the world. It presents one of the most unvarnished accounts of the grisly acts and necessities of war, and presents one of the most compelling lessons on why the use of the atomic bomb was necessary to save the million or more lives that would have been lost in a frontal assault on the home islands, every square foor of which would have been even more fiercely defended than was Iwo. Bart