Quote:
Originally Posted by DeltAlum
Also, it has now been well documented that the famous prize winning picture of the event was not the actual first raising of the flag -- but was a restaging using a bigger flag. It was also captured on movie film, but that is almost never seen.
|
It wasn't a restaging.
The point of raising the flag in the first place was to show that Mt. Suribachi had fallen to the Americans. The first flag raised was only 4.5 feet by 2 feet, 4 inches, so it was too small to be seen by Marines landing on the beaches below:
The picture we've all seen of the five Marines and one Navy corpsman :
(uncropped), shows a larger flag being raised so it can be seen from the beach. It was not staged. (This picture shows the smaller one being taken down while the second one was raised):
Joe Rosenthal did have marines pose for a shot a few minutes later -- he called this the "gung ho" shot:
Here is a picture of Rosenthal taking the posed "gung ho" shot:
A week or so after the pictures were taken, Rosenthal was asked by a reporter whether he posed the shot. He thought the reporter meant the "gung ho" shot and answered "Sure." Time Magazine's radio show took this and reported that "Rosenthal climbed Suribachi after the flag had already been planted. . . Like most photographers, Rosenthal could not resist reposing his characters in historic fashion." Thus, confusion was born. But Rosenthal, who received a Pulitzer Prize for the picture of the raising of the second flag, always maintained the picture was not staged, and the film to which you refer, which was made cotemporaneously with Rosenthals' picture, shows that the flag raising was not a restaging.
I'm looking forward to the movie.