Demystifying the Flag at Iwo Jima

May 2, 2000

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Demystifying the Flag at Iwo Jima

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
By James Bradley with Ron Powers.
Illustrated. 376 pages. Bantam Books. $24.95.

ohn Bradley, whose image is enshrined on a bronze megalith at the Arlington National Cemetery, spent most of his life as a funeral director in the small town of Antigo, Wis., but everybody there knew that he was one of the six men who raised the famously photographed flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. He almost never talked about that exploit. Until he died, his large family in Antigo never even knew that he had won the Navy Cross. His silence created a sense that there were secrets about him to be discovered, and it led one of his sons, James, to unearth the untold story of his father and the stories of the other five men who were captured in that famous image.
"Flags of Our Fathers" is the product of these investigations, which James Bradley wrote in collaboration with the journalist Ron Powers.
We can all be happy that Mr. Bradley, who lives in Rye, N.Y., undertook this endeavor. "Flags of Our Fathers" is one of the most instructive and moving books on war and its aftermath that we are likely to see, in part because it is instructive and moving in unexpected ways. On one level, Mr. Bradley has composed a touching eulogy to his father, one that honors him precisely for those qualities that did not earn him fame and recognition on Iwo Jima. He has also forged an unforgettable tableau of one of the most savage battlefields in history, a battlefield of wholesale death, mutilation and waste. Beyond that he has produced an arresting meditation on the nature of heroism, the public perception of it, and the unbridgeable chasm between the two.
"Flags of Our Fathers" is most affecting not because of its graphic portrayal of men at war, although its portrayal rivals "Saving Private Ryan" in its shocking, unvarnished immediacy. Mr. Bradley's evocations of six very different young men and the forces that led them to Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima are flavorful and differentiated. But what gives this book its special power is his bittersweet understanding of the torment suffered by the surviving flag-raisers, who knew that the very act that gave them a kind of lifetime celebrity was one of the few acts carried out on Iwo Jima that was not especially noteworthy. As Mr. Bradley makes clear in a perceptive piece of historical re-examination, the incident that gave them heroic stature was insignificant, an accident, a meaningless conjunction of time and place.
"He knew real heroism," Mr. Bradley writes of his father, one of whose rare comments about the war was that the real heroes of Iwo Jima were those who never came back. "He could separate the real thing from the image, the fluff. And no matter how many millions of people thought otherwise, he understood that this image of heroism was not the real thing."

T. O. Kriegsmann/ Bantam Dell Publishing Group

James Bradley
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The title of Edmund Wilson's book on Civil War writings, "Patriotic Gore," is an apt phrase for Mr. Bradley's work. As a reconstruction of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, "Flags of Our Fathers" is straightforwardly patriotic. There is no historical revisionism here; in Mr. Bradley's vision, the Americans are the good guys, and the Japanese enemy, while brave, is ruthless and unspeakably cruel.
At the same time, a powerful sense of ironic juxtaposition simmers beneath his narrative: between the reality experienced by the marines caught in the battle, who saw their buddies literally sliced into pieces, and the media-induced image of a flag spread out grandly in a stiff breeze.
Iwo Jima, an island that lay athwart the main air route to Japan, was defended by 22,000 dug-in Japanese soldiers whose orders were to kill 10 Americans each and then to die. On the morning of Feb. 19, 1945, it was invaded by 70,000 American marines, of whom 26,000 were to be killed or wounded as they carried out the grim task of rooting out the defenders, 21,000 of whom died by the time it was over. "Death became demystified, an occupational hazard," Mr. Bradley writes.
On the fourth day, according to Mr. Bradley's careful reconstruction of the battle, six men put up a flag on the island's highest point. They were merely replacing a smaller flag that had been raised earlier by a different group of men. Almost by accident, an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, snapped a picture of the second flag-raising. He did not, contrary to what is commonly said about this historic moment, pose the photograph beforehand. The picture was authentic, but the sentiment that it aroused was not. In fact, the second flag was basically unnoticed by the marines on Iwo Jima, who had cheered when the first flag went up. Still, the picture -- The Photograph, as Mr. Bradley aptly calls it -- became an icon of American patriotism, and the act of raising it was surrounded by a fabricated epic of battlefield heroics.
John Bradley, who as a medical corpsman repeatedly risked his life to bring help to the wounded, was acutely aware of the fabricated nature of the flag-raising heroism, and the sharpest passages in his son's book involve a penetrating exploration of that awareness. But the junior Mr. Bradley examines the effects of The Photograph on others in this story who felt its effects. For the three men in the picture who came home, and for the families of the three men who didn't, The Photograph became mostly an affliction, a light that blinded, or a source of a perverse humiliation. Among those men was Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona who descended into fatal alcoholism after the war and in whom the fuss about the picture aroused a kind of fury.
"Heroes?" Mr. Bradley writes, putting himself into the psychological frame of reference of Hayes and the others. "They had just returned from the protracted horrors of one of the deadliest and most intense battles in history, where heroes around them had acted with unimaginable bravery, suffered, and died almost by the minute. And here was an American populace driving itself into a frenzy over . . . what? Over an accidental photograph of a forgotten moment."
Mr. Bradley's book is about what might be seen as the hubris of the media and the pictorial image in American life. Like the best books, Mr. Bradley's goes beyond its narrow subject to invite reflection on deeper patterns of human behavior: in this instance, our ability to create a transcendent lie and promote it avidly despite the small voices of those few who know it to be false.

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