The actual event was staged???????

Sauron

Yes and No, the USMC guy’s actually stormed the top of the Mountain and rasied the a small 54×28 inches flag that they had with with them on poles left by the Japs. This was photographed by S/Sgt Lou Lowery a combat cameraman, as shown below.

The whole point of the exercise was to boost US Moral and break that of the Jap’s, unfortunately, the first flag was too small to be very visible from the landing beaches. Hence a 8-foot-long battle ensign was taken from an LST and got to the top of the mountain, and it was the raising of that one was photographed by Joe Rosenthal a few hours after the rasing of the first one.

The actual rasing of the second flag was not staged for the camera’s (there was an operational reason for doing it), but it was the not the first flag to be rasied. As started however, Rosenthal captured the shot at the best spilt second of time as the below movie stills show (taken by Bill Genaust).

I think the total time for those three clips was about 3 seconds, and the pole weight was about 100 Lbs.