By: BIGVERN1966 - 17th September 2006 at 04:09
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.
By: Sauron - 17th September 2006 at 02:30
The actual event was staged???????
Sauron
By: BIGVERN1966 - 16th September 2006 at 17:15
The actual event that was photographed was staged for the cameras, both in stills and in movies and the history of that photo was covered by a TV Series on BBC a few years back. However, Joe’s timing of the photo was spot on perfect, as when compared with the same frame from the Movie footage taken from near the same angle as the still shot, the frames before and after lack the impact of the image that its now iconic.
RIP Joe
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September 16, 2006 at 3:56 pm