It was perhaps the last image our civilization will ever have of glory in war.
Forty years ago last Saturday, on Feb. 23, 1945, an Associated Press photographer named Joe Rosenthal reached the 556-foot peak of Mt. Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima in the western Pacific. A party of U.S. marines had fixed a large American flag to a long steel pipe and were just getting ready to raise it over the summit, replacing a much smaller flag that had been planted there less than two hours before.
Hastily Rosenthal wrestled two large rocks together and heaved a Japanese sandbag on top of them, then clambered up on his improvised platform to get a better angle for his shot. As six of the marines began to swing the 20-foot flagpole upright, he quickly aimed his camera and clicked the shutter release.
In that split second he caught the pole just a hairline past the diagonal. The angle gives the photo not only its dramatic composition but also its extraordinary energy, since it is also the instant the equilibrium of forces shifts so the pole is no longer falling back against the marines`
thrusting arms but swinging skyward on its own pivot. For the men in the photo it is both the moment of greatest effort and also the moment of success, a powerful symbol of heroism and victory.
Rosenthal`s picture won him a Pulitzer Prize and became possibly the most famous war photograph ever taken. It belongs, in a sense, to a tradition of heroic-battle art dating back at least to the tapestries of the Middle Ages. In February, 1945, though, that tradition was nearing its end; other events of that time were already forming a world in which no one could ever again imagine or represent war in quite the same way.
In the same week as the marines were battling their way up the steep sides of Suribachi, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, head of the atomic bomb program code-named Manhattan Project, conferred with his scientists at the secret A-bomb laboratory complex in Los Alamos, N.M.
When the conference ended, Groves issued an order representing a significant milestone: The design of the first atomic explosive devices was to be ``frozen.`` That meant theoretical work was at an end, for those devices, and all efforts would be concentrated on actually producing the bombs. (The freeze didn`t apply to a unit known as the Group F-3, headed by Edward Teller. F-3`s task was to study what the atomic scientists then called ``Super``--the H-bomb.)
The A-bomb would be tested on schedule in New Mexico in July and used against Japan in August. To some, it seemed that with the bomb on its hip, so to speak, the U.S. could enforce its will on the entire planet. But, as the scientists already had begun to perceive, the American monopoly could not last many more years, and the bomb in fact represented something brand new in the history of warfare and national strategy: a weapon that served its purpose only while it was not being used.
The start of the nuclear age was not the only 1945 event creating a new comprehension of human conflict, however. Exactly four weeks before the marines raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi, Russian troops on the other side of the world reached a place called Oswiecim in southern Poland. History would come to know it better by its German name, Auschwitz.
In the complex of prison camps there, the Russians found 648 corpses and 7,600 survivors, according to the British historian Martin Gilbert. During January, some 65,000 other prisoners had been marched out of Auschwitz toward other camps inside Germany. Before they left, the Germans destroyed the gas chambers and crematoria where something like 4 million human beings--about half of them Jews, the rest Russian war prisoners or other non-Jewish captives --had been murdered in the previous 2 1/2 years.
Some accounts of Auschwitz, based on reports by escaped prisoners, had already appeared in the Western press, but the world was still far from grasping the full story of what had happened there or at the other Nazi extermination camps.
The Russians had publicized their discoveries at some of the camps they had liberated earlier, but had not been readily believed--perhaps because the truth was too fantastic. (The BBC`s Moscow correspondent, Alexander Werth, filed a long, detailed eyewitness account of the Maidanek camp, which he saw shortly after its liberation in August, 1944. The report was never broadcast; Werth`s London editors simply didn`t believe it could be true.) After capturing Auschwitz, the Russians were strangely reticent about what they had found. No announcement was made at the time, and Soviet authorities waited more than three months before releasing a full description of the camp.
Even then, it would take more months before the enormity of the Nazi slaughter was really comprehended in the West. Like the A-bomb, that comprehension fundamentally changed concepts of war: Just as the bomb created a new vision of limitless destruction, the Holocaust created a new consciousness of limitless evil.
On Iwo Jima, after the capture of Suribachi, it took three more weeks to seize the rest of the island. Three of the six marines in Rosenthal`s now world-famous photo were killed in the fighting. Dying too, though few people yet realized it, was that photograph`s vision of war. Not the victorious flag- raising but the blasted, battered landscape of the island itself--``like hell with the fire out,`` said one American during the battle--would be the accurate symbol for the new moral and military realities that were waiting to be born in February of 1945.