Joe Rosenthal

Origins and early life

Joe Rosenthal was born in Washington on 9 October 1911, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants — the fact that the Jewish Virtual Library and every biography record and on which this fiche rests — and this fiche states as plainly that he converted to Catholicism as a young man, around 1943, and remained a Catholic for the rest of his life. He grew up in poverty, taught himself photography in San Francisco during the Depression, was rejected by the army in 1941 for the eyesight that his thick glasses corrected, and went to the Pacific war instead as a photographer for the Associated Press, landing with the Marines at Guam, Peleliu and Angaur.

Work and career

On 23 February 1945, on the fourth day of the battle of Iwo Jima, he climbed Mount Suribachi with the Marines who were raising a larger flag to replace the first one planted that morning, turned as the pole went up, and pressed the shutter without looking through the viewfinder: the photograph that reached America two days later showed six men straining together under a flag caught by the wind, and became at once the image of the war — a Pulitzer Prize within the year, the model of the Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington, a postage stamp printed in a hundred and thirty million copies, and the symbol of the seventh war-loan drive that raised twenty-six billion dollars.

It was also, for the rest of his life, the subject of the charge that he had staged it, a confusion born of a posed group photograph he took a few minutes later; the film and the Marines' testimony settled the question, and he answered it with patience for sixty years. He worked for the San Francisco Chronicle for thirty-five years, and died at Novato, California, on 20 August 2006, at ninety-four.