"One photo, almost all on its own, turned that around." "The country was tired of war," says a retired captain (Harve Presnell) as he thinks back. Thus, it was printed, imitated, and reenacted to keep spirits high-and to keep the dollars coming in. ![]() It inspired us to strive for victory, and brought comfort to the worried families of Marines. Rosenthal's image captured America's imagination. And it works-the cheering people open their wallets to show their support for those troops still fighting against Germany and Japan. They're taking part in a vigorous military propaganda effort, persuading patriotic Americans to purchase war bonds. The Marines are standing in Chicago's Soldier Field, under a sky full of festive fireworks, waving to the Americans who have taken such comfort from that dramatic black-and-white portrait. No, this is a recreation on a peak made of papier-mâché, staged for a cheering crowd. When they reach the peak, they triumphantly lift an American flag.īut this is not the moment in that famous 1945 photo taken by AP reporter Joe Rosenthal atop Mt. Marines who appear in the ubiquitous photo called "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima."Īs the film opens, we watch three servicemen-John Bradley (Ryan Philippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach)-climb a steep slope. So is war propaganda.īoth of these observations are powerfully illustrated in Clint Eastwood's new film Flags of Our Fathers, which is based on James Bradley's book about the lives of the six U.S. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war."War is hell," they say. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. Only James Bradley’s father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: “The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn’t come back.”įew books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. The men in the photo-three were killed during the battle-were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. ![]() Following these men’s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific’s most crucial island-an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.īut perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island’s highest peak. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima-and into history.
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