_
The forgotten first flag on Iwo Jima
A friend called me up earlier today, and told me that the last surviving member of the group of Marines that raised the flag on Iwo Jima had died. He suggested that since the issue didn't get much press I should write about it.
So I took a few moments for research. I took a look around a few of the major news networks websites, and didn't find anything. Finally, after a few searches on Google, I found this article: Last Marine in Iwo Jima Photo Dies at 82
Reading it through, I was a bit puzzled, and quickly referenced Wikipedia, where I found out something I'd never heard before.
There were two flag raisings on Iwo Jima – the famous flag-raising photo that almost everyone has seen was of the second flag. (You can read the whole story behind this on Wikipedia's article “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.”)
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but it was the first I'd heard of it. Which really brings me to why I'm writing this. Things like this should be common knowledge. Here's a photograph that won a Pulitzer Prize, and has been immortalized in who knows how many renditions, and yet the story behind it has to be researched. Did you know that of the men depicted in that famous second photo, only three survived the battle? I didn't. But I should have.
It's sad that celebrity gossip can make page one of the major newspapers, but the death of Raymond Jacobs, a man involved in a major historical event gets no press. What's worse, the event that Jacobs was involved in is hardly even recognized as a historic one – only the second flag raising gets any attention.
The point here is that history is important. Not just because we can learn from it, though we should. And not just because both great and terrible things happened throughout it, though they have. History is important by default. It shouldn't matter if it makes a pretty photo or not.
Every moment becomes history the moment that it passes, and the further away we get, the harder it is to remember it's importance. When my friend called me, he pointed out that we will both likely live to see the last World War II veterans die, and with them a lifetime of stories will go untold. But it was only after reading about the forgotten first flag of Iwo Jima that I realized that their stories haven't gone untold. It's just that no one is listening.
