Anniversary: Raising the Flag on Mount Suribachi — February 23, 1945

On 23 February 1945, four days into the battle for Iwo Jima, US Marines reached the summit of Mount Suribachi and raised a small flag — then, hours later, replaced it with a larger one so a battalion could keep the first as a trophy. The second raising was photographed by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press and became the most reproduced image of the Second World War.

The photograph froze a single moment of a battle that ran for another month. Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s garrison, dug into a network of tunnels rather than the beach defences Japanese doctrine called for, fought on from underground until organised resistance ended on 26 March — in a battle that became the costliest single action in US Marine Corps history. Kuribayashi’s own letters home, published decades later, show a commander who built that defence to inflict maximum American casualties while privately doubting the war could still be won.

The Iwo Jima and Mount Suribachi entry is a documentary account — the island remains closed to visitors today — of the tunnels behind the photograph, and the man who ordered them dug.