Man in famous Iwo Jima flag photo was misidentified, Marine Corps says

WASHINGTON — An internal investigation by the Marine Corps has concluded that for more than 70 years it wrongly identified one of the men in the iconic photograph of the flag being raised over Iwo Jima during one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.

The inquiry found that a private 1st class named Harold Schultz was one of the six men in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. And it determined that a Navy hospital corpsman, John Bradley, whose son wrote a best-selling book about his father's role in the flag-raising that was made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood, was not actually in the image.

Schultz, a mail sorter who died in 1995 at the age of 70, never publicly acknowledged that he was in the photograph. According to his stepdaughter, he discussed it only once with his family, mentioning it briefly one night during dinner in the early 1990s as they talked about the Iwo Jima battle.

"My mom was distracted and not listening and Harold said, 'I was one of the flag raisers,'" his stepdaughter, Dezreen MacDowell, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "I said, 'My gosh, Harold, you're a hero.' He said, 'No, I was a Marine.'"

"After he said that, it was clear he didn't want to talk about it," she said. "He was a very self-effacing Midwestern person. He was already sick, and died two or three years later."

The investigation was opened in response to questions raised last year by producers working on a documentary, "The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima," which will air July 3 on the Smithsonian Channel, in what was only the latest controversy about the photograph. It was taken on Feb. 23, 1945, by Joseph Rosenthal of The Associated Press as the Marines battled the Japanese on the strategically important island in the Pacific.

Just days later, the image appeared on the front pages of major national newspapers, quickly becoming a symbol of the sacrifices U.S. service members at war were willing to make. Ultimately, 6,800 U.S. service members were killed on the island, and the image became the inspiration for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, which depicts six 32-foot-tall figures in the same positions as the men in the photograph.

[Flags of Our Fathers' author now doubts his father was in Iwo Jima photo]

But in 1946, the Marines conducted a similar investigation in response to claims that the service had misidentified one of the flag raisers, concluding that the man in the far right of the photograph was actually Harlon Block, not Henry Hansen. (Both men had died on Iwo Jima.) In the decades since then, the Marines and Rosenthal have fended off accusations that the photograph was staged.

Matthew Morgan, a retired Marine who worked as a producer for the show's production company, Lucky 8 TV, said it first approached the Marines last year citing evidence that the men in the photograph were misidentified.

Morgan said the Marines were initially not interested in looking into the claim. But in January, the production company provided the chief historian of the Marines, Charles Neimeyer, with detailed evidence that laid out the case for mistaken identity.

Other photographs of the men on Iwo Jima that day, along with forensic analysis of them, showed that the gear Bradley was wearing was different from that worn by the man who was identified as Bradley in the photograph. Facial recognition technology used on the photographs also showed that the man was not Bradley.

"Over the years, people have claimed they were in the photo, but there was nothing besides their word to back that up," Neimeyer said. "I thought that maybe they are on to something, maybe they are right."

In March, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert B. Neller, appointed a retired three-star general to lead a panel of eight active and retired Marine commissioned and noncommissioned officers, including Neimeyer, to investigate the photograph.

The panel began meeting secretly the next month at Marine offices in Quantico, Virginia, where it painstakingly examined Rosenthal's photograph. After six days, the panel voted unanimously to endorse findings that it was Schultz — not Bradley — who had participated in the flag-raising.

Bradley's role that day was at the center of the book "Flags of Our Fathers," co-written by his son, James, which was published in 2000 and was on the New York Times best-seller list for 46 weeks. But in May, shortly after it was publicly disclosed that the Marines were investigating the photograph, James Bradley said that he no longer believed that his father, who is deceased, was in the image. He said that his father had participated in an earlier flag-raising and mistakenly believed that it had been the one captured by Rosenthal. Bradley declined to participate in the documentary, according to Morgan.

Bradley, who did not return an email seeking comment, said in May that he had become convinced of this in 2014, after reading an article in The Omaha World-Herald that told how amateur historians had discovered the misidentifications. But he said that it took him a year to examine the evidence in the article because he had been working on a book in Vietnam, and then had become ill.

Days after the photograph was taken in 1945, Schultz sustained wounds to his arm and stomach, and he was sent home. Several months later, Schultz, who was originally from Michigan, was discharged from the Marines.

The federal government helped him get a job in Los Angeles as a mail sorter for the Postal Service. He was single until age 60, when he married MacDowell's mother, who lived next door in his apartment building and shared a porch. But he never moved in with her and rarely discussed his time in the military, according to MacDowell.

Why Schultz apparently never disclosed that he was in the famous picture remains a mystery.

Many Marines who had fought on Iwo Jima suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but little was known about the condition at the time. To cope, many Marines simply never talked about their military experience.

One of the other men pictured in the flag-raising, Ira Hayes, had asked men in his unit not to identify him as being in the photograph, but they could not keep it secret.

"I think Hayes and Schultz believed that if they were identified as flag raisers, not a day would go by without them being reminded of combat and being on Iwo Jima," Neimeyer said.

On Wednesday, Neller called MacDowell to tell her of the findings about her stepfather.

"I'm delighted he has gotten the recognition, but I wish it happened when he was alive," she said afterward. "He was a kind and gentle man."

Neller said in a written statement that "although the Rosenthal image is iconic and significant, to Marines it's not about the individuals and never has been."

He added: "Simply stated, our fighting spirit is captured in that frame, and it remains a symbol of the tremendous accomplishments of our corps — what they did together and what they represent remains most important. That doesn't change."

The Marines will now alter any places where they refer to the flag raisers, substituting Schultz's name for Bradley.