The story of Joe Rosenthal's photograph of six Marines raising the United States flag on Mount Suribachi on 23 February 1945: how the shot was almost missed, why it was wrongly called staged, and what the frame teaches a player about dating a 1945 photograph.
On 19 February 1945, United States forces landed on Iwo Jima, a small volcanic island in the western Pacific that the Japanese defenders had spent months fortifying with tunnels and pillboxes. The battle turned out to be one of the hardest of the Pacific War. By the fifth day, Marines of the 5th Division had fought their way up to the summit of Mount Suribachi, the dormant volcano at the island's southern tip. A small American flag had been raised on the peak that morning by an earlier patrol; in the early afternoon a larger, second flag was brought up and put in its place. It is that second flag-raising, on the afternoon of 23 February 1945, that the famous photograph shows.
Joe Rosenthal, a civilian photographer on assignment for the Associated Press, had climbed Suribachi along with Marine photographers Sergeant Bill Genaust and Private First Class Bob Campbell. As the new flag went up, the men who had carried it began heaving the tall metal pole into place. Rosenthal — who had put down his Speed Graphic camera and was piling rocks under his feet for a better vantage point — realised he was about to miss it. He swung his camera up and fired the shutter blind, without using the viewfinder, at 1/400th of a second on Agfa sheet film. He assumed the frame was a miss. It was anything but: the picture won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography, and it remains perhaps the most reproduced and most recognised American photograph of the Second World War.
Part of what makes the photograph so easy to over-read is that very few people, at first, knew it was a second flag-raising at all. The day had begun with a small first flag on Suribachi, and the dramatic second pole, silhouetted against the sky, is the image that stuck. For decades the individual identities of the six raisers were also argued over: Marine Corps historians misidentified three of them for many years, correcting staff-sergeant Harlon Block only in 1947, Pfc. Harold Schultz as late as 2016, and Pfc. Harold Keller in 2019, as better records and photographic evidence came to light. Three of the six — Michael Strank, Harlon Block and Franklin Sousley — were killed later in the battle, and Rosenthal's fellow photographer Bill Genaust, who stood a few feet away filming the same moment, was also killed on Iwo Jima before the island was secured.
For a guessNow player the picture is a compact lesson in reading a 1940s photograph. The most obvious dating anchor is the flag itself: the forty-eight-star American flag of the era brackets the image to 1941–1945 even before any other clue is weighed. Around it sit quieter tells: the heavy cloth field uniform and boots of Second World War Marines, the steel helmets, the volcanic, hastily-dug ground, and the overcast, grain-heavy look of a wartime press negative shot on a handheld Speed Graphic. None of those pins the exact day — the precise 23 February date is a matter of historical record, not of the clues in the frame — but together they squeeze the photograph into a remarkably narrow wartime window. That bracket-by-evidence habit, weighing several weak clues toward one tight range, is exactly what playing the archive is meant to train.
The photograph is one of the rounds in guessNow's archive. It arrives revealed piece by piece, and you slide to the year you think it was taken before your HP runs out — see which of the tells above you can read from the frame, then open the full record with its photographer and licence on the reveal. For the wider wartime dating cues, our how to date a 1940s photograph guide walks through the ruled decades and ration-era details of the 1940s in detail.