A Son's Salute. - Review - book review

Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley, with Ron Powers (Bantam, 384 pp., $24.95)

This is less the story of a battle than of a photograph-probably the most famous photograph of the Second World War and perhaps any war: the planting of the American flag on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945, by six anonymous men who would never be anonymous again. It may well be that for sheer emotional weight, no image of war has had such a hold on American hearts. Perhaps it is the desperate togetherness of the men as they try to grip the pole: an image of national unity forged in global war and increasingly hard to hold through the Asian quagmires and fractured peace that have followed.

James Bradley is the son of John Bradley (the man in profile anchoring the pole's middle with a steady, firm grip), and he brings a heartfelt personal dimension to this penetrating and insightful look at an American icon. Bradley and his co-author, Ron Powers, peel back the negative, as it were, to give us the positive (and not so positive) real lives of these six men, both before and after their date with history. In so doing, they have made a significant, and unusual, contribution to the study of American culture and mythmaking.

Among the many myths they dispel is that the photograph was posed: It was, in fact, the second flag-raising on Iwo, the first having been accomplished earlier in the day by twelve men who did pose. The second group was sent up by the battalion commander to hoist a larger flag, "so every son-of-a-bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it!" The commander also wanted the first flag for a souvenir.

To be sure, there is another story, without which the photograph is meaningless-the ferocious month-long battle for Iwo Jima that cost the lives of almost 7,000 Americans and nearly all the 22,000 Japanese holed up in a suicide stand. But while Bradley and Powers tell it vividly-often with horrifying verisimilitude-the uniqueness of their book lies in the devoted, piercing gaze they give to that photograph as symbol, as moment in history, as exploited icon, and as a fateful conjunction that burdened the flag-bearers more than it uplifted them. Indeed, those who survived the planting greeted the resulting notoriety with varying degrees of disgust.

Hurriedly put on a U.S. stamp in late summer 1945, the image sold a record 150 million stamps. In fact, the climax of the book is not really the battle at all, but what became known as "the Mighty 7th"-the last wartime U.S. bond drive. The surviving Marines were personally ordered home by Presi dent Roosevelt to participate, and people flocked to glimpse these American heroes. The tour netted $26.3 billion-nearly half the annual U.S. budget at the time. In a real way, The Photo graph (as Bradley calls it) helped financed Hiro shima.

Flags focuses on the lives of the six men who, quite by chance, found themselves hoisting the piece of Japanese plumbing that became a U.S. flagpole on Mount Suribachi. The authors take the men from their homes in varied corners of the country before the war, through extensive training, to their date with destiny as part of Easy Company (2nd Battalion, 28th Regi ment, 5th Division). Three of the six did not survive. Killed within days were Pvt. Franklin Sousley of Ken tucky and the beloved Sgt. Mike Strank, the son of steelworking eastern- Pennsylvania Czech immigrants, who was done in by friendly fire. In the famous photo, Sousley and Strank are virtually indistinguishable as they interlace hands toward the back of the pole. The third was Cpl. Harlon Block from southern Texas, the determined figure on the right, planting the pole in rocks, who was later hit by mortar fire: "He gave a strangulated scream, 'They killed me!' He struggled with his intestines for a moment longer, then rolled to the ground and died facedown."

These three fit the senior Bradley's oft-repeated statement that the "real heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn't come back." Yet the remaining three make the most fascinating, and tragic, portraits. Two died young: Pima Indian Ira Hayes, the figure on the far left whose hands do not grasp the pole, and whose story was told in two movies, died of alcoholism. The other, Rene Gagnon, died of a wrecked heart: His creepy wife latched on to her husband's fame far beyond his capacity to stomach it. The only one who lived to a ripe age and enjoyed something resembling a normal life was Bradley's father, a medic during the war, who returned to Antigo, Wisconsin, to open a funeral home and father eight children. For the first four years after the war, he cried in his sleep.

The sensitivity of these portrayals is undercut by serious flaws that include a barrage of overstatement, errors of fact (Salerno, not Tarawa, was the war's first U.S. amphibious assault to face sustained opposition), cloying repetition, misidentification, poor diction ("suritude" is not a word), and bathos (as in, "many of them would ensure a long future of Christmases in America by laying down their lives for their buddies"). Assertions that Marines "never slowed down," are "the most rugged group of warriors in the world," have "the most demanding recruit training in the world," etc., would put to sleep the most patient Navy Seal or Army Special Forces paratrooper.