February 23rd is Iwo Jima Day

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a United States Navy corpsman raising an American flag atop Mount Suribachi, during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

The photograph was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and came to be regarded in the United States as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time.

Three Marines depicted in the photograph, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, and Michael Strank, were killed in action over the next few days. The three surviving flag-raisers were Marines Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes, and sailor John Bradley, who became celebrities after their identifications in the photograph.

The image was later used by Marine Felix de Weldon to sculpt the 1954 Marine Corps War Memorial, located adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington, D.C. The original mold is located on the Marine Military Academy grounds, a private college preparatory academy located in Harlingen, Texas.