77 years ago today, the flag was raised at Iwo Jima
In what became perhaps the most famous American photo of all time, an iconic image of the US Marine Corps was taken 77 years ago today.
I’ve written about several of the men there that day. Colonel Dave Severance‘s passing last year saw me detail the sequence of events about the flag raising. Then-Private First Class Jack Lucas had just two days prior jumped on not one but two grenades (and survived), and Private First Class James La Belle was fighting his way across the island. Both would earn the Medal of Honor, La Belle posthumously.
The Battle of Iwo Jima was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Pacific War. Beginning on 19 February 1945, the battle ran for just more than a month. It involved more than 110,000 men and hundreds of ships on the Allied side faced off against about 21,000 well-entrenched Imperial Japanese. More than 6,800 Americans would die, as would roughly 18,000 Japanese. Only 217 Japanese were captured.
Category: Historical, Marines, We Remember
Hardcore.
Never forget.
USMC!
About as many casualties as all of GWOT/OCO since 9/11 inclusive, too, for all folk (cough, cough, Democrats) itchin’ for WW2-style war to buck up their sh*tty midterm election prospects, I might add…
^Word^ And how many of those “folk” would have someone in their family that would be in that WW2-style war? Yeah, not many, if any at all.
“…that such men lived.”
The last time I looked into it, we are about to exhaust or have recently (last couple years) finally exhausted the supply of Purple Hearts the govt ordered in advance for the millions of expected casualties for Operation Downfall (invasion of mainland Japan).
495,000 excess as of the end of WWII per the Truman Library. https://www.trumanlibraryinstitute.org/tru-history-purple-hearts/#:~:text=The%20Purple%20Heart%20is%20a,the%20planned%20invasion%20of%20Japan. 470K were awarded between Korea and Vietnam per the Wikipedia Purple Heart article. A bit more than 48k since 1990 indicates the old WWII stock is depleted years ago.
Semper Fidelis
Great men. Never forgotten.
The deputy police chief I worked for, Frank Pierce, was a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his actions as a corpsman on Iwo Jima.
Semper Fi!
S/F
Rest in Peace Ira Hays, yours was a tortured life you did not deserve.
Today every single one of these Men would be denounced as racists, transphobes, and misogynists. The standard american boilerplate when describing their historical great Men. Perhaps we can learn that “recently found evidence” shows that in actuality every flag raiser in WWII was black and there has been a 77 year racist conspiracy to deny these hero’s their due. Next on “ruining american history” We look back and discover that WWII’s greatest hero of all was actually a transgender. Audie Murphy was changed by White racists and transphobes because he was known as Aubrey Murphy.
If these brave men only knew how bad america would be in just 77 years these men would never have bothered.