MIXUP

Wrong Guy in Iconic Iwo Jima Photo


Marine misidentified for 70 years.

An investigation by the Marine Corps has determined that it wrongly identified a man in the iconic Iwo Jima photograph that features a U.S. flag being raised after a bloody battle in Japan during World War II. Seventy years later, the probe has concluded that Private First Class Harold Schultz was one of the men in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, upon which the Washington, D.C. memorial statue is based. Navy hospital corpsman John Bradley was not, in fact, shown in the photo. His son James wrote a bestselling book, Flags of Our Fathers, about his father’s role in the war—and the picture. That book eventually became a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Schultz only mentioned his role in the picture once to his family over dinner, and he never brought it up again, his stepdaughter said. “I said, ‘My gosh, Harold, you’re a hero.’ He said, ‘No, I was a Marine.’” Schultz died in 1995, before the mistake was ever publicly acknowledged.