Movie Review: 'Flags of Our Fathers'
On February 23, 1945, D+4 of the battle for Iwo Jima (code-named Operation Detachment), five Marines and a Navy corpsman clambered up to the summit of Mt. Suribachi, a dormant volcano on the southern tip of the 7.5-square mile island; with an altitude of 166 m (546 ft), Suribachi dominates the unusually flat terrain of Iwo Jima and, as such, was an important military objective – whoever held the high ground could direct artillery and mortar fire at any point on the small island located nearly 700 miles southeast of Tokyo. The five Marines - Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, along with their Navy medic, John “Doc” Bradley – were just a small fraction of the 110,000 members of the Fleet Marine Force that were involved in Operation Detachment, but as a result of what at the time they considered a routine – almost mundane – assignment, they became immortalized when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took one of the most famous pictur...