Rosenthal tried to find the Marines who had raised the first flag, aiming to get a group picture of them beside it, but when no one seemed able or willing to locate them, he turned his attention to a group of Marines preparing to raise the second flag. Rosenthal’s photo is so astoundingly perfect that some critics suggested he had somehow staged the flag-raising picture or covered up the fact that it was actually not the first flag-raising at Iwo Jima.
The man principally responsible for spreading the story that the photograph was staged, the late Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod, long ago admitted he was in error, but the rumor persists even today, 71 years after the event and ten years after Rosenthal’s death.
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While Rosenthal’s photograph has become a permanent part of the American consciousness, a less-remembered Iwo Jima classic is the powerful eulogy delivered by Chaplain Gittelsohn. Ironically, though he was an outspoken lifelong pacifist who gave passionate sermons on the futility of war, he reconciled his World War II service through reliance on the Jewish tradition of a “just war.”
And, referring to young Jewish draftees, he wrote: “I had no right to hide behind my rabbinic exemption or to leave them away from home and in combat bereft of religious leadership.”
Lieutenant Gittelsohn, who in the thick of battle under heavy enemy fire ministered to fallen Marines of all faiths, earned three combat ribbons for outstanding bravery.
After the battle, Division Chaplain Warren Cuthriell, a Protestant minister, wanted the fallen Marines to be honored in a single, non-denominational ceremony. He asked Rabbi Gittelsohn to deliver the memorial sermon at a combined religious service dedicating the Marine cemetery on Iwo Jima. However, despite the extensive number of dead and wounded Jewish servicemen, a majority of the Christian chaplains objected to having a rabbi preach over predominantly Christian graves and opposed any form of a joint prayer service.
Cuthriell stood up to the tremendous pressure and adamantly refused to alter his plans. But Gittelsohn sought to spare his friend any further embarrassment and decided it was best not to deliver his discourse. Instead, three separate services were held. At the March 21, 1945 Jewish service, Gittelsohn delivered to some 70 attendees the powerful speech he originally wrote for the combined service:
Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may now rest a man who was destined to be a great prophet – to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie here silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth in their memory…. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores….We dedicate ourselves, first, to live together in peace the way they fought and are buried in this war. Here lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich men and poor together. Here are Protestants, Catholics and Jews together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many men of each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudices. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy . . .
We here solemnly swear that this shall not be in vain. Out of this and from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this will come, we promise, the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere . . .
