Inside, amid thousands of letters, photographs and mementos of World War II, they found the Navy Cross awarded to Jack, a medical corpsman, for bravery, its existence a secret until that moment. The letters, says James, 46, "were from thousands of people. They all called him a hero." That was because, in the classic photograph of six men struggling to hoist a giant American flag on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi in 1945, Jack Bradley is second from the right. His family knew that but not much more. Bradley, who had been assigned to the Marines, never considered himself a hero; he resolutely barred the door against fame, adroitly avoiding interviews and hardly ever speaking in any detail about Iwo Jima. On his first date with Betty, now 76, he fended off her questions about the flag-raising, saying, "The real heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn't come back." It was this Jack Bradley, brushed by history but immune to the blandishments of hero worship, who intrigued his son: "I already knew the guy who raised me and who loved his family," says James. "I had to make the pieces fit."
The result of his five-year quest is Flags of Our Fathers, written with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Powers, which the New York Times calls "one of the most instructive and moving books on war and its aftermath that we are likely to see." Flags is the story of six young men and a moment during a lull in a savage battle that passed unnoticed by those who participated in it. Captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, the photograph, which contrary to widespread belief was not staged, became one of the great iconic images of World War II, helping to reinvigorate a nation. The Marines in the picture were Mike Strank, Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon. Jack "Doc" Bradley, then 21, was hurrying by with an armful of bandages when Strank, a sergeant, asked him to help raise the drainage pipe that held the flag. Strank, Sousley and Block died on Iwo Jima. Plagued by alcoholism, Hayes, a Pima from the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, died in 1955 at age 32. Gagnon died of a heart attack in 1979; he was 54. Bradley alone lived to old age.
"My father didn't know the picture was taken," says James, a twice-divorced writer and motivational speaker who lives in Rye, N.Y. "He wasn't 1 looking at the camera. None of the guys who raised it knew they were being photographed." It I wasn't even the first flag raising that day; a smaller F version of the Stars and Stripes had already gone up, but a Marine colonel ordered it replaced by one that could be seen from afar.
Taken on Feb. 23, 1945, Rosenthal's photograph hit newspapers two days later and created a sensation. It was, said the Times, "the most beautiful picture of the war." The picture, says Alan Aimone, librarian at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, "gave encouragement to a lot of people that we could win. It was a positive aspect of a pretty grim story." Indeed, few combat stories of World War II are grimmer than Iwo Jima's. A 22,000-strong Japanese force had dug in on the flyspeck 2-by-5-mile volcanic island halfway between Saipan and Japan, determined to fight to the death. In 36 days of battle, the Japanese were wiped out almost to a man, but U.S. casualties were also high: about 7,000 killed and 19,000 wounded. "It was important," says historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Citizen Soldiers, "because it was the first Japanese territory that was conquered."
Among those wounded was Doc Bradley, who suffered shrapnel wounds in one leg and both feet. After treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, he joined Gagnon and Hayes on a triumphal war-bond tour that raised a record $26.3 billion. Feted wherever they went, the three became instant celebrities on a scale the author likens to Beatlemania. "He did his duty, but my father hated all the attention," says James.
Neither James nor his seven siblings—Kathy, 52, Steve, 51, Mark, 49, Barbara, 43, Patrick, 39, Joe, 38 and Tom, 37—ever got the full story from their father. "While he was alive," James says, "I wouldn't have called any of his friends—it would have been so out of order." Reading all the books on Iwo Jima he could get his hands on, James decided that he would also retrace the steps that had taken the Marines to the windswept top of Mount Suribachi. Interviewing relatives and childhood friends as well as wartime buddies, he began to piece together their life stories. "You have to remember," he says, "these are people in their 70s, getting calls out of the blue from some guy they didn't know."
As the stories—"the sacred memories," James calls them—emerged, he found many of the families shared his father's ambivalence about The Picture: "Ed Block [Harlon Block's brother] told me that his father went to a dedication for his son in 1965. He came back and told his second wife, 'I wish I could stop seeing that photo. It just reminds me of Harlon, who was my best friend.' " Listening to the stories, James says, "I realized my father gave me a great gift by not talking about the war. He gave me the motivation to search out the story. I think I was doing what my dad was trying to do, which was not to obscure the real heroes of Iwo Jima."
Mike Neill
Bob Meadows in Rye
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
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