|
|
| |
| |
World War II Iwo Jima
Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients
Iwo Jima Medal of Honor Recipients
The Flag-Raisers
The six men who raised the second flag over Suribachi personified the stereotypical American cross-section one might find in a Hollywood movie of that era.
There was Ira A. Hayes , a Pima Indian from a reservation in Arizona and a former Marine paratrooper with combat experience at Bougainville.
Michael Strank was the son of Czech immigrants who lived and worked in the coal fields of Pennsylvania. The rugged sergeant had enlisted in 1939 after Nazi Germany had swallowed his parents' homeland and fought on Bougainville with the Raiders.
Harlon H. Block was drafted in 1943 after a year of working in the Texas oil fields. He volunteered for parachute duty and served in the same battalion as Hayes on Bougainville.
Franklin R. Sousley, a boyish-looking nineteen-year-old draftee, had grown up on his grandfather's small Kentucky farm.
Rene A. Gagnon, a New Englander of French-Canadian extraction, had been rejected by the Navy for low blood pressure, but with schooling from a friendly civilian doctor, had succeeded in passing the Marine Corps physical.
John H. Bradley, "a solid guy with a sense of humor," had completed his apprenticeship to a Wisconsin funeral director when he enlisted in the Navy to become a corpsman.
Sgt Strank, Cpl Block, and PFC Sousley were killed in action. (Combat cameraman Staff Sergeant William H. Genaust also died in the last stages of the battle.) Pharmacist's Mate 2d Class Bradley was wounded. The Marine Corps never made awards to the men for raising the flag, though several of them received decorations for other acts of courage. PFC Hayes received a letter of commendation, and Strank merited a posthumous Bronze Star. The Corps conferred a Navy Cross on Bradley for aiding Marines under fire. He was, in fact, treating Sergeant Henry O. Hansen, a member of the original patrol, when a sniper's bullet killed the sergeant.
Hayes fared worst in postwar life. The quiet young man had grown up in a close-knit tribal community of two hundred and was troubled by the unwanted limelight of the bond tour and subsequent publicity. He became a problem drinker, unable to hold a job, and died of alcohol and exposure near his home in 1955, barely two months after the unveiling of the Marine Corps War Memorial.
Gagnon flirted briefly with a Hollywood career, after playing in The Sands of Iwo Jima with Hayes and Bradley, and then settled down to a position with an airline for nearly two decades. The end of his life was unhappy. A newspaper printed an unflattering Memorial Day interview in 1978 that got him fired from his job as a motel desk clerk. A year later he died of a heart attack while working as a maintenance man for an apartment complex.
Strank, Hayes, and Gagnon now lay buried in Arlington National Cemetery not far from the monument they inspired. Bradley returned to his hometown and his former business, setting up his own funeral home. He died in 1994, the last of the flag-raisers.-JTH
Return to World War II Iwo Jima Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients
|
|
|
|
|
|
Articles & Briefings
