The United States said good-bye to a hero June 25, 2007, when Charles W. Lindberg passed away at Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, just outside Minneapolis, at the age of 86. Many will not recognize his name, the reason due in part to a saddening historical misconception.
When the terms “Iwo Jima,” “Suribachi,” and “Flags of Our Fathers” are mentioned, everyone remembers the names of Ira Hayes, John “Doc” Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and so forth. Why? Because instantly, Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of six Iwo Jima flag raisers comes to mind. To the American people, this photograph represents the first American flag to be erected atop the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. But alas, according to Associated Press writer Chris Williams, Charles W. Lindberg spent much of his life trying to refute this delusion.
February 23, 1945, amid Japanese turmoil directed unswervingly at U.S. Marines, Charles W. Lindberg and five of his patrol were the first citizens of the United States to hoist Old Glory atop the peak of Iwo Jima.
“Two of our men found this big, long pipe there,” he said in a dialogue with The Associated Press in 2003. “We tied the flag to it, took it to the highest spot we could find and we raised it.
“Down below, the troops started to cheer, the ship’s whistles went off, it was just something that you would never forget,” Lindberg said. “It didn’t last too long, because the enemy started coming out of the caves.”
One of the Marine photographers, Sergeant Lou Lowery, snapped a photo of the men at this momentous time. According to Lindberg, his commanding officer ordered the flag to be taken down and replaced, lest anyone take it as a souvenir. Four hours later, however, after fighting had commenced and Lindberg was back in the battle, a photographer named Joe Rosenthal showed up with his camera and immortalized six different men from a separate patrol unit who raised the second, larger flag. News of this reached Washington before the first, and at the end of the war, it was the likenesses of the second flagholders, not the first, who were credited with the first flag erection.
As an insult to injury, Lindberg says no one believed him when he told them he was one of the first flagholders on Iwo Jima. So he spent the better part of his elderly life spreading the news about the first flag raising, speaking at conferences, and selling photographs of Lowery’s photo through catalogs, according to AP reporters. His character was also portrayed by Alessandro Mastrobuono in Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers”, a documentary film of the true story of Iwo Jima.
Charles W. Lindberg most likely would not have described himself as hero, however. After being shot in the arm on March 1, 1945, he was evacuated from Iwo Jima. But it is not just his injury and the flag raising that makes him a true hero; he held fast to the experiences he knew to be factual, and dedicated his life to the awareness of the truth. He represented the first flagholders who were killed in battle shortly after the flag’s raising, and of those who preceded him in death. Now, his likeness appears on a mural in Long Prairie, Minnesota of the battle of Iwo Jima, and his face is engraved into the black granite walls of Soldiers Field in Rochester. Thanks to those who really cared, his memory will live on for years to come as one of the first Iwo Jima flag raisers.
