Veteran seeks credit for first Iwo Jima flag raising

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — The old man gazes at the photo of the flag flying over Iwo Jima and sees himself 60 years younger, a Marine in uniform with a radio on his back and his head tilted up at the Stars and Stripes.

It's not the photo known the world over of six men struggling to raise Old Glory. No, this is a black-and-white of the smaller American flag first raised by Marines atop Mount Suribachi, earlier the same day. But because of the iconic later picture, this event is largely lost to history.

And as another anniversary of the flag-raising arrives Wednesday, 79-year-old Raymond Jacobs says he has been similarly overlooked all this time.

The young radioman in the photo is himself, Jacobs insists. And armed with pictures, news clippings, correspondence and his own account of the siege on the extinct volcano, the white-haired former Marine has been rounding up veterans, members of Congress and authors as allies in his fight for recognition.

"When the folks in Washington, D.C., kept saying, 'No, no, no,' I got a little bit pushed, so I said, 'I'm going to prove it to them,' " Jacobs says. "I understand their skepticism because there have been any number of people who've claimed to have been part of this group and they weren't, they were just telling sea stories."

Jacobs' story begins Feb. 19, 1945, when he and thousands of Marines were pinned down on the black sand beach as bullets, mortars and artillery rained down from an invisible enemy burrowed in the island.

Iwo Jima would be the deadliest battle in Marine Corps history, killing nearly 7,000 Americans.

On the morning of Feb. 23, after a four-man reconnaissance patrol returned from the 550-foot summit of Suribachi, Jacobs, a member of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, says he was ordered to fill in for Easy Company's radioman on a combat patrol up the mountain.

With a 40-pound radio strapped to his back and carrying an M-1 rifle, Jacobs says, he made a nerve-racking scramble up the rugged peak with 40 strangers.

"The amount of fire that they poured down on us in previous days was so incredible that you were twitchy," he says. "All the time you're moving, you're looking around waiting for the first round to hit."

After making it to the summit without resistance, a group of the men tied a small flag to a length of water pipe found in the debris and hoisted it. When it was aloft, a spontaneous roar rose from the shore.

"All of a sudden you could hear voices down below screaming and yelling and cheering," Jacobs says. "It was an incredible feeling, a very emotional feeling. The boats who were beached and the big ships at sea started blowing whistles and horns and all the rest of it."