The men that hoisted the second flag on Iwo Jima are as follows:

Joe Rosenthal, Associated Press (AP)

You may not recognize his name, but you know the picture he took. Even Cartier-Bresson, who spoke of the “decisive moment” in photography, never captured a more astonishing instant of formal beauty, aching tension and profound emotion than Rosenthal’s image of Marines raising that flag. Rosenthal was an AP photographer whose eyesight was bad enough to make him 4-F — but clearly it didn’t ruin his eye. The Pulitzer Prize winning photo was so perfect that Rosenthal was suspected of staging it. But people who were there said he did no such thing; a film taken of the flag-raising corroborates them. Rosenthal himself always said he’d gotten lucky. The heavy pipe the men were using partly accounts for the powerful sense of struggle, and the light was perfect: the sun right overhead on an overcast day.

Joe died in August 2006 in San Fancisco.

This page will be updated soon with details of the flag raisers.