INTERVIEW
Charles W. Lindberg IWO JIMA FIRST FLAG-RAISER INTERVIEW BY BOB YEHLING, WITH CHUCK OLDHAM
C
harles W. Lindberg’s life changed 10 days after he was evacuated from Iwo Jima. While lying in a military hospital in Saipan, between operations to repair a forearm shattered by a Japanese bullet, Cpl. Lindberg saw a photograph that set the tone for the next 50 years of his life. “Someone asked me if I wanted to see the first flag-raising,” Lindberg recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ I looked at it and I said, ‘Oh no, that’s not the way we did it.’” The-24-year old corporal didn’t know it at the time, but he was looking at a photo taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. It was the image of five Marines and a Navy corpsman struggling to hoist a large American flag. “The photo” won Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize; President Franklin D. Roosevelt the badly needed support of the American people to finish off Japan; the treasury coffers $220 million in war bond sales; unwanted fame for Pfc. Ira Hayes and PHM2c John Bradley; welcome fame for Pfc. Rene Gagnon; and the U.S. Marine Corps a symbol that would memorialize its grit and tenacity forever. There was just one problem: Rosenthal’s photograph depicted the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. Four hours prior to that event, Lindberg and five other members of Company E, 28th Marines of the 5th Marine Division, had quickly raised a smaller flag on a 20-foot piece of iron pipe – then fought off Japanese resistance for three hours until the mountain was secure. Had Company E not mopped up the mountain, the second group may never have been sent up the hill by Lt. Col. Chandler Johnson, who ordered the flags switched to prevent any souvenir hunters from stealing the first flag. From such an innocent switch grew the biggest avalanche and magnet of publicity the U.S. military has ever known. Timing was a factor, too. The photographer who accompanied Company E up the mountain on the morning of Feb. 23, Sgt. Lou Lowery of Leatherneck magazine, did not get his film off Iwo Jima until several days after the first flag-raising. Meanwhile, as a civilian member of the international media, Rosenthal was able to have his film rushed by ship to Guam, where it was developed and flown to the United States.
Uncommon Valor: Before Iwo Jima, you served with the 2nd Raider Battalion at Midway, then on Guadalcanal, and after that on Bougainville. On Guadalcanal, you were on the famous “Long Patrol.” Can you describe that? Charles W. Lindberg: We were sent back into the jungle. We spent 32 days behind enemy lines. We traveled all the way
84
IWO JIMA 75
America’s propensity for creating big events and heroes took over. The second flag-raising became larger than life, and so did its three surviving participants. Lying in his hospital bed in Saipan, and later Oahu, Lindberg grew more and more chagrined with the developments in the States – as did his surviving fellow platoon members. “You can’t feel good about it,” he recalled. “We kind of did the dirty work and somebody else got the credit for it. Actually, in my own opinion, there shouldn’t have been any names there amongst the flags. Every man on that island put those flags up; we didn’t do it by ourselves. No way did we do it alone. But when those other names came out, I said, ‘To hell with it: I’m going to get the names out.’” Like others fortunate enough to make it through the war, Lindberg made a life for himself far from any battlefields. He met his future wife at an American Legion dance in 1946 and married her a year later. He began a career as an electrician and they raised a family – three sons and two daughters; between them, the three boys served in the Boy Scouts and all four branches of the military. It was just as happy and ordinary as any other family in which the patriarch sharpened his determination during the Depression, strengthened his callused, paw-sized workingman’s hands on fence posts, farm tools, flamethrowers, and electrical equipment, then settled into semi-retirement. However, because of a fateful moment in 1945 and the controversy that surrounded it thereafter, Lindberg’s life was not ordinary. He spent many of his hours sharing the story of the first flag-raising with the public, often speaking at schools to teach children about the sacrifices made by veterans at Iwo Jima and elsewhere. This interview is the product of three different interviews conducted between 1995 and 2005, the longest by Bob Yehling. Two years after the final interview, on June 24, 2007, Cpl. Charles W. Lindberg passed away and was laid to rest at Fort Snelling National Cemetery. His tombstone records his Purple Heart and Silver Star medals, and reads, in its last lines: “Iwo Jima First Flag Raiser.”
from where we landed [at Aola Bay] up to Henderson Field. And our job was to harass, destroy anything we could – supplies. We took a toll of the enemy, over 480, and we destroyed a lot of stuff. We destroyed a cannon up there [nicknamed Pistol Pete] that was firing on the airfield and they couldn’t find it. We found it. We only lost 17 men.
You were involved in some of the first actions of the war as well as one of the last. How did it help you in the heat of the moment at Iwo Jima to have been seasoned by other World War II assaults? Well, let’s put it this way – you keep your cool. Stuff never worried me. I take it as it comes, and I don’t wonder why, and I don’t get nervous. You just go ahead and do it – do
