Statue in behind enemy lines
19, 1945.Īfter World War II, Colonel Severance completed flight training and flew fighter aircraft during the Korean War. He had six officers and 240 enlisted men under his command when the Marines landed on Iwo Jima on Feb. The statue is dedicated to “the Marine dead of all wars and their comrades of other services who fell fighting beside them.”Įarly in 1944, he was promoted to captain. Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the National Mall in Washington. And the scene he photographed was replicated on a monumental scale as the U.S. The Joe Rosenthal photograph is in the National Archives. Frayed by strong winds, the second flag flew above Mount Suribachi for the remainder of the Iwo Jima campaign. Rosenthal’s dramatic photograph.īoth flags are now at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Va. It was the raising of the second flag that was portrayed in Mr. After it was returned to the beach, Colonel Severance sent another group of his Marines to bring a larger flag to the mountaintop. When James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy, who was on the beach below, saw the flag, he requested that it be kept as a memento. Louis Lowery of the Marine magazine Leatherneck. In midmorning, a group of Marines from Easy Company raised a flag at the summit, a ceremony photographed by Sgt. The island, defended by 21,000 Japanese troops, held airstrips that were needed as bases for American fighter planes and as havens for crippled bombers returning to the Mariana Islands from missions over Japan.Īmid heavy casualties, the Marines by the fifth day of combat on Iwo Jima had silenced most opposition from Japanese soldiers dug into caves on Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano 546 feet high at Iwo Jima’s southern tip. The citation stated that in a firefight for a heavily defended ridge, he “skillfully directed the assault on this strong enemy position despite stubborn resistance.”Ĭolonel Severance, a captain at the time, commanded Easy Company of the 28th Marine Regiment, Fifth Marine Division - part of the 70,000-man Marine force that sought to seize Iwo Jima, 7.5 square miles of black volcanic sand about 660 miles south of Tokyo. In the days that followed, Colonel Severance earned the Silver Star, the Marines’ third-highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. 23, 1945, captured by an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, was taken when the battle for Iwo Jima was far from over.
The flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. His family announced his death on Wednesday.
Dave Severance, the commander of the Marine company that raised a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in World War II, inspiring the photograph that thrilled the American home front and became an enduring image of men at war, died on Monday at his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego.