An Irishman’s Diary: A Tale of Two Heroes in the Battle of Iwo Jima

In various accounts of the Battle of Iwo Jima, the very bloody conflict that started 70 years ago today, two Irish surnames stand out.

One belonged to Joseph Jeremiah McCarthy, who was indeed Irish-American. The other attached to Ira Hayes, who was anything but, and only owed the moniker to the random decision of a 19th-century census taker.

Both men were heroes of the battle in their own ways. McCarthy, a pug-nosed Chicagoan who looked like Brendan Behan, but wasn’t nearly as fond of talking, won his country’s highest tribute, the Medal of Honour, for his actions on the island.

And that wasn’t his first conspicuous act of bravery in the Pacific campaign. He had already earned a Silver Star in a place that has since acquired much resonance in the land of his ancestors: Saipan.

Ira Hayes’s even greater post-war fame was due, by contrast, to a quirk of fate.

US flag

Despite the surname, he was Native American, a member of the Pima or “river people” of Arizona. But on February 23rd, 1945, he happened to be standing nearby as fellow troops raised a US flag on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, using a stretch of water pipe as a pole.

They were struggling in the wind, so somebody asked Hayes to help. And as he joined the five others from the rear, the moment was captured by a photographer named Joe Rosenthal.

The picture won a Pulitzer Prize later that year, as well as inspiring the design of a US postage stamp.

It has since been reproduced countless times, usually with the word “iconic” in the caption. And for good or bad, it made post-war celebrities of the flag-raisers, or at least of the three who made it off Iwo Jimo alive.

In implying that the island was already secured for the US, the photograph was rather premature. The battle had only started.

By the time it ended, more than a month later, it had become the only action involving the US marines in which their casualties outnumbered the enemy’s: by about 26,000 to 22,000.

The deaths of half the flag-raisers notwithstanding, there was a stark contrast in fatalities.

The Japanese were fighting for “their very hearths and homes”, as one commentator put it, and they fought to the end. Three times as many Japanese died as did Americans. Only a little over 200 were taken prisoner.

If it didn’t exactly lie, the camera glossed over another truth. The flag so famously pictured was not the first one raised on the island. That had happened earlier the same day, and was also photographed.

As he lugged his camera up the mountain slope, Rosenthal even met the other photographer on the way down, who told him the flag was already raised but that he should keep climbing anyway because “the view is worth it”.

Summit

The other man didn’t know how right he was. By the time Rosenthal reached the summit, it had been decided that the first flag wasn’t big enough. A replacement on a longer pole had been found. The rest was photographic history.

Sad to say, Ira Hayes couldn’t cope with the fame that awaited him after the war. According to one account, the name of the Pima Indians came from a phonetic rendering of their expression for “I don’t know“: a phrase used repeatedly to the inquiries of early European settlers in those parts.

If so, there was an irony in his awkward relationship with the American press. Hayes was even less fond of talking than McCarthy, and the questions he was asked (including one once about the origins of his “Irish name“) were met with angry silence or short answers.

Worse than questions, he was also plied with free drink everywhere he turned, and didn’t deal with it well.

He survived to play a cameo role in the classic 1949 movie, Sands of Iwo Jima.

But back on the reservation in Arizona, the rest of his life was a precipitous slide into alcoholism, until he was found dead outdoors, one cold January morning in 1955. He was 32.

McCarthy had a longer and happier retirement from the battle field.

After getting his Medal of Honour from President Truman, he quit the army as a lieutenant colonel and rejoined the Chicago Fire Brigade he had left for war.

Among his many honours was to be grand marshal of the city’s St Patrick’s Day parade in 1959. Thereafter he lived well into his 80s and died in 1996. @FrankmcnallyIT