On this day in 1945, during the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, US Marines reached the crest of Mount Suribachi, the island's highest peak. There they raised the US flag. Marine Corps photographer Sergeant Lou Lowery captured this first flag-raising on film just as the enemy threw a grenade at him. Lowery dodged the grenade and hurled his body over the edge of the crater, falling 50 feet. His camera lens shattered, but he and his film were safe.

More Photo Moments. Several hours later more Marines headed up to the peak with a larger flag. This time Joe Rosenthal, a photographer with the Associated Press, met them enroute and recorded the raising of the second flag along with a motion-picture cameraman.

Three Photographs of Suribachi. Rosenthal took three photographs atop Suribachi. The first showed five Marines and one Navy corpsman struggling to raise the heavy flag pole. It became the most reproduced photograph in history and won a Pulitzer Prize. The second photo was similar to the first. The third photo showed a group picture of 18 soldiers smiling and waving for the camera. Before the Battle of Iwo Jima ended in late March of that year, three of the six Marines who raised the flag would be dead.

Iwo Jima. Some History. Early in 1945, US military command tried to gain control of Iwo Jima, a tiny volcanic island in the Pacific, 700 miles southeast of Japan. Capturing the island was anther step toward the proposed air war against the Japanese home islands. Iwo Jima was to become a base for fighter aircraft and an emergency-landing site for bombers. On February 19th, the first wave of Marines made their way onto the shores of Iwo Jima.

Heavily Protected. The island already held 22,000 Japanese soldiers under the command of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. Kuribayashi, expecting an Allied invasion, had already built a complex system of underground tunnels, fortifications, and artillery that held off the initial Allied attack. Despite this, by the evening of the first day, 30,000 US Marines under General Holland Smith established a solid beachhead.

Inch by Inch. Over the course of the next few days, under heavy fire from the Japanese, the Marines made slow but steady progress. While Japanese kamikaze flyers crashed into the Allied naval fleet surrounding the island, the Marines continued to advance.