Battle of Iwo Jima

The flag went up over Mount Suribachi on the fifth day. The fight for Iwo Jima went on for another month.

The island is eight square miles of volcanic rock roughly 750 miles south of Tokyo, and the United States wanted its airfields. Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew it. He put about 21,000 men underground, in pillboxes, bunkers, fortified caves and some 11 miles of tunnels, and made the Marines dig them out one position at a time.

The island was declared secure on March 26, 1945. By then 6,821 Americans had been killed and 19,217 wounded, and American casualties, dead and wounded together, actually exceeded the Japanese. Of the 21,000 defenders, 216 were taken prisoner. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor came out of those 36 days, and Adm. Chester Nimitz's verdict that "uncommon valor was a common virtue" is carved on the Marine Corps War Memorial. The airfields paid off: by the end of the war, 2,251 B-29 landings had been recorded there.

This painting puts the flag raising inside that unfinished fight. Black smoke climbs from fires on both sides, warships sit on a gray horizon, and the summit under the Marines' boots is a heap of broken rock and dropped rifles. The flag is up and catching the wind. Nothing around it is over.