Re-reevaluating the Photo Evidence - A USMC Case Study
RESEARCH NOTES: I have previously said that most of
the photo evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy has not determined
much with certainty, except for the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie
in the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol – that put to rest the question of whether
the two men knew each other, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA) Photo Panel determination that the boxes in the snipers window were
moved after the last shot, based on two photos taken within seconds of each
other.
Now however, because of the advancements in photo
facial identification software and the recent US Marine Corps re-evaluation of
the identities of the men in the famous flag waving photo at Iwo Jima, I
believe that a re-evaluation of the photo evidence in the assassination of
President Kennedy can and will make more new unquestionable discoveries that
can have an impact on the case.
Convincing the Marine Corps Historians that they had
identified the wrong man in the Iwo Jima photo, that won a Pulitzer Prize and
served as the basis for books, movies and the famous monument in Washington
D.C., was not an easy task, but was accomplished by two determined amateur
historians – Erick Krelle and Stephen Foley.
If two amateur historical researchers can convince the USMC to admit they were wrong for 70 years in identifying the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, we can convince them that one of the most famous marines of all time - Lee Harvey Oswald, did not kill President Kennedy, and they should release all of the outstanding records they have that support this, including the report that concludes Oswald "was not capable of committing the assassination alone."
Marines investigate claim of mistaken identity in
famous Iwo Jima photo
Published May 03, 2016 Associated Press
In this Feb 23, 1945 file photo, U.S. Marines of the
28th Regiment, 5th Division, raise the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo
Jima, Japan. (AP)
DES MOINES, Iowa – The Marine Corps says it
has begun investigating whether it mistakenly identified one of the men shown
raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima in one of the iconic images of World War II
after two amateur history buffs began raising questions about the picture.
The Marines announced its inquiry more than a year
after Eric Krelle, of Omaha, Nebraska, and Stephen Foley, of Wexford, Ireland,
began raising doubts about the identity of one man. In November 2014, the Omaha
World-Herald published an extensive story about their claims and Saturday was
the first to report the Marines were looking into the matter.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal shot the
photo on Feb. 23, 1945, on Mount Suribachi, amid an intense battle with the
Japanese. Rosenthal didn't get the names of the men, but the photo immediately
was celebrated in the U.S. and President Franklin Roosevelt told the military
to identify the men.
After some confusion, the Marines identified the men
as John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, Harlon Block, Michael Strank and
Franklin Sousley. All were Marines except Bradley, who was a Navy corpsman.
Block, Strank and Sousley were killed in fighting at
Iwo Jima before the photo was distributed in the U.S.
On Monday, the Marines issued a statement saying,
"The Marine Corps is examining information provided by a private
organization related (to) Joe Rosenthal's Associated Press photograph of the
second flag raising on Iwo Jima.
"Rosenthal's photo captured a single moment in
the 36-day battle during which more than 6,500 US servicemen made the ultimate
sacrifice for our Nation and it is representative of the more than 70,000 US
Marines, Sailors, Soldiers and Coast Guardsmen that took part in the battle. We
are humbled by the service and sacrifice of all who fought on Iwo Jima."
Iwo Jima, a tiny island 660 miles south of Tokyo,
was the site of an intense 36-day battle that began Feb. 19, 1945, between
about 70,000 Marines and 18,000 Japanese soldiers. Capturing Iwo Jima was
deemed essential to the U.S. war effort because Japanese fighter planes were
taking off from the island and intercepting American bomber planes.
Hal Buell, a retired AP executive news photo editor,
had long discussions with Rosenthal about the flag-raising picture and in 2006
wrote a book about the famous image. It's hard to understand the photo's power
in 1945 to Americans, who were weary of the war and horrified by the incredible
number of deaths by servicemen, especially in locations of Asia most had never
heard of, Buell said.
"People were just tired of the war, and all of
a sudden out of nowhere came this picture that encapsulated everything,"
Buell said. "It showed that victory was ultimately possible."
Buell said after Rosenthal shot the photo, the
flag-raisers quickly moved onto other tasks, and it was impossible for him to
get their names. That task was left to the Marines after the picture prompted
an overwhelming response and the government decided to use the image in an
upcoming sale of war bonds to finance the continued fighting.
Rosenthal died in 2006.
The identification of the six servicemen has been
accepted for decades, but the World-Herald reported that while recovering from
an operation Foley had lots of time on his hands and began noticing possible
discrepancies in the picture. He enlisted the help of Krelle, who maintains a
website dedicated to the Marines' 5th Division.
After examining the famous photo along with other
pictures taken that day of the men, they concluded that the man identified as
Bradley was actually Harold Henry Schultz, a private first class from Detroit.
Schultz died in 1995.
Krelle declined to comment on the Marine's
investigation, telling the World-Herald he had signed a confidentiality
agreement with a third party. A message left by the AP at a phone number listed
to Krelle wasn't immediately returned.
In 2014, Krelle had told the newspaper, "People
can hold onto what they have always known in the past. But to me, the photos
are the truth."
Discrepancies identified by Krelle and Foley
included:
— Bradley wore uncuffed pants in the famous photo
but other pictures shot that day shows in him tightly cuffed pants.
— The bill of a cap is visible beneath the helmet in
the flag-raising picture but not in other images of Bradley made that day.
— The man identified as Bradley is wearing a
cartridge belt with ammunition pouches, and a pair of wire cutters hangs off
the belt. But as a Navy corpsman, Bradley would typically be armed with a
sidearm, not an M-1 rifle, and he'd have no need for wire cutters. Other photos
that day show him wearing what appears to be a pistol belt with no ammo
pouches.
Bradley's son, James Bradley, wrote a best-selling
book about the flag raisers, "Flags of Our Fathers," which was later
made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood.
Bradley told the AP he was shocked to hear the
Marines were investigating the identity of the men.
"This is unbelievable," said Bradley, who
interviewed the surviving Marines and Rosenthal before writing his book.
"I'm interested in facts and truths, so that's
fine, but I don't know what's happening," he added.
The Marines didn't give a timeline for its
investigation.
Marines
misidentified one man in iconic 1945 Iwo Jima photo
WASHINGTON — The Marine Corps
acknowledged Thursday it had misidentified one of the six men in
the iconic 1945 World War II photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima.
The investigation solved one mystery but raised
another. The Marine Corps investigation identified a man who has never been
officially linked to the famous photo: Pvt. 1st Class Harold Schultz, who died
in 1995 and went through life without publicly talking about his role.
“Why doesn’t he say anything to anyone,” asked
Charles Neimeyer, a Marine Corps historian who was on the panel that
investigated the identities of the flag raisers. “That’s the mystery.”
“I think he took his secret to the grave,” Neimeyer
said.
U.S. Marine Corps Pfc. Harold Schultz (Photo:
Courtesy of The Smithsonian Channel)
The Marine Corps investigation concluded with near
certainty that Schultz was one of the Marines ra
raising the flag in the photo.
The investigation also determined that John Bradley,
a Navy corpsman, was not in the photograph taken on
Japan's Mount Suribachi by Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for the
Associated Press. The Feb. 23, 1945, photo that has been reproduced over
seven decades actually depicts the second flag-raising of the day.
The three surviving men identified in the photo,
John Bradley, Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon, went on a tour selling war
bonds back in the United States and were hailed as heroes.
Bradley’s son James Bradley and co-author Ron
Powers, wrote a best-selling book about the flag raisers, Flags of our
Fathers, which was later made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. John
Bradley had been in the first flag-raising photo on Iwo Jima and may have
confused the two, Neimeyer said.
Schultz, who enlisted in the Marine Corps at
age 17, was seriously injured in fighting on the Japanese island and went on
to a 30-year career with the U.S. Postal Service in Los Angeles after
recovering from his wounds. He was engaged to a woman after the war, but she
died of a brain tumor before they could wed, said his stepdaughter,
Dezreen MacDowell. Schultz married MacDowell's mother at age 63.
Analysts believe Schultz, who received a Purple
Heart, knew he was in the iconic image, but chose not to talk about it.
“I have a really hard time believing how it wouldn’t
have been known to him,” said Matthew Morgan, a retired Marine officer who
worked on a Smithsonian Channel documentary on the investigation. The
filmmakers turned over their evidence to the Marine Corps to examine.
Schultz may have mentioned his role at least
once. MacDowell now recalls he said he was one of the flag raisers over
dinner in the early 1990s when they were discussing the war in the
Pacific.
“Harold, you are a hero,” she said she told
him. “Not really. I was a Marine,” he said.
She described him as quiet and self-effacing.
It’s difficult to fathom his desire to keep his role
quiet in an era when many Navy SEALs and other servicemen
are rushing books into print about their exploits. During World War
II many veterans were reluctant to speak about their experiences because
it reminded them of the horrors of war.
One of the flag raisers, Ira Hayes, initially
asked to remain anonymous, but the Marines were under orders from President
Franklin Roosevelt to identify the Marines so they could go on a war bonds
tour.
The photo appeared in thousands of newspapers and
raised the morale of a nation that had grown weary of the bloody slog in
the Pacific.
“We were winning the war but it was the hardest part
of the war,” historian Eric Hammel said of the Pacific island-hopping campaign.
“It went viral in the 1945 equivalent of the word,”
Neimeyer said.
The new investigation was prompted by growing doubts
about the identity of Bradley in the photo.
Two amateur historians, Eric Krelle and Stephen
Foley, went further and were able to identify Schultz as a possible flag
raiser. They examined the Rosenthal photo and compared it to others taken the
same day, including a film that was shot at the same time as Rosenthal took his
photo. Their research was highlighted in a lengthy 2014 Omaha World-Herald article.
More than a year later the Marine Corps agreed to
investigate the claim, appointing a nine-person panel headed by Jan Huly, a
retired Marine Corps three-star general.
The faces in Rosenthal’s photos are mostly obscured,
but investigators were able to identify distinctive ways the Marines wore
their equipment and uniforms in the photo and then compared it to other photos
taken of the unit on the same day.
“It’s obvious to the untrained eye,” said Michael
Plaxton, a consultant who examined the photographs for a documentary, "The
Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima," which will air on
the Smithsonian Channel on July 3.
“People have pointed out the inconsistencies over
the years,” Plaxton said.
He said it required more careful and
independent analysis to draw any firm conclusions, however. Plaxton’s report
and other material uncovered by the Smithsonian Channel was used by the Marine
Corps in their investigation.
Neimeyer said the Marine Corps didn’t immediately
launch an investigation because it frequently receive competing claims
about the presence of people in famous war photos. Once the Marine
Corps realized how compelling the evidence was in this case,
it agreed to look into the issue earlier this year.
It wasn’t the first time the Marines had to correct
the record. A Marine Corps investigation in 1947 determined that Henry
Hansen had been misidentified as a flag raiser instead of Harlon Block.
Both men had been killed in action on the island, as were two other men
identified in the photo, Franklin Sousley and Michael Strank.
It's not surprising there has been confusion about
the identities of the Marines. Rosenthal gave the shot very little thought
as he took it, and the men raising the flag took little notice as well.
The Marine Corps effort to identify the men was
further hindered by the confusion over the fact there were two
flag-raisings, the chaos of one of the war’s bloodiest battles and the faces in
the photos were obscured.
The Marine Corps said the results of the
investigation do
don’t undermine what the photo and memorial
depicting it represent. The photo helped cement the Marines’ reputation as one
of the world’s toughest fighting forces.
"Although the Rosenthal image is iconic and
significant, to Marines it's not about the individuals and never has
been," Gen. Robert Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps, said in a
statement. "Simply stated, our fighting spirit is captured in that
frame, and it remains a symbol of the tremendous accomplishments of our Corps
-- what they did together and what they represent remains most important.
"That doesn't change," Neller said.
Marines landed on Iwo Jima, a tiny Pacific atoll
about 760 miles from mainland Japan, on Feb. 19, 1945, beginning a bloody
five-week fight for every inch of the island against an entrenched
Japanese force that refused to surrender.
Few Marines escaped unscathed. Of the 70,000
Americans who participated in the battle, 6,800 were killed and about 20,000
were wounded. Some infantry units sustained much higher casualty rates. About
20,000 Japanese soldiers, most of the force, died trying to defend the tiny
island.
The first flag-raising, which occurred shortly after
10 a.m., captured the attention of the Marines fighting on the island. In the
midst of brutal battles throughout the island they looked up to see
the flag flying over Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the
island. Marines paused to cheer. Navy ships sounded their horns.
Hours later the Marines decided to replace that flag
with a larger one. Rosenthal was there, snapping a photo so quickly he didn’t
have time to look through his viewfinder.
After Schultz's death, MacDowell found
only a few items that her stepfather kept from his Marine Corps
days. Included in the metal box of military records was a group
photo that Rosenthal took of Marines on Iwo Jima around the same time
as the famous photo.
But there was no answer to the mystery of why Schultz remained
largely silent about his brush with history.
“He probably wouldn’t be really happy with us
revealing this now,” Neimeyer said.
Man
in Iwo Jima Flag Photo Was Misidentified, Marine Corps Says
June 23, 2016
WASHINGTON — An internal investigation by the Marine
Corps has concluded that for more than 70 years it wrongly identified one of
the men in the iconic photograph of the flag being raised over Iwo Jima during
one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
The inquiry found that a private first class, Harold
Schultz, was one of the six men in the photograph, which received a Pulitzer
Prize. And it determined that a Navy hospital corpsman, John Bradley, whose
son wrote a best-selling book about his father’s role in the flag-raising that
was made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood, was not in the image.
Mr. Schultz, a mail sorter who died in 1995 at age
70, never publicly acknowledged that he was in the photograph. According to his
stepdaughter, he discussed it only once with his family, mentioning it briefly
one night during dinner in the early 1990s as they talked about the Iwo Jima
battle.
“My mom was distracted and not listening and Harold
said, ‘I was one of the flag raisers,’ ” his stepdaughter, Dezreen MacDowell,
said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
“I said, ‘My gosh, Harold, you’re a hero.’ He said,
‘No, I was a Marine.’ ”
“After he said that, it was clear he didn’t want to
talk about it,” she said. “He was a very self-effacing Midwestern person. He
was already sick, and died two or three years later.”
The investigation was opened in response to
questions raised last year by producers working on a documentary, “The Unknown
Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima,” to be shown July 3 on the Smithsonian Channel, in
what was the latest controversy about the photograph. It was taken on Feb. 23, 1945,
by Joseph Rosenthal of The Associated Press as the Marines battled
the Japanese on the strategically important island in the Pacific.
Just days later, the image appeared on the front
pages of major national newspapers, quickly becoming a symbol of the sacrifices
American service members at war were willing to make. Ultimately, 6,800
American service members were killed on the island, and the image became the
inspiration for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., which depicts
six 32-foot-tall figures in the same positions as the men in the photograph.
But in 1946, the Marines conducted a similar
investigation in response to claims that the service had misidentified one of
the flag raisers, concluding that the man in the far right of the photograph
was actually Harlon Block, not Henry Hansen. (Both men had died on Iwo Jima.)
In the decades since, the Marines and Mr. Rosenthal have fended off accusations
that the photograph was staged.
Matthew Morgan, a retired Marine who worked as a
producer for the show’s production company, Lucky 8 TV, said it first
approached the Marines last year citing evidence that the men in the photograph
were misidentified.
Mr. Morgan said the Marines were initially not
interested in looking into the claim. But in January, the production company
provided the chief historian of the Marines, Charles Neimeyer, with detailed
evidence that laid out the case for mistaken identity.
Other photographs of the men on Iwo Jima that day,
along with forensic analysis of them, showed that the gear Mr. Bradley was
wearing was different from that worn by the man who was identified as Mr.
Bradley in the photograph. Facial recognition technology used on the
photographs also showed that the man was not Mr. Bradley.
“Over the years, people have claimed they were in
the photo, but there was nothing besides their word to back that up,” Dr.
Neimeyer said. “I thought that maybe they are on to something, maybe they are
right.”
U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division,
raised the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, Japan, in 1945.CreditJoe
Rosenthal/Associated Press
In March, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen.
Robert B. Neller, appointed a retired three-star general to lead a panel of
eight active and retired Marine commissioned and noncommissioned officers,
including Dr. Neimeyer, to investigate the photograph.
The panel began meeting secretly the next month at
Marine offices in Quantico, Va., where it painstakingly examined Mr.
Rosenthal’s photograph. After six days, the panel voted unanimously to endorse
findings that it was Mr. Schultz, not Mr. Bradley, who had participated in the
raising of the flag.
Mr. Bradley’s role that day was at the center of the
book “Flags of Our Fathers,” written by his son, James, and Ron Powers, which
was published in 2000 and was on the New York Times best-seller list for 46
weeks.
But in May, shortly after it was publicly disclosed
that the Marines were investigating the photograph, James Bradley said that he
no longer believed that his father, who is deceased, was in the image. He said
that his father had participated in an earlier flag-raising and mistakenly
believed that it had been the one captured by Mr. Rosenthal. Mr. Bradley
declined to participate in the documentary, according to Mr. Morgan.
Mr. Bradley, who did not return an email seeking
comment, said in May that he had become convinced of this in 2014, after
reading an article in The Omaha World-Herald that told how amateur
historians had discovered the incorrect identifications. But he said that it
took him a year to examine the evidence in the article because he had been
working on a book in Vietnam, and then had become ill.
Days after the photograph was taken in 1945, Mr.
Schultz sustained wounds to his arm and stomach, and he was sent home. Several
months later, Mr. Schultz, who was originally from Michigan, was discharged
from the Marines.
The federal government helped him get a job in Los
Angeles as a mail sorter for the Postal Service. He was single until age 60,
when he married Ms. MacDowell’s mother, who lived next door in his apartment
building and shared a porch. But he never moved in with her and rarely
discussed his time in the military, according to Ms. MacDowell.
Why Mr. Schultz apparently never disclosed that he
was in the famous picture remains a mystery.
Many Marines who had fought on Iwo Jima suffered
from post-traumatic stress disorder, but little was known about the condition
at the time.
To cope, many Marines simply never talked about
their military experience.
One of the other men pictured in the flag-raising,
Ira Hayes, had asked men in his unit not to identify him as being in the
photograph, but they could not keep it secret.
“I think Hayes and Schultz believed that if they
were identified as flag raisers, not a day would go by without them being
reminded of combat and being on Iwo Jima,” Dr. Neimeyer said.
On Wednesday, General Neller called Ms. MacDowell to
tell her of the findings about her stepfather.
“I’m delighted he has gotten the recognition, but I
wish it happened when he was alive,” she said afterward. “He was a kind and
gentle man.”
General Neller said in a written statement that
“although the Rosenthal image is iconic and significant, to Marines it’s not
about the individuals and never has been.”
He added: “Simply stated, our fighting spirit is
captured in that frame, and it remains a symbol of the tremendous
accomplishments of our corps — what they did together and what they represent
remains most important. That doesn’t change.”'
The Marines will now alter any places where they
refer to the flag raisers, substituting Mr. Schultz’s name for Mr. Bradley.
