Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

It is 50 Weeks that shaped America Week 7. This is our series marking America 250, and this week we go to February of 1945 and the

tiny island of Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima is located about halfway between Japan and the Mariana Islands,

southeast of Japan. It's a trapezoidal island. A lot of people have described it as being shaped

kind of like a pork chop, and it is dominated by Mount Surabachi, a 546-foot dormant volcanic cone at the southern

tip of the island. In the winter of 1945, as American involvement in World War II was starting

to shift to the Pacific Theater, Iwo Jima became a focus of intense fighting

between American and Japanese troops. And on February 23rd, after about 10 days of battle,

a group of six American soldiers, one Marine and one medic, clambered to the top of Mount Surabachi

and raised an American flag in triumph. And they were not alone. A photographer

by the name of Joe Rosenthal was there too, and he took out his speed graphic camera, set his

shutter speed to one four hundredth of a second, and snapped a photo. That photo of the flag being

raised over Iwo Jima would almost immediately become one of the most iconic photos in U.S. history.

Within a day, it was plastered all over newspapers, and it came to symbolize the gritty American spirit and soon to be triumph of the Second World War.

And that is the focus of this week's series because that photo not only shaped Americans' perception

of the war, it also symbolizes the power of media and images in the story of World War II

and beyond.

It's also just a fascinating backstory of how that photo came together.

So here we go with our deep look at raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the Battle in the Pacific,

the man who took the photo, the mystery of who is in the photo, some light controversy about whether the photo is actually

staged. We will get into all of it here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly

Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. I'm very excited about this

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