U.S. NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER. The second American flag flies triumphantly over Iwo Jima. The first flag to be raised on Mount Suribachi was considered too small to be recognized at a distance, and a larger banner was obtained from LST-779.

The time and the place were prophetic. It was early 1945, and the place was Pearl Harbor, site of the surprise attack that plunged the United States into World War II.

The war’s final year was but a few days old, and the landing ship, tank LST-779 was in Pearl Harbor for extended training maneuvers in anticipation of landing on Iwo Jima. Lieutenant junior grade Alan Wood, of Sierra Madre, Calif., was serving as the LST’s communications officer at the time. “It was our first operation, and naturally we were a little excited,” he recalled. “We knew it would be pretty important because Iwo was so close to Japan.”

During the ship’s stay in Hawaii, Wood and several signalmen visited a Navy salvage depot. Wood, who was responsible for LST-779’s flags, recalled: “I was just rummaging around looking for anything that might be of use when I found this apparently brand-new flag in a duffel bag with some old signal flags. It was a large flag, and I was glad to find it because we were out of large flags. Little did I know how famous it would one day become.”

Wood figured that the flag was probably from some decommissioned vessel, although he did not know where it actually came from and has since wondered about its origins. “We carried the flag on our long trek to Iwo,” he remembered, “and it flew several times from our gaff on Sundays—it being the one large flag we had.”

After stops at the islands of Eniwetok and Saipan for further battle orientation, LST-779 set out on the last leg to Iwo Jima. On board were a company of Marines and their 155mm howitzers, as well as reserves of ammunition and high-octane gasoline.

In a letter to a friend (which on November 19, 1945, found its way into the Congressional Record), Wood described his first impressions of the battle for Iwo Jima. “On the 19th of February—a clear, cool, beautiful day—we rolled up to Iwo, which was a mass of smoke and dust,” he wrote. “The big ships of the Navy circled the island and were leisurely pumping a steady barrage of shells at it. Overhead our planes buzzed and roared as wave after wave dove at the beaches and Mount Suribachi. It didn’t seem possible there could be a living thing left on Iwo when the Marines got there. It looked like a pushover. But that afternoon as we cruised around, several thousand yards off the beach, we could tell by looking through binoculars that the Japs were doing a lot of fighting back.”

Wood and his shipmates could see burning tanks and landing craft. They were dismayed as they watched Japanese mortars and artillery brutally pummeling the U.S. Marines pinned down all along the beach. Then the call came for help—the howitzers were desperately needed. LST-779 headed for the beach. Through a mix-up, two other LSTs that were also supposed to land did not show up for two more days.

“The beach was a madhouse of men, supplies and noisy vehicles,” Wood wrote his friend. “Suribachi was a few thousand yards down the beach on our left, and the front line, marked by some entrenched tanks, was only a few hundred yards down the beach. Occasionally you could hear the spatter of small-arms fire, and all too often a big Jap mortar would explode with a shattering burst, and with terrible finality, right on the beach in the midst of all the men, supplies and machines.”

Unloading LST-779 took the afternoon and most of the night—a night that Wood declared he would never forget: “That pale moon, the eerie yellow star shells, the black grotesque outline of Suribachi, the occasional burst of a shell, sometimes close at hand, and the continual clank and groan of the tracked vehicles unloading our ship, and the wash of surf on the wreckage which littered the shore line. There was a feeling of death in the air that was overpowering—almost stimulating—which prevented any weary eyes from closing for any length of time.”

A pre-dawn Japanese mortar barrage threatened the LST, which was still loaded with large reserves of gasoline and ammunition. Mortar rounds fell dangerously close to the ship. “Shrapnel spraying against the steel plates sounded like someone was throwing handfuls of gravel at us,” Wood remembered. “How we missed being hit I don’t know. If we had, the result would have been disastrous.” The skipper of the LST wisely decided to pull out, since, for a time, the critical cargo had been unloaded. After two days spent a safe distance from the island, the ship was again beached, this time closer to Mount Suribachi.

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