<P> News pros were not the only ones greatly impressed by the photo . Navy Captain T.B. Clark was on duty at Patuxent Air Station in Maryland that Saturday when it came humming off the wire in 1945 . He studied it for a minute, and then thrust it under the gaze of Navy Petty Officer Felix de Weldon . De Weldon was an Austrian immigrant schooled in European painting and sculpture . De Weldon could not take his eyes off the photo . In its classic triangular lines he recognized similarities with the ancient statues he had studied . He reflexively reached for some sculptor's clay and tools . With the photograph before him he labored through the night . Within 72 hours of the photo's release, he had replicated the six boys pushing a pole, raising a flag . Upon seeing the finished model, the Marine Corps commandant had de Weldon assigned to the Marine Corps until de Weldon was discharged from the navy after the war was over . </P> <P> Starting in 1951, de Weldon was commissioned to design a memorial to the Marine Corps . It took de Weldon and hundreds of his assistants three years to finish it . Hayes, Gagnon, and Bradley, posed for de Weldon, who used their faces as a model . The three Marine flag raisers who did not survive the battle were sculpted from photographs . </P> <P> The flag - raising Rosenthal (and Genaust) photographed was the replacement flag / flagstaff for the first flag / flagstaff that was raised on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945 . There was some resentment from former Marines of the original 40 - man patrol that went up Mount Suribachi including by those involved with the first flag - raising, that they did not receive the recognition they deserved . Staff Sgt. Lou Lowery who took the first photos of the first flag flying over Mt . Suribachi, Charles W. Lindberg, who helped tie the first American flag to the first flagpole on Mount Suribachi (and who was, until his death in June 2007, one of the last living person depicted in either flag - flying scenes), complained for several years that he helped to raise the flag and "was called a liar and everything else . It was terrible" (because of all the recognition and publicity over and directed to the replacement flag - raisers and that flag - raising), and Raymond Jacobs, photographed with the patrol commander around the base of the first flag flying over Mt . Suribachi, complained until he died in 2008, that he is still not recognized by the Marine Corps by name as being the radioman in the photo . </P> <P> The original Rosenthal photograph is currently in the possession of Roy H. Williams, who bought it from the estate of John Faber, the official historian for the National Press Photographers Association, who had received it from Rosenthal . Both flags (from the first and second flag - raisings) are now located in the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia . </P>

Raising the flag on iwo jima original photo