Flag raising is modern version of Iwo Jima tableau

The Associated Press photograph that dominated Page One in this and many other newspapers around the country on Thursday morning is a keeper, bound to take its place in history alongside the indelible image of United States Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi more than a half-century ago.

The photo shows three soot-covered and weary New York City firefighters pausing from their search and rescue mission at the former World Trade Center towers to raise the American flag on a pole skewed at a 45-degree angle amidst the smoldering wreckage.

Pundits and politicians galore have labeled Tuesday’s dastardly terrorist strike against America a modern-day Pearl Harbor, reminiscent of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii that vaulted us into World War II. The comparison, though vastly overworked, seems apt.

By the same token, it is not difficult to imagine that many grieving older Americans, upon seeing Thursday’s photograph of the New York firefighters hoisting Old Glory, were at least subliminally reminded of the 1945 photo of the Iwo Jima flag-raising and perhaps struck by the parallels.

In his exhaustive account of World War II, “A World At Arms,” published in 1994 by the Cambridge University Press, historian Gerhard Weinberg describes the battle of Iwo Jima. He writes of how the “loose ashes of the island – which had only appeared above sea level due to volcanic action half a century before – made progress difficult… A shallow beachhead was obtained on the first day, and in the following days the Marines fought they way forward slowly and at great cost. By Feb. 24 they had reached the crest of volcanic Mount Suribachi, planting a flag which encouraged the Marines struggling for control of the airfields and inspiring through a famous news picture the monument to the Marines in Arlington National Cemetery today…”

In New York City, loose ash and debris slow courageous rescue workers, as well. Like the Marines of Iwo Jima, they, too, established a shallow beachhead on the first day and have since “fought their way slowly and at great cost” in lives lost. And, like the heroic Marines of Iwo Jima who encouraged their comrades with the planting of America’s flag atop Mount Suribachi, so too did the New York firemen inspire their own, as well as Americans everywhere, with the impromptu flag-raising atop the World Trade Center rubble.

Some 6,000 Marines were killed on Iwo Jima, and 25,000 were wounded – the only time that American casualties exceeded Japanese deaths in the Pacific offensive. By the time all victims in the attacks on New York and Washington have been accounted for Tuesday’s death toll may well be greater.

The horrific crimes against mankind are being laid at the doorstep of Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, and probably rightfully so. If those strong suspicions prove to be correct, President Bush has promised that bin Laden and his followers will be tracked down and our score with terrorism evened.

Meanwhile, Americans must be mindful of another aspect of early World War II, one less inspirational that the Iwo Jima flag-raising tableau: The blanket stereotyping of all Japanese-Americans as The Enemy following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and their incarceration in concentration camps. The simultaneous demonization in the mass media of the Japanese (and, to a lesser extent Germans and Italians, the other partners in the Axis powers triumvirate) was so profound that it lingers in the psyche of older Americans to this very day.

Mindful of these mistakes in our time of national distress, we must not repeat them by unjustly blaming Islam or its followers living in the United States for Tuesday’s carnage and misdirecting our anger at them. That was the point of commentary Thursday on this page by former Central Intelligence Agency director R. James Woolsey and Mansoor Ijaz, an American Muslim of Pakistani origin.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Earl Warren, then-attorney general of California and later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, were central figures in ordering the internment of Japanese-Americans. Their action was upheld in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Hugo Black. “That error in judgment, made by three of 20th century America’s most prominent guardians of human rights, still haunts us today,” Woolsey and Ijaz wrote.

If future generations are to be haunted by our actions in the present national crisis, let it be by the positive image of New York City firemen planting the flag in a pile of rubble on the day when – fueled by a fierce national determination to emerge the stronger from a calamity of epic proportions – America, the sleeping giant, was finally awakened.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.