I’m sad to see that Charles W. Lindberg has passed away.

Lindberg was the last surviving member of the group of Marines that raised the original flag on Iwo Jima.

That’s him, standing on the far right. 

Here he is back then:

And here’s a more recent shot:

Lindberg was born and raised in Linton, North Dakota.  After the war, he became an electrician and settled in the Twin Cities.

Back in the mid-sixties, he wrote a book about his experiences; it must have been self-published or run off at some small college press, because it was written in the style you’d expect of a farm boy-become-electrician, unvarnished and unpolished and very, very direct.  My high school library had a dog-eared copy, which I read several times.  I’m sure the book is lost to publishing history, but if you can find it it’s well worth a read.  In it, he relates his story and that of the patrol, and began his decades-long job of telling people that there was a first flag-raising, before the one immortalized by photographer Joe Rosenthal. 

“Two of our men found this big, long pipe there,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003. “We tied the flag to it, took it to the highest spot we could find and we raised it.

“Down below, the troops started to cheer, the ship’s whistles went off, it was just something that you would never forget,” he said. “It didn’t last too long, because the enemy started coming out of the caves.”

The moment was captured by Sgt. Lou Lowery, a photographer from the Corps’ Leatherneck magazine. It was the first time a foreign flag flew on Japanese soil, according to the book “Flags of Our Fathers,” by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Bradley’s father, Navy Corpsman John Bradley, was one of the men in the famous photo of the second flag-raising.

Three of the men in the first raising never saw their photos. They were among the 5,931 Marines killed on the island.

Rest in peace, Corporal Lindberg.