The Uncommon Valor of Michael Strank
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PlUuRAr T BY CUHI MINER THE UNCOMMON VALOR OF MICHAEL STRANK Immortality was the furthest thing from Sgt. Michael sitions on the "flea speck" Pacific island for five days. Strank's mind on February 23, 1945. That's when the Casualties were high. The men were in desperate need of Western Pennsylvania native led a four-man patrol from a boost. When Strank's patrol got to the hilltop with the Company E's Second Platoon to the 550-foot summit of full-size battle flag, he told his four fellow Marines and Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima and raised an American one Navy corpsman to raise it high "so that every son of a battle flag. Strank, who was on his second tour of duty bitch on this cruddy island can see it." withthe Marines and who, at the age of 24, was the oldest The event should have drifted off into historical of the group, was just doing his job. oblivion. It was only marginally newsworthy; the Battle of Earlier in the day, another Marine patrol had planted a Iwo Jima would not be won for another month or so. But smaller flag on the inert volcano, but Lt. Col. Charles an AP photographer, Joe Rosenthal, was standing nearby Johnson of the 28th Marines didn't think it was large and at the precise moment that the iron flag pole reached enough. The Americans had been battling Japanese po- its now famous 45-degree angle, Rosenthal pointed his | 4 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY SPRING 2000 camera and clicked away. Later that class neighborhood on a hillside ~ day, he hustled the film off the ». ' n street (Pine) perched above the mill, island to Guam, where it was devel- WHEN OTRANK S PATROL Mike's kid sister Mary, who wasn't oped and sent over the Associated GOT TO THE HILLTOP WITH born until her big brother was almost Press wire. 14, remembers her street as being When it ran in American news- THE FULL-SIZE BATTLE populated by "Polish and Slavish papers a few days later, the FLAG, HE TOLD THE MEN people." The family attended Holy photograph showing Strank and his High Trinity Greek Catholic Church. comrades struggling to raise Old to raise it "so According to military records, Glory breathed new life into a war- THAT EVERY SON OF A Strank went toFranklin High School weary home front. Within days, pol- and graduated in 1937.3 Withw"h thehe Bitch on this Cruddy SlES'S,— i!LlL l Depression *— <- employ- iticians took to the floor of the I '\_^ 1'| v_**_J %_*I\'I I still**Jt \u25a0 \u25a0 I onV\u25a0 I and"" \u25a0 \u25a0 the'1»-* '111 I*SIV T Senate to request that a memorial ISLAND CAN SEE IT." ment outlook bleak, he turned to be built based on the image. Pres- the Civilian Conservation Corps, a ident Roosevelt personally selected New Deal program that offered un- the photograph as the theme of the Seventh (and derprivileged kids manual labor in the nation's forests and subsequently most successful) War Bond drive. Rosenthal three square meals a day. When he left the program 18 won the Pulitizer Prize. months later, there still weren't many jobs, so Strank Today, it is purportedly the most reproduced image in joined the Marines. He enlisted in October 1939, 26 the history of photography. months before Pearl Harbor propelled the country into the It's easy to see why. Frank Capra couldn't have scripted war. Strank was looking for work, not for glory. "He might a more dramatic scene or have cast more archetypical have made it a career," his sister thought. characters. The cluster of bodies included a daredevil Strank was shipped off to the Pacific, where, according Texan, a humble kid from a Kentucky tobacco farm, a to his sister, he found himself thrust into the front lines in wholesome midwesterner from Wisconsin, a dashing the brutal Pacific theater. "There were times when we had French Canadian from New Hampshire and a laconic no idea where he was and we had to contact —the Red Cross American Indian fresh off an Arizona reservation. When to get letters to him." Although —war weary "he wasn't the AP re-ran the photo later that spring, the headline feeling good," according to Mary Mike re-enlisted for a read: "Six Men Who Raised the Flag in Iwo Symbolize second tour and by this time had been promoted to Melting Pot That Has Made America Strong." sergeant. Mary finally got to know her older brother during Among the flag-raisers, according to the AP, was the a month-long leave in 1944. Friends tried to get Mikeout "son of a Czech immigrant coal miner": Johnstown's for a drink, but he preferred to stay home with his 10- Michael Strank. year-old sister. "We played a lot of cards and checkers," The AP got it mostly right. Strank was actually Slovak. she said about her brother who had to go back to war. His father, Vasil, arrived in Johnstown in 1920 from Tragically, in one of The Good War's more sobering Jarabina, a small village in Slovakia. With the help of an ironies, Strank, the soldier who orchestrated the flag- uncle, Vasil got a job in one of Bethlehem Steel's bi- raising, never lived to see the photograph. He died a week tuminous coal mines and settled in Franklin Borough, an later while trying to subdue the enemy in the northern industrial neighborhood contiguous to Johnstown, and end of the island, reportedly as he diagrammed strategies home of Bethlehem's steelmaking operations. Two years in the sand. Strank was one of three flag-raisers who later, the elder Strank sent for his wife and young son never made it off the island, and was among the nearly Michael, who was just 3 years old when the family was 7,000 American servicemen who gave their lives at Iwo reunited in the New World. Jima, the bloodiest battle in Corps history. He was bur- Michael Strank's childhood and adolescence fit a fa- ied, with Catholic rites, in a Marine cemetery there. In miliar pattern: the family lived in a small home built by 1949, his body was re-interred in Arlington National the company (Bethlehem) in a densely settled working- Cemetery in Washington. ILLUSTRATION BY WALL-TO-WALL STUDIOS 5 Strank's family did not learn of and certainly the Marines milked — '* worth, his role in the flag-raising until C C the Pnot°graPn for al1 was several weeks after the photo was IRAGICALLY, oGT. oTRANK it's still probably their most effec- first published. Rosenthal never re- NEVER LIVED TO SEE THE tive recruitinrecruiting§ poster. corded the men's names. But later But James Bradlev whose nUr\ nr da u He men a . that spring, the AP re-transmitted PHOTOGRAPH. fiE DIED A father was one of three soldiers to the photograph, this time identi- Week Later trying to survive, doesn't believe that the un- fying each soldier by name and Enemy, varnished truth detracts. It may hometown. The Stranks had just re- Subdue the have been the second flag on Mount turned from a memorial service for Reportedly while He Suribachi, but the raising was not their son at Holy Trinity Church without risk. The larger battle flag HlAPDAMMPnUlAuKAHntU OIKAltUltOStDATPTIPS when an editor at the Johnstown was bound to irritate the Japanese, Democrat called to tell them that in the Island sand. many of whom were hiding in caves Mike was among the six soldiers in in and around the quiet volcano. the photo. And the fact that three of the six It's easy to understand why Strank almost went unno- U.S. soldiers subsequently lost their lives shows that the ticed. Although there were actually six soldiers struggling battle below was very real. to raise the flag, only four could easily be distinguished. Bradley investigated the lives of all six flag-raisers for Strank was one of two soldiers supporting the flagpole and a book to be published this May. Sgt. Strank, he learned, the flag-raisers on the other side. Only his arms are liked to play the French horn and baseball (as a young partially visible, entangled with those of Pvt. Frank Sous- athlete, he reportedly hit one out of Point Stadium in ley, the second soldier from the left. It wasn't until after Johnstown) and instinctively looked after those around sculptor Felix DeWeldon completed his bronze cast him. When floodwaters in 1936 threatened to destroy his memorial that Mary Strank Pero was able to see her hometown for a second time, Mike ran down to personally brother in full repose behind the other four Marines. She inspect the flood and reassure his family.Bradley was not remembers the dedication ceremony for the Arlington surprised that Rosenthal's photo captured Strank helping memorial vividly: November 10, 1954, on what would one of his men to liftthe pole. Weeks before landing at have been her brother's 35th birthday. Iwo, Strank turned down a promotion. "Itrained those Western Pennsylvania sent its share of men and women boys and I'm going to be with them in battle," he was into the armed forces, even producing a few war heroes quoted as saying. (among them "Commando" Kelly); but it is perhaps most His aggrieved mother, asked to speak at a New York widely known as the arsenal of democracy, its civilian war bond drive rally in May 1945, put it simply: "He was factories turning out everything from armor plate to a good boy, a good boy." bullets.