Iwo Jima Flag Raiser Charles W. Lindberg Dies

J.J. Jackson* | June 26, 2007

God Bless him.

Just days after Japan renamed Iwo Jima, word comes that the last surviving U.S. Marine who helped raise the first flag on Mount Suribachi — not the flag in the famous re-enactment — has died.

Charles W. Lindberg passed away yesterday at a hospital in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. He was 86. Just a month ago he attended a Memorial Day observance at which ground was broken for a war monument that will tell the story of the first flag raising, which was overshadowed by the famous photo of the second flag to go up.

On the morning of Feb. 23, 1945, 24-year-old Corporal Lindberg, armed with a flame-thrower, and five other Marines fought their way to the top of the island’s highest point.

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

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