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René Gagnon was a United States Marine Corps corporal who participated in the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.
He was generally known as being one of the six Marines who raised the U.S. flag on top of Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. On October 16, 2019, the Marine Corps announced publicly that Corporal Harold Keller was actually the flag raiser thought to have been Gagnon. The flag raisers were originally identified from the iconic photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, which was taken by Associated Press combat photographer Joe Rosenthal on Mount Suribachi.
This flag raising has been generally portrayed as
René Gagnon was a United States Marine Corps corporal who participated in the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.
He was generally known as being one of the six Marines who raised the U.S. flag on top of Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. On October 16, 2019, the Marine Corps announced publicly that Corporal Harold Keller was actually the flag raiser thought to have been Gagnon. The flag raisers were originally identified from the iconic photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, which was taken by Associated Press combat photographer Joe Rosenthal on Mount Suribachi.
This flag raising has been generally portrayed as the only American flag raising on Mount Suribachi even though earlier the same day another flag was raised on top. The first flag was regarded to be too small to be seen by the thousands of Marines fighting on the other side of the mountain, so it was soon replaced by a larger flag which had been carried up the mountain by Gagnon. There is no photograph of the first flag raising which took place after the mountaintop was captured, only photographs of those including the flag raisers, who were at or around the flag after it went up. The second flag raising became famous and took precedence after the photograph of it appeared worldwide in the newspapers.
Gagnon was identified as being one of the men in a Marine Corps photograph showing both of the American flags. It was determined that he is one of the Marines helping to take down the first flagstaff as the second flag attached to another Japanese steel pipe is being raised. The Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, which was modeled after the second flag raising, no longer depicts Gagnon as being one of the six bronze figures on it.
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Tags: Military (1), Marine (1), Veteran (1), Infantry (1), Iwo Jima (1), USMC (1), Flags Of Our Fathers (1), Born 1925 (1), Died 1979 (1), Died Young (1), Died Aged 54 (1), Born March 7 (1), Born In New Hampshire (1), World War II Veteran (1), Historical Figures In The Military (1)
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