JOE ROSENTHAL - FIRST DAY COVER SIGNED - HFSID 165048

JOE ROSENTHAL
The combat photographer signs a First Day Cover honoring The Veterans of Foreign Wars
 First Day Cover signed: "Joe Rosenthal", 6½x3¾. FDC honoring the 75th Founding Anniversary of Veterans of Foreign Wars, 10-cent stamp affixed, postmarked Washington, DC, March 11, 1974, FIRST DAY OF ISSUE. Joe Rosenthal (1911-2006), a veteran Associated Press combat photographer, won the Pulitzer Prize for News Photography in May 1945 for his world-famous photograph depicting five U.S. Marines from the Second Battalion, 28th Regiment, Fifth Division and a Navy corpsman raising the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi, the highest southern point on the island of Iwo Jima. There was considerable controversy as well as acclaim over this photograph, which was taken on February 23, 1945 and was later used as the model for a U.S. stamp, a war bond campaign and for the U.S. Marine War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. The "Stars and Stripes" had originally been raised on the summit at 10:37 a.m. It was then decided that a larger flag should replace the first, which is the flag raising that Rosenthal captures in his photograph. Contrary to criticism from some circles, Rosenthal had not staged this shot - he had simply captured the raising of the second flag. Nearly 7,000 Americans, almost 6,000 of them Marines, including three in Rosenthal's photograph, died in the battle for the strategically important Pacific island that had previously been a Japanese stronghold. That represents nearly one-third of the Marines killed in all of WWII. After the war, in which he also took photographs of the invasions of New Guinea and Guam, Rosenthal became the chief photographer and manager of Times Wide World Photos before going to work for the "San Francisco Chronicle". Slightly creased, lightly rippled at cachet. Fine condition.