Harlon Henry Block was born in Yorktown, Texas, in 1924 — the son of a lay preacher, a high school football star. He enlisted in the Marine Corps alongside seven classmates on February 18, 1943, and came to MCRD San Diego for recruit training. He was eighteen years old.
He qualified as a Paramarine — elite parachute infantry — and fought at Bougainville before the Paramarines were disbanded. Reassigned to the 5th Marine Division, he landed on the volcanic black sand of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945.
On February 23, Joe Rosenthal's camera captured six Marines raising a large American flag on Mount Suribachi. Harlon Block is in the photograph. He is the Marine closest to the base of the flag pole, his hands still on the pole, driving it into the volcanic rock.
The photograph ran in newspapers across the United States on February 25, 1945. Belle Block looked at the image and told her husband: that is Harlon. She recognized her son from the posture, the physique, the way he was positioned at the base of the pole. Harlon Block had been killed in combat on Iwo Jima eight days after the photograph was taken, on March 1, 1945. He was twenty years old.
The Marine Corps officially identified the six men in the photograph in early 1945. They got one of them wrong. In the official identification, Harlon Block's position was assigned to a different Marine, Sergeant Hank Hansen. Belle Block spent years insisting her son was in the photograph. The Marine Corps maintained its identification.
In 1947, two years after the war ended, the Marine Corps reopened the investigation. A Congressional inquiry contributed to the review. In January 1947, the Corps officially corrected the record: Harlon Block had been correctly identified by his mother. Hank Hansen, who had also died on Iwo Jima, had not been in the second flag-raising.
The correction came four years after the photograph was published. Belle Block had been right from the first day. The Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia — modeled directly on Rosenthal's photograph — includes the corrected names. Harlon Block is the man at the base of the flag pole.
He trained for his war on the same parade deck at MCRD San Diego that you can see from the water on the northwest shore of this bay.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Harlon Block" and "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima"; Marine Corps Historical Division, Iwo Jima flag-raising identification records; Associated Press photograph archive.
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