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He remembers the Iwo Jima flag

By MELANIE AVE
Published November 11, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - Sixty-one years later, Frank Coppins still remembers watching Old Glory rise high amid the bloodshed and gunfire and chaos of World War II.

"It was like, 'Oh, the war's almost over,' " recalled Coppins, an 86-year-old retired Marine, who saw the first American flag raised on the island of Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945.

"You could hear all those Marines screaming, they made it. All the troops needed that."

Hours later, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took the iconic black and white picture of the second flag raising atop Mount Suribachi.

The image of five Marines and a Navy corpsman standing the flagpole up was seen around the world and became the most memorable photo of the war.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo gave new hope to a nation weary of battle.

It is also the subject of the recently released movie Flags of Our Fathers, a drama about the surviving flag raisers.

Coppins, who retired after 16 years as a city traffic engineer in St. Petersburg, said he is unsure if he saw the second, more famous flag raising because of all the "confusion, confusion, confusion."

But he distinctly remembers the first, four days after the Marines' bloody landing on the beach and bitter fight up the 546-foot volcano's summit on the island's south end.

"The Japanese were fighting," Coppins said. "Bullets were flying. It was a hard job, but we got to the top."

Coppins joined the Marines at age 19, soon after graduating from St. Petersburg High School in 1939.

He and his friends knew it was just a matter of time before the country would join the war already raging in Europe.

"In those days," he said, "it was pure patriotism."

Coppins first saw combat in Guadalcanal and then Iwo Jima, where he was a master sergeant in the Marine 5th Division.

As a member of the 5th Engineer Battalion, Coppins had to take an armored bulldozer and cut a road up Suribachi. The bulldozer made it about one-third of the way when a 36-inch mine blew off a track. Troops made it up the mountain on foot.

Coppins was about 200 yards from the summit, looking for mines, when he glanced over and saw several soldiers raising a small flag - a poignant symbol of the coming victory.

Rosenthal, the AP photographer, missed the first raising but was there a few hours later for the second, in the same place as the first.

"Out of the corner of my eye ... I had seen the men start the flag up," Rosenthal said in Collier's magazine in 1955. "I swung my camera, and shot the scene."

Critics accused Rosenthal of posing the perfectly composed image. "He was just pretty lucky," Coppins said. "It was an accident."

Coppins said the Marines took down the first flag because they wanted a larger one that could be seen all over the 8-square-mile island. Fighting continued for another 31 days, leaving 6,821 American dead and 19,217 wounded. About 20,000 Japanese died.

It was one of the war's deadliest battles and the Marines' worst.

Coppins remembers dragging a wounded friend in his company back to a landing craft. He held the hand of a comrade as he was shot in the head trying to save another man in a cave. And he watched an injured sergeant silently mouth a song as he lay dying on a stretcher.

"There will never be another battle in history like Iwo Jima," Coppins said.

Both flags are housed at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., which was dedicated Friday on the Marines' 231st birthday. It opens Sunday.

Coppins, who retired as a Marine major in 1962, is now a white-haired widower with three children and seven grandchildren.

He received four Bronze Stars for heroic achievement in combat, including one for Iwo Jima.

His daughter, Jackie Martino, 52, of St. Petersburg, recently took Coppins to see Flags of Our Fathers.

"The word hero falls short in describing him and all the men who participated in that war," she said.

Coppins scoffs.

"I just feel like I did my job," Coppins said. "Maybe I'm a little vain, but I think I did it well."

Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Melanie Ave can be reached at 727 893-8813 or mave@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 11, 2006, 00:07:20]