Joe Rosenthal

Rosenthal's iconic photo, shot on February 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The memorial, dedicated in 1954 and known officially as the Marine Corps War Memorial, commemorates the US Marines who died taking the Pacific island.

The photo was listed in 1999 at No 68 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

It shows the second raising of the flag that day on Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island. The first flag had been deemed too small.

"What I see behind the photo is what it took to get up to those heights - the kind of devotion to their country that those young men had, and the sacrifices they made, " Rosenthal once said. "I take some gratification in being a little part of what the US stands for."

The picture was influential and much imitated, not least by Thomas E Franklin who took the photo of three firefighters raising a flag amid the ruins of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, for a New Jersey newspaper.

Franklin said he instantly saw the similarities with the Iwo Jima photo as he looked through his lens. Franklin's photo, distributed worldwide in the wake of the WTC attacks, was itself a finalist in 2002 for the Pulitzer Prize in breakingnews photography.

The small island of Iwo Jima was a strategic piece of land 750 miles south of Tokyo, and the United States wanted it to support its long-range B-29 bombers and a possible invasion of Japan.

On February 19, 1945, 30,000 Marines landed on the south-east coast. Mount Suribachi, at 546ft the highest point on the island, took four days for the troops to scale. In all, more than 6800 US servicemen died in the five-week battle to take the island, and the 21,000-strong Japanese defence force was virtually wiped out.

Ten years after the flag-raising, Rosenthal wrote that he almost did not go up to the summit when he learned a flag had already been raised. He decided to go up anyway, and found servicemen preparing to put up the second, larger flag.

"Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene. That is how the picture was taken, and when you take a picture like that, you don't come away saying you got a great shot. You don't know. Millions of Americans saw this picture five or six days before I did, and when I first heard about it, I had no idea what picture was meant."

He added that if he had posed the flag-raising picture, as some sceptics suggested over the years, "I would, of course, have ruined it" by choosing fewer men and making sure their faces could be seen.

The photo, owned by Rosenthal's employers at Associated Press, quickly became the subject of posters, war-bond drives and a US postage stamp.

Rosenthal left AP later in 1945 to join the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked as a photographer for 35 years before retiring.

Rosenthal took special pride in a certificate naming him an honorary Marine and remained spry and alert well into his 90s.

Nick Ut, a friend and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for his 1972 image of a little girl, naked and screaming in agony as she flees a napalm bomb attack during the Vietnam War, praised Rosenthal. His own image had stoked anti-war sentiment. But Rosenthal's photo helped fuel patriotism in the US, Ut said.

"People say to me, yours is so sad. But you see his picture and it shows how Americans won the war."

Rosenthal took up photography as a hobby. As the Depression began, Rosenthal moved to San Francisco, living with a brother until he found a job with the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1930.

Turning photography into his career was a development that came about almost by accident. In 1932, Rosenthal joined the old San Francisco News as a combined reporter and photographer.

"They just told me to take this big box and point the end with the glass toward the subject and press the shutter and, 'We'll tell you what you did wrong', " he said.