Primalbranding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future by Patrick Hanlon

Author:Patrick Hanlon [Hanlon, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

The temperature on Iwo Jima on the morning of February 19, 1945, was somewhere near sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The sky was overcast. There were no seabirds on the island, no songbirds, not even the tiny green lizards that scamper across volcanic islands. After the first bombardments at 2:00 A.M., it seemed that even the five senses had fled. The Japanese enemy was dug into the island like crabs. They hid in tunnels, holes, and caves. “The Japanese fought underground,” as one observer described the battle. “The Marines fought aboveground.”

For thirty-six days the Marines of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth divisions fought their way across the island step-by-step, using pistols, rifles, grenades, flamethrowers, and bare hands as they battled the twenty-two thousand Japanese dug in on the eight-square-mile island. After three days of heavy fighting and thousands dead on both sides, a patrol of forty Marines made their way up the side of the island’s tallest mountain, Mount Suribachi.

Climbing for over two hours under heavy fire, a bloodied platoon from Echo Company finally reached the top. Once they had placed themselves in defensive positions around the perimeter of the volcanic crater, Marine sergeant Mike Strank ordered the men to raise the American flag on the summit. It was the first American flag raised on Japanese soil. Strank told them to use an oversized flag, so that “every Marine on this cruddy island can see it.”

Photographer sergeant Lou Lowery took the first flag-raising picture. When headquarters saw the raised flag, they ordered a second flag raising to take place, and this time AP photographer Joe Rosenthal went along. The famous photograph of February 23, 1945, hit the cover of Life magazine and the scene of six Marines raising the American flag became an icon of World War II. (The fact that three of the six men—including Strank—would die in battle soon after the photo was taken was not lost on the millions of Americans waiting back at home.)

The photograph, and the subsequent statue of the flag raising located at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, is just one of many icons that can be taken from the United States Marine Corps’s over two-hundred-year history. Like many primal organizations the mythos and creed of the Marine Corps affect those who serve far more than their four years of service might account for. Marines feel an esprit de corps unrivaled in the American armed forces. It has been that way for many decades.

“It is the uniformly ‘Marine’ character of the three United States Marine Corps divisions that give them their formidable fighting power,” says military writer John Keegan. “The mythology of the Marines, expressed in the Marine hymn and the motto semper fidelis (“always faithful”), together with a litany of Corps slogans—including, ‘A Marine never dies’—has poetic truth. If a recruit chooses to think otherwise, he will be put straight by the long-service NCO of the Corps—gunnery sergeants and sergeant majors—who are tradition’s ultimate guardians.”

As is true of many primal organizations the icons, rituals, and creed of the Marine Corps run a far deeper course than most other organizations.

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