Now… All Together 7th War Loan Poster – CC Beall – 1945

Now… All Together 7th War Loan World War II Poster – CC Beall – 1945

This reproduction world war two poster was painted by the American commercial illustrator and portrait painter Cecil Calvert Beall. The artist was renowned for his watercolour paintings and drawings for magazines and comic books. During the second world war, Beall designed posters for the US Government for war loan drives. He is best known for this poster for the Seventh War Loan Drive. It is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” taken by Joe Rosenthal whilst working for the Associated Press.

The Japanese island of Iwo Jima is part of the Ogasawara Archpeligo south of the Bonin Islands. Initially, the island was not part of the United States Pacific Campaign and its island-hopping plans to defeat Japan. However, the battle fought by the United States, along with the Philippines against the Japanese in Manilla ended sooner than planned.

The Battle of Manilla was a major battle of the US Philippine campaign.  During the conflict an estimated 100,000 to 240,000 Filipino civilians were killed, both deliberately by the Japanese in the Manilla Massacre and from artillery and aerial bombardment by U.S. and Japanese forces. The month-long battle left 1,010 U.S. soldiers dead and 5,565 wounded. After the conflict 16,665 Japanese dead were counted within the 0.26 square mile historic walled city of Intramuros alone. In addition to the deaths, the battle saw the complete devastation of the city. It is widely considered to be the scene of the worst urban fighting in the Pacific theater and along with Berlin and Warsaw, one of the most devastated city’s of the entire war.

With the Japanese at Manilla being defeated in just a month, much earlier than had been planned. Iwo Jima came into focus. The island, 1,200km from Tokyo on the mainland was strategically located to act as an early warning system against invasion. The island also contained airfields. For the Americans, if the island was taken they could use the island as a base from which to attack Japan.

The American invasion of Iwo Jima started on February 19, 1945. The battle saw some of the fiercest fighting of the entire war with each side suffering over 20,000 casualties in the conflict. In his book Whistling in the Face of Robbers: Volume Two – 1945-1951, Dahn Batchelor writes “The Imperial Japanese Army positions on the island were heavily fortified, with vast bunkers, hidden artillery, and 18 kilometres (11 mi) of tunnels. The battle was the first U.S. attack on the Japanese Home Islands and the Imperial soldiers defended their positions tenaciously. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, over 19,000 were killed and only 1,083 taken prisoner.”

One of the first aims of the conflict was to send a platoon to seize and occupy the highest point of the volcanic island, Mount Suribachi. The 40 man combat patrol set off on February 23rd at 8am and began to climb the mountain. With the Japanese being bombarded, the unit experienced very little enemy fire. They reached the top about 10.15am, attached the Stars and Stripes to a Japanese water pipe and raised and planted the flag. Ironically, the cheers from Marines and blasts from ships’ sirens and horns alerted the Japanese. Where the American soldiers had faced little trouble on the ascent, they were suddenly under heavy fire.

Photographs of the flag-raising were taken by Staff Sergeant Louis R Lowery who had accompanied the patrol. The photographs show Corporal Charles W. Lindberg, Privates First Class James Michels, Harold Schultz, Raymond Jacobs, Private Phil Ward, and Navy corpsman John Bradley.

However, it wasn’t the only flag raising to happen that day. In his book, Flags of our Fathers, the author James Bradley explains the requirement to swap the flag later that day. According to Bradley’s account James Forrestal, the then Secretary of the Navy was so taken with the fervor created by the raising of the flag he decided he wanted to keep the flag as a memento. This news did not sit well with the 2nd Batallion Commander Chandler Johnson, whose men had planted the flag. “To hell with that!” the colonel spat when the message reached him. As far as Johnson was concerned the flag belonged to the battalion. He decided to secure it as soon as possible and dispatched his assistant operations officer, Lieutenant Ted Tuttle to the beach to obtain a replacement flag. As an afterthought, Johnson called after Tuttle: “And make it a bigger one!”. Johnson ordered  Rene Gagnon, his battalion runner, to go up with the men and return with the original flag.

On Johnson’s orders, four men, Sgt Michael Strank, Cpl Harlon H. Block and Privates First Class Franklin R. Sousley and Ira H. Hayes were sent to replace the flag. Gagnon, Strank, and Strank’s three Marines reached the top of the mountain around noon without being fired upon. Three photographers, including Rosenthal, reached the summit as the Marines were attaching the flag to the old Japanese water pipe. Rosenthal was rearranging a pile of stones in order to get a better vantage point and in doing so almost missed the opportunity.

In an article in a February 1955 edition of Colliers Magazine entitled “The Picture that will Live Forever” Rosenthal wrote: “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”.

As it turned out the photograph was great!. It has become one of the most iconic images of World War Two. According to Wikipedia, the photo was first published in Sunday newspapers two days later and reprinted in thousands of publications. It was the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication and was later used for the construction of the Marine Corps War Memorial in 1954.

Part of the photograph’s success has to be the anonymity of the soldiers in the image. Because you can’t see their faces, the men depicted could be any American soldiers. In fact, the identities of the men in the photograph has been a matter of consternation since the day it was taken.

For more than seventy years, the identities of the six second-flag risers has been a confusing catalogue of errors and misinformation. The correct line-up was only finally confirmed in 2019. In Rosenthal’s photograph, the six soldiers raising the flag are, from left to right, Cpl. Harlon Block, Pfc. Harold Keller, Pfc. Franklin Sousley, Sgt. Michael Strank, Pfc. Harold Schultz and Pfc Ira Hayes. Just six days after the famous photograph was taken, Strank and Block were killed in action. Strank was hit by a shell, possibly fired from an offshore American destroyer and Block a few hours later by mortar. On March 21 Sousley was shot and killed by a Japanese sniper, just a few days before the island was declared secure.

It is believed the American President, Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Beall to turn the Rosenthal photograph into one of the ongoing series of War Loan posters. It worked! CC Beall’s pictorial version of Rosenthal’s iconic photo along with its famous “Now… Al Together”, became the striking centerpiece of the 7th War Loan drive. Roosevelt’s untimely death in 1945 meant that Truman was left to move the loan drive on.

The three surviving flag-raisers René Gagnon, Ira Hayes & John Bradley were relieved of duties in the Pacific and flown back to the United States to raise public morale and money for the war effort… They received a hero’s welcome and began a 33 city, six-week publicity tour around the States. On May 24, Hayes was taken off the tour due to problems caused by drinking alcohol and ordered back to his company and regiment which had returned to Hawaii.

Interestingly, in January 2016, the US Marine Corps admitted that for seventy years it had wrongly identified Harold Shultz as John Bradley. This would suggest that Bradley had toured the United States as one of the six flag raisers, in the full knowledge that he wasn’t. Bradley had been awarded a Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism while serving with the Marines during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. It seems strange that he would attend the tour fraudulently. His two colleagues, Ira Hayes and René Gagnon would have known he wasn’t involved. And so would Harold Shultz who should have been on the tour in Bradley’s place.

Maybe Bradley was simply following orders. It’s possible he was chosen for the tour because as an injured, decorated soldier he would gain more sympathy and therefore extract more money, for the war effort, out of the American public. It’s also likely he was suffering a form of PTSD. Seeing 20,000 fellow soldiers lose their life on the island including the horrific torture and death of his best friend by Japanese soldiers, took a huge toll on him. It’s possible he saw being feted on the War Loan tour was preferable to returning to battle. Whatever the reasons, we do know the whole war had a huge effect on him and Bradley’s recollections of discovering and taking care of Ignatowski’s remains haunted him until his death. 

The 7th war loan drive was the most successful war loan drive of the War. The poster played no small part in helping to achieve a record total of 26.3 billion dollars. An amount equivalent to almost half of the full war debt which stood at 56 billion dollars. In total, there were 8 war loan drives between 1942 and 1945. By the end of the war, 85 million Americans had purchased 185.7 billion dollars of bonds.

Three and a half million copies of the iconic World War Two poster were printed by the US Government Printing Office in 1945. The “Now… All Together” poster depicting US Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima has become one of the most enduring images of the second world war.

Our posters are carefully and professionally created from vintage originals. Whilst great care is taken in the production of these posters, we also try to maintain a vintage feel, so there may be small imperfections, fold marks, scuffs, tears, or marks that were part of the original poster master. If these do appear they should be visible on the larger views of the item on this listing. The originals of many of the posters we offer can cost many thousands of pounds, so whilst these posters look great, especially framed and mounted on a wall, they are intended as fun, affordable reproductions and not intended fine art prints.

The 50x70cm version has been specially produced to be used in conjunction with Ikea’s 50x70cm Ribba picture frame which currently retails for around £12. So you can bag a bargain of print and frame for a great price.