Associated Press | MSN News | April 28, 2013
When asked for the biggest flag he could find, Alan Wood handed over a large one he'd found earlier in a Pearl Harbor Navy depot.
LOS ANGELES -- Alan Wood, a World War II veteran credited with providing the flag in the famous flag-raising on Iwo Jima, has died. He was 90.
Wood died April 18 of natural causes at his Sierra Madre home, his son, Steven Wood, said Saturday.
Wood was a 22-year-old Navy officer in charge of communications on a landing ship on Iwo Jima's shores Feb. 23, 1945, when a Marine asked him for the biggest flag he could find.
After five days of fighting to capture the Japanese-held island, U.S. forces had managed to scale Mount Suribachi to hoist an American flag.
Wood happened to have a 37-square-foot flag he had found months before in a Pearl Harbor Navy depot.
WWII vet who provided Iwo Jima flag dies: US Marines raise an American flag provided by 22-year-old Navy officer Alan Wood.
Five Marines and a Navy Corpsman later raised that flag in a stirring moment captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.
“Leave the past to history especially as I propose to write that history myself.”
