JOE ROSENTHAL was the photographer who took the most famously iconic picture in the history of US military endeavour.

His photograph, exposed on February 23, 1945, shows the US flag being raised by five Marines and one navy corpsman on Mount Suribachi on the strategic Japanese island of Iwo Jima. One of the bloodiest battles in American history was being fought, and Rosenthal, a photographer with Associated Press, caught the moment as much by luck as by design.

The uncannily expressive perfection of the photograph’s composition — the small team of soldiers straining heroically to raise the Stars and Stripes amid the shell-blasted wreckage of the Japanese hilltop redoubt — was not lost on all those who saw it, and soon prompted accusations that Rosenthal had staged the shot.

Initially, and unwittingly, he encouraged this by saying that the soldiers had posed for the photograph — however, he later realised that he had been describing another photograph taken that day. And it later emerged that what Rosenthal had photographed was in fact the raising of a second US flag on Iwo Jima, to replace a smaller flag which had been hoisted earlier.

Much of the discussion about the authenticity of Rosenthal’s photograph came later, however. At the time the image, with its devastating propaganda potential, was seized upon by editors and was reprinted countless times all round the world.

As soon as President Roosevelt saw it, he summoned the flag-raisers home from Iwo Jima to sell war bonds (three did not survive the battle). Rosenthal himself was awarded a Pulitzer prize for it in 1945.

Before long, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, as the photograph came to be known, was used to grace a 3-cent stamp, and it has been mass-produced in poster form since. The image’s power as a propaganda tool has been recognised many times over. The first President Bush used it as a symbol in his campaign against flag burning. It became a very big picture, especially for a little man.

Joe Rosenthal stood at 5ft 5in (he had had to stand on a sandbag to take the picture) and was so short-sighted that both the US Army and the Navy had rejected him when he tried to enlist on the outbreak of war. Considering the recognition his picture has had, it is surprising that Rosenthal’s name has rarely been associated with it. Indeed, it took 28 years and a decree by President Reagan to have Rosenthal’s name added to Felix de Weldon’s bronze representation of the scene he had immortalised. De Weldon’s sculpture now stands in the Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, as a memorial to the US Marine Corps.

JosephJ.Rosenthal was born in Washington in 1911. After graduating from high school in 1929, he moved to San Francisco to live with a brother. There, contending like the rest of America with the effects of the Depression, he eventually found himself a job as an office boy with the Newspaper Enterprise Association.

In 1932 he became a reporter and photographer for the San Francisco News, but soon moved on to become chief photographer and manager in San Francisco for The New York Times-Wide World Photos. In 1941 the company was absorbed by Associated Press, and Rosenthal joined its staff.

On the outbreak of the war he was studying at the University of San Francisco, but in 1943, after being rejected by the army and navy, he joined the US Maritime Service and photographed convoys in the Atlantic and off the coasts of Britain and North Africa.

A year later he was back with AP and was assigned to the Pacific campaign. By the time he took his most famous photograph he had already distinguished himself photographing the fighting at Guam and Peleliu.

After the war Rosenthal settled back into life as a photojournalist, taking a job with the San Francisco Chronicle, where he stayed until his retirement in 1981.

Rosenthal featured in a number of books about his iconic photograph, and was frequently interviewed — particularly after 9/11, when Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph, Ground Zero Spirit, depicting three firefighters raising the flag at the World Trade Centre, New York, was seen to be an explicit homage to Rosenthal’s image.

His marriage, in 1946, to Dorothy Walch, was dissolved. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Joe Rosenthal, photographer, was born on October 9, 1911. He died on August 20, 2006, aged 94.