On February 23, 1945, six Americans (five Marines and a Navy corpsman) raised the American flag over Mount Suribachi during the battle of Iwo Jima. The island had been the site of one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific during World War II, where an estimated 21,000 Japanese and 7000 Americans died. The flag-raising was immortalised in a photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal which later won a Pulitzer prize. The US government recognised the propaganda value of the photo to a war-weary American public. The three surviving participants in the photo, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), Doc Bradley (Philippe) and Ira Hayes (Beach), the latter a Native American, were taken back to the United States as heroes and ordered to participate in a tour of the country selling war bonds. However the truth was bent as there had been two flag-raising events on the same day (it was the second flag-raising that had been photographed) and one of the men taken on the tour may not have been in the photo. Based on the book by James Bradley, the son of one of the Iwo Jima flag-raisers, Flags of Our Fathers explores the nature of heroism, and war propaganda, telling the story in flashback. Director Clint Eastwood shot most of the Iwo Jima sequences in Iceland (which has similar black beaches) and the war footage is graphic. His companion piece Letters From Iwo Jima depicts the battle from the Japanese perspective.