MONUMENT MAN
On February 23, 1945, Felix de Weldon was at his desk at the Patuxent River naval air station near Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, working on an oil painting of the Battle of the Coral Sea, where, in May 1942, American aircraft carriers had stopped a planned Japanese invasion of Port Moresby, New Guinea. De Weldon, a U.S. Navy painter, 2nd class, was no ordinary sailor—or painter, for that matter. To begin with, at age 37 he was a good decade and a half older than many of his fellow enlisted men. Nor was he an American. A Jewish native of Vienna, de Weldon had left Austria in 1933 to escape Adolf Hitler’s rampaging Nazis. Settling first in Canada, he moved to New York City and joined the U.S. Navy at the beginning of the war as an officially designated “enemy alien.” A child prodigy, he had a master’s degree in art and a doctorate in architecture from the University of Vienna’s prestigious Academy of Creative Arts and School of Architecture. By his early 20s de Weldon had already become a renowned artist and sculptor, traveling in the highest circles of European royalty. He had done portrait sculptures of George V, the king of the United Kingdom, and W. L. Mackenzie King, the prime minister of Canada, as well as coronation busts of British monarchs Edward VIII and George VI.
As de Weldon scanned the photos from Iwo Jima, one instantly caught his eye.
The U.S. Navy had put de Weldon’s formidable talent to good use as a combat artist (there was no such thing as a combat sculptor), and he was working on the Coral Sea painting that Friday when at midday his executive officer, Commander Thurston B. Clark, called him into his office. Clark wanted de Weldon to look over some newly arrived photos from the Battle of Iwo Jima, now in its fourth day. As de Weldon scanned the photos, one instantly caught his eye. “I was so deeply impressed by its significance, its meaning,” he would later recall, “that I imagined that it would arouse the imagination of the American people to show the forward drive, the unison of action, the will to sacrifice, the relentless determination of these young men. Everything was embodied in that picture.”
The photo in question showed six marines, four in front and two partially obscured alongside them, struggling to raise an American flag on the debris-strewn summit of a smoke-wreathed mountain. To de Weldon’s trained eye, the photo’s composition, with the flag rising at a 45-degree angle, the marines’ hands straining upward, and the pyramidal base at the bottom right, was classical in its elegant simplicity. De Weldon asked Clark if he could stop working on the Coral Sea painting for a few days to produce a maquette—a sculptor’s wax scale model—of the flag raising depicted in the photograph. With Clark’s permission, de Weldon worked all weekend, sometimes throughout the night, to complete his three-foot-high model, improvising his building materials by mixing soft Johnson’s floor wax with hard sealing wax. He didn’t know it yet, but his weekend work was the first step in a career-crowning achievement for de Weldon and a signature
