On November 6, 1924, Harlon Henry Block was born in Yorktown, Texas. Raised in Weslaco in the Rio Grande Valley, he became a standout high school football player. After graduating early, Block and seven teammates enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in February 1943, becoming known locally as the “Weslaco Eight.” He completed recruit and parachute training, served as a Paramarine during the Bougainville campaign, and transferred to the 5th Marine Division after the Marine parachute units were disbanded in 1944. Later that year, he was promoted to corporal.
On February 19, 1945, Block landed on Iwo Jima with Company E, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines. Four days later, Marines secured the summit of Mount Suribachi and raised an American flag. When a larger flag was ordered up to replace it, Block helped raise the second flag in the moment captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the twenty-year-old corporal is the stooping figure at the base of the flagstaff, guiding the steel pipe into the volcanic ash as the other Marines lift it skyward.
Block never saw the photograph that would make that moment famous. On March 1, 1945, six days after the flag-raising, he was killed during his unit’s advance toward Nishi Ridge. Initially mistaken for Sergeant Henry “Hank” Hansen in the photograph, Block was officially identified by the Marine Corps in January 1947, following an investigation prompted in part by the efforts of fellow flag-raiser Ira Hayes and Block’s mother. His remains were returned to Weslaco in 1949 and moved in 1995 to the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen. There he lies beside sculptor Felix de Weldon’s original full-scale plaster model for the Marine Corps War Memorial—a lasting representation of the moment in which Block helped steady the flagstaff.
