As a number of posts have suggested, most Americans have probably never seen or heard of the Reichstag flag raising picture. Non-American native English speakers I would have predicted much more likely to say ‘both’ but OTOH IME they are typically sensitive to appearing to be in a US orbit. But the reason they are sensitive is that English language stuff tends to be so US oriented, and in US sphere the Iwo Jima picture really is ‘iconic’ and the Reichstag one pretty obscure. So I’m not sure I buy that the average Canadian or Aussie is really as familiar with the Russian photo for that reason. Though I’m not doubting anyone’s personal word that they are.
In Russia obviously it’s the opposite, though I wonder if the Iwo picture is as obscure there as the Reichstag one is in the US, maybe so. And I wonder if either photo is all that ‘iconic’ in a lot of the globe. Are the mass of people in China for example familiar with either photo? I mean the 100’s mils average people, not elite highly educated English speakers on English web forums. In Latin America or Africa? Only semi-rhetorical, I wonder.
In U.S. media, including U.S. textbooks, it’s NOT one of the more commonly-encountered photos. Raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the Big Three at Casablanca and/or Yalta, Roosevelt giving a fireside chat, and for the European theater St. Paul’s during the Blitz, the gates at Auschwitz, and any of several shots of troops wading ashore at Normandy are far better-known. These are the images I’ve seen over and over since I was a small child, so they’re the ones that immediately invoke a response.
I recognize the Reichstag photo, but I don’t consider it “iconic.”
Nope. Sorry to disappoint you, but, NO, I don’t recognize it. Because, as I and several others have said, we didn’t see it.
There’s no point in getting upset about it and blaming us. We don’t control what we didn’t see and don’t know about.
We’re not saying that it’s not important, or not iconic, or dismissing it. We never heard of it. End of story.
And, this being the Dope, it’s not as if we’re a bunch of uneducated yokels. As I and others have started, we’ve read a lot of history. We’ve perused books of WWII photos. If that image ever showed up in any of them, it didn’t register.
This is, if anything, a statement about what American media covers. Even if I hadn’t read about WWII, I’d have seen that image on television. It showed up on the news, in movies. The image was transformed into a statue that I’ve seen countless times in Washington, D.C. I have seen the Reichstag image — nowhere.
You can claim that American don’t car about any culture or history but their own, but the truth is that we’re familiar with what is often presented to us, and the news and entertainment industries, not to mention those writing textbooks, often do not put more images and history from elsewhere into the mix of what we read and watch.
It used to be that it was hard to obtain news and media that originated outside the country – you’d have to go to stores specializing in out-of-town newspapers and magazines. now you can get it on your computer, You can still get BBC America on Cable, although it’s a pity that Al Jazeera America shut down last April. I have to admit that I rarely cruise the sites.
I do try to obtain information from offshore, but perhaps not as zealously as I should. It doesn’t guarantee that I’ll find everything. But there will still be things that I do not see. This was one of them.
Being highly interested in WWII (an American who has definitely seen the Reichstag photo, though dubious anyone even in the English speaking world outside the US has really seen it as much as the Iwo image, as opposed to ‘knowing they are supposed to’ find the two equally famous…) I must nitpick.
If it’s ‘the US military’ the USN destroyer Reuben James was sunk by the German sub U-552 October 31, 1941 while escorting a merchant convoy headed to the UK: the USN had become a virtual combatant in the Atlantic by then, before Pearl Harbor. USN air and naval units often engaged German submarines (and sank some) between PH and November 8, 1942, and US Army air units shot down some German planes and bombed German occupied Europe as well as flying missions in support of the British ground forces in the Western Desert.
Also, the ground opposition for the November 8 landings in North Africa was purely by French units obeying the orders of the Vichy govt. Allied propaganda of the time called them ‘Nazi forces’ but that wasn’t entirely fair or accurate. German subs and a/c launched attacks on Allied shipping supporting the North Africa landings though within a few days. US Army ground units first engaged German ground units in significant combat in a tank battle at Chouigui Pass in Tunisia November 26, 1942 during the Anglo-US ‘Race for Tunis’, though US Army units had skirmished with German reconnaissance patrols, fired artillery, and come under German air attack in the immediately preceding days.
US and for that matter British ground efforts against the Germans were both minor in the Soviet view though until at least the North Europe campaign of 1944-45. The war wasn’t all about ground forces (leave it aside to debate how much). But in terms of numbers of ground divisions engaged the Soviets were within reason to view direct Western Allied ground efforts, aside from the defeat of France before the USSR even entered the war, as relatively small scale till the final months of the war, including the campaign in Italy as well as that in North Africa. It wasn’t just a matter of who entered the war first, in their view.
Depending on your definition of ‘engaged’ the earliest American/German combat engagement I can recall is on September 4 1941, when the USS Greer engaged U-652, but with little effect.
For that matter, Churchill giving his “V” sign, MacArthur returning to the Phillipines, multiple shots of the Nuremberg rallies, and theseHolocaust photos are more famous by far in the U.S. than the Reichstag photo. It’s just the reality Americans can relate far more to British and Jewish culture than Soviet culture.
Note that there are Iwo Jima parodies in the first search but very few Reichstag parodies (I can only see one, where the serp i molot has been replaced with an Islamic star+crescent. I don’t count the Lego recreationas parody.). I see no Reichstag parodies in the second one. Lots of different variations on the Iwo Jima one, though.
I’m aware that GIS will return different results for different users based on personalization algorithms, regions etc…
My grandfather was on Macarthur’s staff (and my dad was raised in Japan for those years). So you had accompanied station, kids interacting, etc. We have several gifts from the royal family due to bridge tournaments my grandparents ran for top US officers and highly placed Japanese guests. So it seems that while it was occupation forces - it was done in a way to fully integrated and part of the community.
