
Ralph Anthony "Iggy" Ignatowski (April 8, 1926 – March 4–7, 1945) was a US Marine Corps private who was a member of the Marine rifle company platoon that climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi and raised the American flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II on February 23, 1945 before he was captured and brutally killed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the battle.
Biography[]

Ralph Ignatowski in 1945.
Ignatowski was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a Polish father and a German mother. In 1943, Ignatowski failed the physical examination when he first tried to enlist in the US Marine Corps however, he tried again and took a friend's urine sample with him and this time passed the physical test. A year in 1944, after "boot" camp training, he was assigned to 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, US 28th Marine Regiment, US 5th Marine Division. This was at the same he became close friends with US Navy corpsman John Bradley. 70 years after Iwo Jima, Bradley was considered to be one of the six persons who raised the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi in Joe Rosenthal's photo Raising the flag on Iwo Jima when he was not he was involved with the second flag raising but he did help to secure the first flag both the flag's flagstaffs put up on windy Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. In the service record, it said's that days prior to Iwo Jima and before his capture, Ignatowski was aboard the USS Missoula at sea on February 5, 1945, and he arrived at Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands on two days later. Ignatowski was at sea again from February 8 to 10, and disembarked at Saipan, Marianas Islands, on February 11 and boarded the USS LST-481 and sailed to Iwo Jima from February 11 to 18. Bradley, Ignatowski, and the men of E Company, US 28th Marines, arrived at Iwo Jima on February 19 and Ignatowski took some shrapnel in the jaw after the beach landings, however, he returned to duty the same day on February 20. Then out of know where, Ignatowski was suddenly captured and taken into a cave by Japanese soldiers on March 4, 1945, and a few hours later, the corpse of a Second Lieutenant named Leonard Sokol was taken away at the same location by Japanese soldiers. On March 7, 1945, both Sokol and Ignatowsiki's bodies were found. The worst and saddest part about the death of Ralph Ignatowski was that when the Japanese soldiers pulled him in the caves, they begin to torture him by cutting off his fingernails, and tongue both his arms were fractured. Bradley and another Corpsman named Langley said. "They just hung there, there like arms on a broken doll. He had been stabbed repeatedly by bayonets and the back of his head had been smashed in. The last thing that the Japanese did was cutting off Ignatowsiki's genitalia and stuffed it in his mouth. This left Bradley scared him till the day he died.