Americans find echoes of patriotic grit in a defining image from ground zero

When American special forces went into the Afghan city of Kandahar at the weekend, they left behind posters of a photograph showing three firemen raising the American flag in the rubble of ground zero. They were inscribed with the slogan "Freedom endures".

The photograph has become an icon of the courage of the American people. It was taken by Tom Franklin, a photographer with a New Jersey newspaper who had smuggled himself into ground zero on the afternoon of 11 September.

He was picking his way across the rubble when something caught his eye. About 150 yards away three firemen had gathered around a slanting flag pole near the western edge of the carnage. Instinctively, he photographed the scene as the trio struggled to attach a large Stars and Stripes and raise it above the rubble. He also captured the backdrop beyond the men of the jagged ruins of one of the twin towers.

Even as he was taking the pictures for his paper, the Bergen Record, Mr Franklin noted the striking similarity between that scene and the photo-portrait of six American servicemen raising the US flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in February 1945. The man who took that shot, Joe Rosenthal, won the Pulitzer Prize for it.

"It told of more than just death and destruction," Mr Franklin said. "It said something to me about the strength of the American people and of these firemen having to battle the unimaginable. It had drama and spirit and courage in the face of disaster."

Rosenthal's picture became the single most powerful representation of the Second World War for the US public. Mr Franklin's picture immediately became an icon for America's new war against terrorism. Mr Franklin's picture editor, Rich Gigli, understood the Iwo Jima echoes that day. "As soon as they came across I thought, 'Oh my God'. I saw it instantly." He placed one of the frames in that night's paper. He waited until five minutes to midnight before sending it on to the Associated Press, which was then free to syndicate it worldwide. It was grabbed by other papers and magazines both that evening and during the next several days.

The Bergen Record has received 20,000 requests from readers for reprints. The paper sends them out free, asking only that the recipients donate a sum of their choice to a World Trade Centre charity. "That picture has had the biggest impact of any story or photograph I have seen in 25 years of being on this newspaper," Mr Gigli said.

Just as with the Iwo Jima photograph, some in the public asked whether the picture had been staged. So powerful was the message ­ of patriotic grit amid destruction and suffering ­ it seemed almost impossible that the photographer had not set up the scene. But Iwo Jima was not a set-up. And nor was this.

What happened on Mount Suribachi in 1945 is rarely told. A group of soldiers raised a flag and an unknown army photographer captured the moment. But the flag was too small to be seen properly from the beach where US forces were under heavy Japanese fire. They quickly decided a second planting should be made with a larger flag. Rosenthal got wind of the second mission up the mountain and tagged along.

Nor was there anything staged about the Franklin picture. The following day, the editors at the Record sent a reporter back to ground zero to identify the three firemen who had raised the flag. Within hours he had located Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and Bill Eisengrein.

The three men had been digging in the rubble for six hours looking for buried colleagues after the collapse of the twin towers when word came late in the afternoon to evacuate the area because another building, Number 7 World Trade Centre, was threatening to collapse (which, a little later, it did). They were on their way out when Mr McWilliams saw a large Stars and Stripes flying on a boat in the yacht basin behind the World Financial Centre on the Hudson river.

"I knew exactly what he was doing," Mr Johnson later explained, recalling what Mr McWilliams did next. He plucked the flag from the boat and ran back to the smouldering rubble at ground zero. As he passed Mr Johnson, he shouted: "Gimme a hand, will ya."

A few moments later the pair of them, with Mr Eisengrein quickly doubling back to join them, were attaching the flag to the large pole that was already anchored in the debris close to the World Financial Centre. It was a lucky accident that Mr Franklin spotted them.

"Everybody just needed a shot in the arm," Mr McWilliams later told the Record, explaining that he and his friends had raised the flag for the benefit of all the other firemen who had lost so many of their colleagues.

The flag has long since vanished from ground zero. Its whereabouts, however, is no mystery at all. It is flying on the USSTheodore Roosevelt, the aircraft carrier that is the command ship for American forces around Afghanistan.

* A memorial service will be held among the ruins of the World Trade Centre on Sunday. The New York Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, said yesterday that the round-the-clock clear-up operations at the site would be suspended for the inter-denominational service.

Mr Giuliani said the families of the victims had told him it was "very comforting, in a strange way, to actually be there and see the place where their loved one died, and maybe is buried".