The Marine Who Filmed Iwo Jima and Vanished

Three feet. That's how close Marine Sergeant Bill Genaust stood to Joe Rosenthal when the most famous photograph of World War II was taken atop Mount Suribachi — except Genaust wasn't shooting a still. He was running a movie camera, capturing the Iwo Jima flag-raising in color motion picture, the footage you've seen in nearly every Pacific War documentary since. Nine days later he was dead, sealed inside a cave on the island's northern ridges, his body never recovered. Then his original film reel vanished too. Two disappearances, one man almost no one can name.