- In early 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense removed at least two web pages related to Ira Hayes, a Native American veteran best known for appearing in a photograph of six men raising a flag on Iwo Jima during World War II.
- A statement from the Pentagon said: "We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed -- either deliberately or by mistake -- that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly."
- As of March 21, one of the pages about Hayes was back online. However, the text of the restored version had several differences from the original page. Specifically, many references to Hayes' ethnicity were removed or rephrased.
- Another page that originally featured the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph and mentioned Hayes' Pima Nation identity was still offline as of March 21.
In mid-March 2025, a claim circulated online that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) had removed one or more pages mentioning Pfc. Ira Hayes, a member of the Pima Nation who served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II.
Hayes, who was born on the Gila River Reservation in Arizona in 1923 and died in 1954, is best known for appearing in photographer Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of six men — Hayes and four other U.S. Marines, along with one member of the Navy — raising an American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the western Pacific island of Iwo Jima, the site of a protracted and bloody WWII battle.
Readers wrote in and searched our site for information about the claim that the DOD had removed at least one page about Hayes. The claim also appeared in posts on social media platforms including Reddit, Facebook (archived) and X (archived).
(X user @realpublicius)
In short, the DOD did remove at least two pages about Hayes in early 2025, and as a result we've rated the claim true. By March 21, one of the pages was back online — but, as we'll explain below, with significant changes to the text.
As the Washington Post reported on March 17, the DOD indeed removed numerous pages, including one about Hayes, from its website following a Feb. 26, 2025, memo (archived) from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that ordered the removal and archiving of all "DoD news articles, photos, and videos promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs."
Following the Feb. 26 memo, the DOD also removed pages about Navajo Code Talkers and a Black Medal of Honor recipient.
We reached out to the DOD to ask whether it planned to restore the page identified in the Washington Post article or another now-defunct page mentioning Hayes. Over email, a spokesperson shared a statement from Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot, reading:
As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services' core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed -- either deliberately or by mistake -- that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.
Ullyot's statement referenced a statement Hegseth made during a January Fox News appearance: "DEI is not going well at the Defense Department because it's dead." Also in January, Hegseth declared "Identity Months Dead at DoD" in guidance that canceled all department "celebrations or events related to cultural awareness months."
The page about Hayes that the Washington Post identified showed only a "404 - Page Not Found" error message at the time of this writing, but archived versions going back to Nov. 3, 2021, the page's publication date, existed on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Those archived versions showed that the page originally contained an article about Hayes that prominently featured his Pima heritage and identity. That article began, "It's a time to reflect on the contributions and sacrifices Native Americans have made to the United States, not just in the military, but in all walks of life."
The most recent available archived version from before the removal dated to Feb. 23, 2025. Archived versions do not exist for every day, so it's possible the page remained accessible for some amount of time after that date.
As of March 21, the page about Hayes was again available on the DOD website — but with some notable changes to the text. Specifically, some instances of the terms "Native American" and "Indian" that appeared in the original article were absent from the restored version. Other parts of the text that had previously emphasized Hayes' ethnicity were phrased differently — for instance, a section originally identifying Hayes as a "a 22-year-old Pima Indian from Arizona" now said he was "a 22-year-old from Arizona's Pima community."
A side-by-side comparison of the beginnings of the two versions is embedded below, with changes directly concerning Hayes' Pima identity highlighted in yellow.
Left: The page about Hayes as it appeared on Feb. 23. Right: The same page as it appeared on March 21. (Wayback Machine)
Among the changed portions of the text was the article's headline, which was originally, "Pima Indian Helped Raise American Flag on Iwo Jima During World War II." The headline of the version of the article available on March 21 was "Marine's Valor Helped Secure Iwo Jima Victory in World War II."
Another deleted page
A search for Hayes' name across all sites with URLs starting "defense.gov" found Google had indexed another page mentioning Hayes that also now led to a 404 error page and, as of March 21, was still offline. A preview for that page that still appeared in Google search results read, "Marine Corps Pfc. Ira Hayes, left, a Pima from Arizona, helped four fellow Marines and a Navy corpsman raise the second flag on Mount Suribachi, Japan."
An archived version of the webpage showed that as recently as Feb. 18 it featured the famous Iwo Jima flag photograph with a caption reading:
Marine Corps Pfc. Ira Hayes, left, a Pima from Arizona, helped four fellow Marines and a Navy corpsman raise the second flag on Mount Suribachi, Japan, Feb. 23, 1945. The service members are from left to right: Marine Corps Pfc. Ira Hayes, a member of the Pima Nation of Arizona, Franklin Sousley, Michael Strank (behind Sousley), John Bradley, Rene Gagnon (behind Bradley) and Harlon Block. National Archives photo
The page also featured tags reading "American Indian Heritage Special" and "Native American History Month."
At the time of this writing, the flag-raising photograph still appeared on multiple DOD webpages about Iwo Jima that did not mention Hayes.
The photograph was also still available on other government websites, such as that of the National Archives (archived).
A different image of Hayes — with a caption that did not mention his ethnicity — was still available (archived) on the DOD website at the time of this writing. Because we did not find any archived versions of this page captured before March 18, we were unable to verify whether that page ever included the words "Native American," "Indian," or "Pima."
Pages about Hayes that explicitly mentioned his Pima background were still available on official Marine Corps and Department of Veterans Affairs websites at the time of this writing.