Jacobs and his family spent his later years trying to prove that he was the Marine radio operator who was photographed several times by Staff Sergeant Louis R. Lowery (a combat photographer with Leatherneck magazine), on top of Mount Suribachi, standing beneath the first American flag. Although Jacobs's face is not visible in Lowery's most widely circulated photograph of the first flag flown on Mount Suribachi, his claim that it is definitely him was based on other photographs of him taken by Lowery and other combat photographers near the first flag with Lieutenant Schrier. The radioman in the most famous of Lowery's photographs was assumed for years to be an unknown Marine, an F Company Marine rifleman named Louis Charlo, or Pfc. Gene Marshall, the E Company radio operator (Charlo and Marshall were not members of the 40-man patrol). Marshall, who died in 1987, claimed he was on Mount Suribachi, on February 23 (Jacobs said he was ordered back down Mount Suribachi sometime after the flag raising).