He became a close friend with one of his platoon's Navy corpsmen, John "Doc" Bradley, who was with Ignatowski on the battlefield just before he was captured on Iwo Jima. For more than 70 years, 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 (on June 23, 2016, the Marine Corps announced that John Bradley was not in the famous flag-raising photo); he was involved with helping to secure both the flag's flagstaffs put up on windy Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945.