https://i.imgur.com/BQ3VQ2c.jpg
I have seen people say that this image was not real, and that historians agree that it was most likely falsified. The reason for this is because apparently a newspaper at the time published an alternate version of the image, without the man standing in the front.
What is the reality here?
The photo has always been part of some controversy:
If you look at a larger version of the first image here you'll note that the standing person's right arm (seen from our perspective) somewhat fades into the wood and that - again from our perspective - on the right side of his head, you'll notice some remaining effects of probable editing (the noted effect that you'll get when someone moves a bit when taking a photo) which is strange as the rest of the photo does not show similar artifacts.
There's another example, in the New York Times, were the standing man is not present, see here
However, the images without the standing man seem to have been edited in terms of contrast, see here
Finally, the Imperial War Museum in London holds a slightly larger photo (see here). It originates from a collection of approximately 250,000 photographs donated to the museum by the US Embassy in 1947.
So, the photo is most likely a combination of two images with every version seeing some additions. However, take note that editing in photographs was very common at that time and happened with images of virtually everything. See this famous Soviet example, or this British case with the smoke and explosion being added during editing.
