[Leica] The Secret Camera

[jon.stanton at comcast.net (jon.stanton@comcast.net)]

Here's an interesting newspaper story:

Snapshots from Hell 
An ex-POW?s photos ofa Japanese prison camp stayed buried for decades. 

By Dan Malone

?They say we?re not to do something, we don?t do it.? 
?It?s something the military authorities still need to answer for.? 
The images are deceptively familiar. Twig-thin men with swollen joints, some 
so weak and frail they can barely stand. Bellies distended with disease. 
Skin stretched like parchment over protruding ribs. The empty, 
expressionless stares of the near-dead. Standing outside a wooden shack, 
some wear diapers made of rags, others nothing at all.

Our eyes automatically file these photos with the ones from history books 
and television documentaries ? the ghastly, grainy snapshots from Hitler?s 
concentration camps.

But these men aren?t European Jews being held in Germany. They?re Allied 
soldiers, mostly American, captured by the Japanese and starved, beaten, and 
worked to near-death as slave laborers. And unless you?ve read a 
self-published book by a Burleson veteran, you?ve probably never seen these 
photos before, or any like them. They may be the only images in existence of 
American prisoners in Japanese prisoner camps. And they sat unpublished for 
more than 50 years, apparently ignored by a U.S. government that seemed 
indifferent to the atrocities the images documented.

Even more astonishing, the photos were not taken by victorious troops 
liberating the prisoners or by wartime correspondents. They were taken by 
one of the prisoners himself, at the risk of his life, with a pinhole camera 
put together with cardboard and tape.

But Terry Kirk, now an 87-year-old ex-Marine, doesn?t really need the photos 
to recall his 1,355 days in captivity. His memories remain as sharp as the 
attacks he still occasionally suffers from the malaria he contracted as a 
prisoner of war.

?The only thing that remains is the agony that you went through,?? he says. 
?You can?t forget it.??

When he?s not running errands with his wife, Mildred, or visiting family in 
Texas or California, Kirk, a compact man with a wrestler?s build, spends his 
days pecking on a state-of-the-art Apple Powerbook in a spare bedroom he?s 
converted to a study. He has written and published two other books, a 
what-if novel about the war and another book extolling the virtues of 
hydrogen fuel cells. At a breakfast with family and friends, Kirk is a quiet 
man, content to listen while others talk.

Get him alone and ask him a few questions, and his story begins to unfold, 
in the sometimes salty language of a Marine. In a series of interviews at 
his middle-class brick home in Burleson, Kirk recounted building his camera 
and secretly photographing fellow prisoners to make sure the world would one 
day know of their ordeal. 

As he struggled for his own survival, Kirk said, he watched as his fellow 
prisoners died and their bodies were hauled away by those still clinging to 
life, on ?dead runs? to the crematorium. The ashes of the dead were packed 
in urns, secured with white ribbons and stacked in a room ? silent 
testaments to disease, malnutrition, and abuse.

?I think the American public should know exactly what these kids faced in 
the Pacific war,?? Kirk said. ?They were just one click above being a 
teen-ager. They?d cremate these kids, put them in little crocks, and you 
couldn?t tell anything. If the American public had a photograph,? he 
thought, ?they?d know what it was all about.??

The photographs ? and Kirk ? almost went up in the flames of history.

In the final days of the war, after several moves, Kirk landed in a prison 
camp in Kokura, the city that was the intended target for the second atomic 
bomb the U.S. would drop on Japan. But thick clouds on Aug. 9, 1945, covered 
the city, home to one of Japan?s largest arsenals. Bock?s Car, the B-29 
carrying the Fat Man atomic bomb, was diverted instead to Nagasaki.

So Kirk and his photographs survived. ?I hoped that when I turned them over, 
the government would do something,? he said. ?But in the end, they decided 
we were not to tell anyone what the Japanese did to us. They said it was 
something like a military secret.??

Left to the military, Kirk said, his photographs never would have surfaced. 
The copies he gave to military officials at the end of the war were never 
used in war crime trials. In fact, Kirk was forced to sign what he and 
others call a gag order about his days as a POW, and he feared prosecution 
if he ever spoke out.

?Being a true Marine, I followed orders,?? he said. ?But when I discovered 
they weren?t going to do anything with them, I said to hell with them. The 
story will get out even if they court-martial me.?? 

In the mid-1970s, when Kirk became convinced that his photographs might 
never been seen, he published a memoir, a book he called The Secret Camera, 
that included his photographs. More recently, Kirk has been hailed for his 
courage by fellow POWs and cited on the floor of the U.S. Senate for his 
daring. His family and others, meanwhile, are trying to persuade the 
government to formally acknowledge his bravery.

?Terry Kirk is one of the outstanding unsung heroes of the war,?? said Linda 
Goetz Holmes, a Pacific War historian affiliated with the National Archives 
and the author of several books on Japanese POWs during WWII. ?What he did 
is risk his life for what would have been certain death if those photographs 
were found.?


The wide, white smile Terence Sumner Kirk flashes gives no hint of the 
hardships and heartaches of his life. Kirk was one of seven children born in 
Illinois to a Scottish father and an English mother. His father, Benjamin, 
was a coal miner during the early 1900s, when the International Workers of 
the World, or Wobblies, were trying to ?take over all the unions and the 
coal mines.??

?My father was a foreman, and he was trying to tell his people that they 
[the Wobblies] were Communists and would cause a lot of trouble,?? Kirk 
said. ?They shot him in the head.?? Terry?s mother, Anne, told her 
3-year-old son only that his father had died.

For years, his mother kept a photograph of a handsome soldier on her 
dresser, and Kirk grew up believing that the man in the photograph was his 
father and that he had been killed during a war. Looking back, Kirk said, 
the romantic myth about his father that he grew up with probably planted the 
notion of military service in his mind.

Years later, on a return trip to his hometown, Kirk learned the truth about 
his father from a newspaper editor. His father had been severely wounded and 
left mentally incapacitated. ?My mother told me he was dead. In those days, 
being in a mental institution was considered a stigma.??

The shooting fractured the Kirk family. His mother was unable to care for 
seven children alone; the newspaper editor who later told Kirk the truth 
about his father arranged for all but Kirk?s eldest sister to be sent to the 
Mooseheart orphanage about 40 miles outside of Chicago, home at the time to 
some 1,400 children.

His mother took a job at the orphanage and was able to see her children on 
holidays. But the infrequent visits were too short for mother and child to 
bond. Nor did he remain close to his siblings. ?You never really get 
acquainted with them,?? he said. ?I never really had a family to speak of.??

He graduated from high school during the 1930s and tried to make a living as 
a mechanic. ?There was a Depression of the worst kind,?? he recalled. ?There 
was no future I could see. So I joined the Marine Corps.?


In his memoir and in interviews with Fort Worth Weekly, Kirk described his 
years in the Marines. Enlisting in 1937, he went to boot camp in San Diego 
and was transferred to Hawaii. In late 1939 he volunteered for duty in 
China, where the Marines had maintained a presence since the Boxer Rebellion 
at the beginning of the century. It was a troubled time in Asia, with 
Japanese forces invading Manchuria and China even as Hitler and Mussolini 
were consolidating their power in Europe. But for a footloose young man in 
his prime, it was attractive duty. ?The best liberty port in the Marine 
Corps,?? Kirk said with a grin.

Kirk, now a corporal, was one of 23 Marines stationed at the Camp Holcomb 
rifle and machine gun range in Chinwangtao, China, east of Beijing, not far 
from a large deployment of Japanese troops. Early on the morning of Dec. 8, 
1941, Kirk heard a radio report that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. A 
short time later, the Japanese soldiers stationed down the road began 
advancing on Kirk?s camp. The badly outnumbered Marines readied their 
machine guns and braced for the fight. ?We knew the situation. We didn?t 
have a Chinaman?s chance,?? Kirk said. ?We wanted to set up our guns and get 
as many of these people as we could before they got us.??

The Camp Holcomb Marines telegraphed their headquarters about the looming 
battle, with stereotypical military understatement. ?The issue is in doubt,? 
the wire said. No one expected the un-Marine-like answer that came back: 
?Comply with demands.??

Kirk felt that he had been training for that day since he entered the 
service. ?I was honed to a razor?s edge, one lean fighting machine, and we 
were ordered to lay down our arms.??

Kirk and his fellow Marines were taken prisoner on the first full day of 
U.S. participation in the war. They spent the next three and a half years in 
a succession of prisons and work camps, first in China, then later in Japan, 
their numbers dwindling as they moved. The Marines were fed nothing during 
the first three days in Japanese custody ? a hint of the deprivations 
awaiting them. On a diet of millet, rice, and scavenged or rotting meat, 
strong men wasted away. Kirk dropped from his fighting weight of 150 to 89 
pounds.

Early on, Kirk vowed to escape; he began setting aside a third of his daily 
rice ration for the journey, only to have it stolen at night by the rats he 
saw crawling through the latrine during the day. The lack of food and 
terrible quality of what they did get to eat wrecked the men?s digestive 
systems. At times, the constipation they suffered was so bad they used 
spoons to relieve their impacted bowels, a procedure that left them, he 
wrote, ?bleeding, dizzy, nauseated, and weak.?? At other times, week-long 
sieges of diarrhea left them so weak that escape was impossible. The men 
couldn?t walk 100 yards without leaving a trail of their own waste.

At Woosung prison in China, one prisoner died after brushing up against an 
electric fence. Another was shot by a guard for failing to understand his 
order, spoken in Japanese, to change a light bulb.

After about a year, Kirk and others were moved to a camp near Yawata in 
Japan. Working as slave laborers for a steel company, the men loaded coal 
and iron ore with shovels and watched as the other prisoners, some not yet 
18, slowly died.

?If dying without a whimper was the mark of a man, there were no boys among 
them,?? Kirk wrote in The Secret Camera. ?The dead were stacked on 
two-wheeled carts like cordwood?? and pulled by fellow prisoners to the 
crematorium. ?Occasionally, pulling the two-wheeled cart one day on the dead 
run meant being a passenger on [it] the next day. ... Every so often, the 
run proved too strenuous and some of the prisoners, because of their 
weakened condition, collapsed and died.??

Prisoners were forced to saw off the leg of one corpse that was too large 
for the crematorium. Small or large, the dead ended as ashes, packed in 
urns, labeled and stored in a locked room ? and Kirk wondered if he might 
one day be locked away there himself.

?There was enough space on the shelves to store the ashes of everyone in 
camp,? he wrote. ?The little crocks were mute witness that many young men 
died before their time. It was the only room in the building that was 
locked. Weird, I thought, the only people who for sure cannot go anywhere 
are locked up.??

Beriberi, malaria, and dengue fever left men bloated, shivering with 
out-of-control fevers, weak, and vulnerable to pneumonia. ?There will be a 
better day if we live to see it,?? Kirk remembers another prisoner saying. 
No one was sure if they would.

Kirk was eventually moved to the prison camp at Kokura, where prisoners were 
forced to work at an adjacent electric generating plant. It was here that 
Kirk decided he would document prison conditions.

One of the few possessions Kirk had managed to hold onto as he was moved 
from camp to camp was a red satin bathrobe he had purchased for his brother. 
As disease and work continued to push his weight down, he approached a 
British soldier who arranged black-market trades between other prisoners and 
guards. Kirk traded the robe for 10 mess kits of rice to be delivered over 
10 weeks. When the last of the rice was delivered, the guard was to get his 
robe.

But the guard reneged and demanded the robe after the first few deliveries. 
When Kirk refused, he was pulled into a room full of guards who took turns 
throwing him through the air and onto the ground and beating him with a 
club. When the club broke, the guard to whom he had traded the robe took a 
hot poker and waved it before his eyes. Finally, an officer stumbled onto 
the scene, barked out an order, and ended the beating. But his startled 
tormentor dropped the hot iron, which fell and burned Kirk?s neck and leg.

In the spring of 1945, Kirk was again stricken with malaria. Fearing that 
the disease might kill him, he agreed to play human guinea pig for a 
Japanese doctor experimenting with malaria treatment. The serum?s side 
effects were similar to the effects of the disease and carried a risk of 
death, but it seemed to prevent relapses in those who survived. The 
treatment also gave him the means to record the horrors of the prison camp.


Kirk was escorted to the doctor by the prison camp interpreter, a man he 
knew only as Nishi. On the trip, Kirk learned that Nishi himself was a 
Japanese-American, born in San Francisco, who had been tricked into 
returning to Japan with a telegram informing him of his grandmother?s 
imminent death. When Nishi arrived in Japan, he had been forced into 
military service as a translator.

Kirk survived the treatment, and on the return trip to the prison camp he 
took yet another risk ? he asked Nishi to help him photograph dying 
prisoners. From his childhood at the orphanage, Kirk retained the memory of 
an older brother showing him how to build a pinhole camera. If Nishi could 
smuggle photographic plates into prison, Kirk would build a camera.

The photographs, he hoped, could be used as evidence in future war crime 
trials. ?One picture of a starving man or a poor soul swelled up with 
beriberi will tell a hell of a lot more than trying to describe what they 
looked like,?? Kirk told Nishi. ?By the time this war is over, all or most 
of these poor slobs in the hospital right now will be long dead. You also 
know what happens to prisoners who die. They are cremated. It would be 
impossible to look into a crock of ashes and say these guys died of 
starvation, beatings, or disease.??

Nishi agreed. Kirk built his camera, two simple boxes made of cardboard and 
tape, one fitting snugly into another, with a pinhole for a lens, a patch of 
tape for a shutter. The smaller box pressed against the edge of the 
photographic plate in the bottom of the larger box. Raising the tape above 
the pinhole let enough light in to capture an image. After each photograph, 
Kirk had to return to a makeshift darkroom to load another plate. Kirk took 
six photographs ? two of emaciated prisoners, one of three prisoners 
suffering from beriberi, one of the medical staff, one of a barracks, and a 
final shot of the electric plant in which the prisoners were forced to work. 
Nishi smuggled the exposed plates out of the prison, had them developed, 
made six prints of each, and smuggled plates and prints back in to Kirk.

Within a few months, it became clear that the war was nearing an end. Allied 
bombers could be seen on the horizon. Rumor said the nearby city of Yawata 
had been leveled. On Aug. 15, the Japanese colonel who ran the camp 
announced that the war was over. The next day, the Japanese abandoned the 
camp. Kirk eventually made his way to Allied forces and learned how the war 
had ended and how close his camp had come to atomic annihilation.

?We didn?t know what the bomb was until we got back to civilization,?? he 
said. Freedom, he said, was ?like someone had a 10-ton anvil hang[ing] over 
our heads and we were able to get out of it without somebody dropping it on 
us or jabbing us in the back with a bayonet.??


Kirk gave copies of his photographs to Army and Navy officers and an FBI 
agent, all of whom were debriefing POWs. Later, on a stop in Guam on his way 
home, he was required to sign a gag order that forbade him from providing a 
public account of his days in the POW camp without prior military clearance 
? clearance he believed he would never get. Kirk doesn?t have a copy of the 
document he signed. The gist of it, as he remembers, was ?I would not tell 
anyone what happened to me in the Japanese prisoner of war camp ? that 
included my family and anyone else.??

The secrecy didn?t make sense, but Kirk was used to following orders. He 
said that he never told his first wife, from whom he is divorced, that he 
had been a POW. ?I was a Marine,?? he said. ? I take orders. They say we?re 
not to do something, we don?t do it. We don?t ask questions. They made it 
clear to me that no one should know anything about the Japanese in World War 
II.?

After recuperating at a military hospital in California, Kirk began to 
rebuild his life. He married and fathered two children, a girl and a boy. 
His daughter, an artist, lives in South Carolina. When he returned to the 
U.S. he re-enlisted in the Marine Corps and worked as a recruiter. After 
retiring from the military in 1967, he spent another seven years working for 
the Federal Aviation Administration. 

By the mid ?70s, it had become clear to Kirk that the pictures he risked his 
life for might never be seen. He had expected the pictures to generate 
outrage among military officials over the prisoners? mistreatment, but he 
never saw any evidence that it had. In fact, he never heard a word from 
anyone in the military about his photographs. They never surfaced in any war 
crimes trial. For all he knows, his debriefers may have destroyed the copies 
he gave them. 

?I thought when they saw the pictures, it would piss them off. But it 
didn?t. I think they just shit-canned them.?? 

In the late 1970s, his military career almost a decade behind him, Kirk 
began writing The Secret Camera. Six years later, he submitted the finished 
manuscript to 26 publishers and received 26 rejections. Finally, in 1982, 
Kirk himself published the book and the photographs. The copies sell mostly 
by word of mouth and through e-mail (marinebulldog88@earthlink.net). 

In her book about the Japanese use of prisoners for slave labor, Holmes, the 
historian, writes that Kirk?s photographs are unique among the images of 
that war, because they were taken while he was still a prisoner. ?Although a 
number of newly freed POWs were photographed in Japan either by liberating 
troops or with cameras they had commandeered from their former captors, only 
Kirk succeeded in taking such pictures, developing them on-site, and leaving 
camp with them in his possession.?? 

Kirk has since given his negatives to the Marine Corps archives. But he?s 
never been told what happened to the prints he gave the government almost 60 
years ago. Exactly why the military never used Kirk?s photographs ? or what 
exactly happened to the copies he provided ? is a mystery. A call to a 
Defense Department expert on POWissues was not returned. 

Holmes thinks Kirk?s photographs fell victim to worries about the Cold War 
that began at the end of World War II. U.S. officials were paranoid that 
postwar Japan might turn Communist. ?By that time, Russia had already 
invaded Manchuria,?? she said in an interview. ?Russia was taking over 
China. The Communist Party was very active among the workers of Japan, and 
our fear was that Japan might go over to the Soviets.?? 

The government wanted to keep relations with Japan warm. Perhaps, Holmes 
said, they feared Kirk?s photographs would add to the hatred that returning 
GI?s and other Americans had for the Japanese. ?Everything became tamped 
down and ?make nice to the Japanese,?? she said. ?The thinking seemed to be, 
don?t fuel any more resentment.??

Holmes? own research has unearthed other examples of returning POWs being 
told to keep quiet about Japanese atrocities. With Kirk?s help, she was able 
to obtain a copy of a gag order like the one Kirk signed. The written words 
state that GI?s are not to tell their stories without ?clearance,?? but 
Holmes said the written words were accompanied by stern verbal orders: 
?Don?t you ever print this or give any interviews.?? 

?It was the verbal instructions that were so threatening, so intimidating,?? 
she said. 

Twenty years and 3,500 copies later, Kirk is beginning to be recognized. In 
2000, his work was cited in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 
which was hearing testimony on the efforts by former POWs to sue the 
Japanese companies that profited from their slave labor.

Frank Bigelow, a fellow POW who lost a leg in a Japanese prison camp, told 
senators that Kirk?s photographs are invaluable. ?We hope that photos taken 
by Terence Kirk will help make our case,?? Bigelow said. ?We want to use 
them as evidence against the Japanese who enslaved us, industrialists whose 
companies used prisoners of war as slave labor.?

Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch later cited Kirk and Bigelow as heroes 
during a debate on legislation that would have compensated former POWs for 
their imprisonment. ?They are heroes for their perseverance through 
circumstances most of us can barely imagine,?? he said. 

Hatch told his colleagues that, of the 27,645 Americans who were captured by 
the Japanese, only 16,000 survived imprisonment. Today, no one knows exactly 
how many of those former POWs are still alive. Those who remain are men in 
their 80s, like Kirk, or older. And the opportunities to acknowledge their 
ordeal and sacrifice wither with their numbers. ?These guys are dying 
fast,?? Kirk said.

The lawsuit against the Japanese corporations that profited by the POWs? 
forced labor was roadblocked a few years ago when the Justice Department 
ruled that the 1951 peace treaty with Japan waived all claims of the United 
States ?and those of its nationals against Japan and its nationals.?? And 
the legislation that would have compensated the surviving POWs ? if the 
proposed $10,000 per man can be called compensation for what they suffered ? 
has stalled. 

Kirk?s family is in the process of trying to persuade the government to 
honor him with a Bronze Star or Purple Heart. ?We?d like to get him some 
recognition while he?s still here,?? said his daughter-in-law, Carolyn 
Noonan.

But the government owes Kirk more than money or a medal. Holmes says he?s 
owed an answer. 

?It?s a puzzlement to all of us ? why Terence?s photographic evidence, which 
would have been perfect documentation [in war crimes trials], was not 
used,?? she said. ?It?s something the military authorities still need to 
answer for ? why they suppressed his photographs.??