Re: The Secret Camera

Date: June 07, 2004

"POW gave world a view of camps
By Bill Fairley Special to the Star-Telegram
May 26th, Part One

On Monday, as the nation observes Memorial Day, retired Master Gunnery Sgt. Terence Kirk of Walnut Springs will remember his fellow POWs, living and dead, with whom he served during 30 years in the Marine Corps -- and especially during 45 months of internment in Japanese POW camps.

After his father was killed in a coal miners' labor dispute in 1919, Kirk and six of his siblings were reared in a Moosehead, Ill., orphanage where his mother placed them, unable to support them.

Kirk graduated from high school with training in electronics, auto mechanics and blacksmithing. He was employed for two years as an auto mechanic, but thought that there should be more to life than being a grease monkey. In 1937, he went to a recruiting office in Chicago and joined the Marine Corps.

After training in San Diego, Kirk's platoon was sent first to Shanghai and then to Tientsen, China, where they guarded the U.S. embassy. When World War II began, the Marines were supposed to return to the United States. But the Japanese soldiers occupying that part of North China had other ideas.

The Marines began a harsh life as POWs in a succession of prison camps during a freezing winter. Early in 1942, the Japanese decided to put the POWs to work, so Kirk's detachment was transported in cold freight cars to the northern island of Kyushu between two large Japanese cities -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the prison quarters, there was little heat and little food, and most of the work was done outside in sub-freezing temperatures. The POWs were often beaten by the guards. Many died.

Kirk says his orphanage experience made him stubborn and innovative. He traded clothing he had salvaged, and he made and repaired shoes, for which the guards would give him extra rations and blankets.

The blacksmith training came in handy, too. He made a forge and repaired carts, truck parts and wagons -- and he could stay warm while working in the shack with the forge.

Kirk suffered from recurring malaria and dengue fever, but he was one of the few POWs who retained enough strength to help pull carts full of dead young men to the Japanese crematorium.

Kirk decided he had to do something to prove to the American people and international authorities that the Japanese ignored -- and often laughed at -- Geneva Convention rules for humane treatment of POWs.

He reasoned that he would need actual photographs as "indisputable proof that our captors were nothing more than cruel and inhuman beasts," he said.

He had read how to make a simple camera from a square cardboard box. He took into his confidence a Lt. Nishi who had been raised in northern California but was not a U.S. citizen. Nishi had occasionally shown sympathy for the POWs.

Nishi had been raised by his parents, who were Japanese citizens, in San Francisco, until they were all deported after the Pearl Harbor attack. Nishi was then drafted into the Japanese army.

Kirk told him that when the United States won the war, Japanese war criminals would be prosecuted. He told Nishi that he would vouch for his efforts if he would help him obtain some photography supplies.

Nishi arranged to supply Kirk with the things he needed to fashion a box camera with a pinhole aperture.

The resulting photos are the only documentation of Japanese mistreatment of American and allied POWs. Today the photo plates are in the Marine Corps archives in Quantico, Va.

Part Two: Terence Kirk comes home.

Source: Interview With Terence Kirk and Information From Kirk's Book The Secret Camera.

Bill Fairley is a longtime Fort Worth resident interested in Texas history. bilfairley@aol.com

Perilous trip home caps Marine's POW experience
By Bill Fairley Special to the Star-Telegram

Second of two parts

After Japan surrendered in August 1945, bringing an end to World War II, the Japanese soldiers guarding Allied POWs in the Kokura prison camps began to disappear from their posts.

U.S. Marine Cpl. Terence Kirk and other POWs picked their way through the rubble left by B-29 bomb raids, hoping to link up with other POWs and to find their way to Army and Navy landing sites on the Japanese islands.

After 1,300 days as a POW, Kirk weighed 115 pounds, down from his normal 160.

He and other former POWs were flown to Guam. While being processed there, they were ordered to do an amazing thing: They had to sign an agreement drawn up by the Defense Department that they would not discuss their living conditions as Japanese prisoners and slave laborers, and would not sue for retribution or seek other recourse from the Japanese government.

In other words, a gag order was imposed. No such order was issued for Americans held by the Germans.

But Kirk and his fellow POWs were too eager to get home to worry about the order.

Kirk and six other former Marine POWs were put on a giant four-engine Mars seaplane for the flight to San Francisco. Their only stop was a brief layover at Pearl Harbor.

Soon after they left Hawaii, a strange rumbling in the engines became apparent. But all aboard agreed to keep flying toward home. Just beyond the halfway point, one engine quit. Once more, they voted to continue the flight. The alternative was an open sea landing, which had never been achieved on the Pacific.

A few hundred miles farther, and a second engine cut out.

"Not to worry," said one of the other POWs, who also was a pilot. "These planes can stay aloft with only one engine. We still have two."

Indeed, the plane keep moving. The passengers cheered when they recognized the skyline of San Francisco. But then the pilot somberly announced, "We have lost oil pressure in the starboard engine three," and calmly added, "We also have fire in that engine."

The crew feathered the engine, and the fire extinguishers were put to work. The pilot called out, softly, on his radio, "Mayday, Mayday. ..."

"Strap yourselves in," the pilot told the former POWs. "We're still two miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge."

Kirk saw the underside of the great bridge as the plane flew beneath it. It had been eight years and 17 days since he had sailed under the bridge toward China.

The surviving engine carried the Mars aircraft to a relatively smooth landing in San Francisco Bay.

Among the many peculiarities of the war were the terms of the final peace treaty signed in 1951. One of the codicils specified that the photos Kirk had taken with his "secret camera" -- a simple box camera with a pinhole aperture -- could never be used to get reparations from Japan for using POWs as slave labor in some of Japan's largest industries, particularly auto and electronics.

Kirk's photos are the only documentation of Japanese mistreatment of American and allied POWs. Today the photo plates are in the Marine Corps archives in Quantico, Va.

Kirk notes that "only 1 percent of Americans who were prisoners of the Germans died in prisons camps, while 37 percent of Allied prisoners of the Japanese died."

But once a Marine, always a Marine: After he recuperated, Kirk re-upped (that is, he re-enlisted). He spent the next 25 years on active and reserve duty, retiring as a master gunnery sergeant.

His civilian career was primarily as an electronics technician with the Federal Aviation Administration. In his spare time he cared for his apple orchard in Redwood Valley, Calif.

Kirk's first wife died years ago of cancer. Their only son joined the Marines and served 13 months in Vietnam. Shortly after coming home, he died in a motorcycle accident at age 22. Their daughter, Jennifer Hamilton, is a professional artist who lives in South Carolina.

A Marine veterans' reunion in Texas brought Kirk to the area for the first time. The reunion is where he met his wife, Millie, whose late husband was also a Marine. She was attending the reunion in his honor with her daughter, Carolyn Noonan.

The Kirks now live in Walnut Springs, southwest of Cleburne.

His book, The Secret Camera, may be purchased through his Web site, www.thesecretcamera.com, for $20, including shipping and handling. It can also be ordered through Borders and Barnes & Noble bookstores.

Source: Interviews and The Secret Camera.

Bill Fairley is a longtime Fort Worth resident interested in Texas history. bilfairley@aol.com "