Terence Kirk, 89; Made Camera to Take Fellow Marine POWs’ Photos

Terence Sumner Kirk, 89, a World War II prisoner of war who built a pinhole camera from cardboard scraps and used smuggled-in photo supplies to take photographs of fellow malnourished Marines, died Wednesday at his home in Burleson, Texas, after a heart attack.

Kirk risked death at the hands of his Japanese captors to build the camera, because he wanted to document the horrors the POWs endured.

He took eight photographs and managed to develop six. Kirk and other Marines walked out of the Fukuoko No. 3 prison in Japan in 1945 after soldiers announced that the war was over.

In 1983, Kirk released his memoirs and prison photographs in his book “The Secret Camera” and then lectured across the country about the Marines in Japanese prison camps.

Born in Harrisburg, Ill., Kirk was one of seven siblings raised in an orphanage. He joined the Marine Corps in 1937 and was later sent to China and assigned to a security detail at the U.S. Embassy. He was captured the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Kirk remained a Marine after the war, serving for 30 years and retiring as a master gunnery sergeant. He later worked as a technical advisor to the Federal Aviation Administration before retiring in 1976.