The Secret Camera

The Secret Camera
Owlwise Publishing | December 7, 2005

Someone must fight for the right to have the freedoms that all Americans enjoy.

The Secret Camera is a true story of one young marine who was held captive for 1,355 days by the Japanese.

During Marine Corps training, the word surrender was never mentioned, it wasn't even in the United States Marine Corps' vocabulary.

The first day of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the twenty three marines stationed at Chinwangtao, China were facing a full company of Japs, but there was no fear. We had been taught to do our job and were ready for them with twelve machine guns setup to cover all approaches. We knew we didn't have a chance, but the general feeling that was expressed by all of us was, "we are going to take a hell of a lot of them with us."

The Japs treated us as though we had disgraced ourselves by surrendering. We had no intention to surrender, but our officers ordered us to lay down our arms.

In the Japanese Army, the code of military justice was, if an officer mentioned surrender, it was not only the right of the common soldier, but it was his duty to kill him.

That should give you an idea of their temperament which put our lives in jeopardy..

Thirty eight percent of all Americans captured by the Japs either died of starvation or were brutally murdered. There were about 32,000 captured, about 12,000 never came back.

While Kirk was held at the Japanese prison camp, his key to survival was to just work, cutting scrap for the foundry, keeping his mind elsewhere. But sometime in 1945, Kirk felt compelled to record what he was living because he feared nobody would ever know. He built a pinhole camera out of two cardboard boxes and convinced a Japanese interpreter, who had grown up in the United States, to smuggle him some photographic plates. He got men built like bags of bones with the distended bellies born of protein, vitamin, and mineral deficiencies to quickly line up in front of buildings at the camp.

The shutter was a piece of tape over the pinhole. ''I had them stand there, pulled the tape off, waited 10 seconds, then put the tape back on,'' Kirk said.