George Silk, a photojournalist who spent 30 years with Life magazine and who shot one of the iconic images from Australia’s Kokoda Track campaign, has died at the age of 87.

For Australians, Silk was perhaps best known for his photo of a Papua New Guinean volunteer – one of the “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” – tenderly helping a blinded Australian soldier, George “Dick” Whittington, to hospital.

Silk was said to be deeply affected by the image, taken on Christmas Day in 1942 after
Australian and American troops had reversed the Japanese advance in New Guinea, and which symbolised the New Guinea volunteers’ vital involvement in the war.

New Zealand-born Silk, who earned fame for his coverage of World War II and later pioneered the use of a special camera for depicting athletes in motion, died at a hospital in Connecticut on Saturday of congestive hear failure, family members said.

Silk, born on November 17, 1916, joined Life’s photo staff in 1943 and spent the next two years covering the war on the Italian front, the Allied invasions of France, and the Pacific campaign.

He shot the first pictures of the atom-bombed city of Nagasaki and Japanese war criminals awaiting trial in post war Tokyo.

Silk, who became an American citizen in 1947, was “superbly versatile” and was at ease with every subject, said Bobbi Baker Burrows, a senior Life photo editor.

“He also was lovably cantankerous, a larger than life character who would break into ‘Waltzing Matilda’ at the slightest excuse,” Mr Burrows said.

In December, 1972, Silk was in Nepal, shooting an assignment on Himalayan game parks when he received news that the magazine had folded. According to the 1977 book That Was the Life, Silk replied by saying “your message . . . badly garbled. Please send one-half million dollars additional expenses”.

“He was very innovative and creative,” his wife said in a phone interview, recalling how Silk had adapted a race-track photo-finish camera to take sequential stills of hurdlers and other athletes for the 1960 Olympic trials and used it for other purposes – including a famous series of his own children in Halloween costumes.

The “strip” camera, in which film was exposed as it rolled past a hole, helped Silk become a leading sports photographer.

Silk’s career as a war photographer began in 1939 as a combat cameraman for the Australian government, covering action in the Middle East, North Africa and Greece.

Trapped with the famed Desert Rats at Tobruk in Libya, he was captured by German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s forces but escaped 10 days later.

In New Guinea, he walked 480 km with allied forces, an ordeal later described in a book, War in New Guinea.

He was with American forces in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and was wounded by a grenade during a river crossing in Germany.

Silk was named magazine photographer of the year by the National Press Photographers Association four times.

Silk, whose death comes as Life magazine is making yet another attempt to revive itself, is survived by his wife, two daughters and a son. No memorial is planned.

Source: Post Courier, Wednesday October 27, 2004.

Tha famous photograph of Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel Raphael Oimbari leading wounded Australia soldier Dick Whittington:
fuzzy_wuzzy_angel.jpg