Photographer Focused on the Pain and Truth of War

Jerry Anker fought in World War II all right -- armed with a Bell & Howell 35-mm Eyemo and a boxy Speed Graphic camera.

He’s one of a dwindling number of World War II veterans who brought images of the war to the nation’s newspapers and movie houses.

But though Anker’s award-winning photographs and historic film footage from New Guinea to Tokyo chronicle wartime heroics and sacrifice, it was his harrowing black-and-white shots of Japanese soldiers’ atrocities in the Philippines, against both civilians and prisoners of war, that helped convict Japanese leaders of war crimes. In 1945, Anker was a 21-year-old combat photographer with the U.S. Coast Guard amphibious forces when he accompanied Gen. Douglas MacArthur on his return to the Philippines. Anker’s camera captured the orphaned babies reaching out in their abandonment, the young boys whose bodies bore the telltale marks of Japanese officers’ samurai swords, the starved and tortured civilians and other grisly victims whose plights vividly illustrated the senseless pain and truth of war.

Anker is a member of the International Combat Camera Assn. and something of a Coast Guard legend. Two years after signing up as a musician in the Coast Guard band, he volunteered for more dangerous duties. He learned photography on the fly, reading the camera instruction book on his way to New Guinea. His handiwork can be found in old newsreels, newspaper and magazine photographs, documentaries and history books, including ABC-TV’s “Shooting Wars,” which aired in 2000.

“I know I took some incredible risks, but it was all part of the job,” Anker said.

The 90-minute ABC documentary paid tribute to Anker and other combat cameramen who served at great peril during the war. It included a segment about two legendary directors, John Ford and John Huston, who made award-winning war-zone documentaries the Hollywood way -- using special effects and staging battle scenes months after the real event.

But Anker focused on real-life combat footage and emotional truth. Shooting bullets as well as pictures, he slogged alongside American and Australian troops in New Guinea, Iwo Jima, the Philippines, Borneo and Okinawa, fully expecting to die.

“When we landed on Iwo Jima, the boat next to us was hit and bodies and shells were flying all around me,” Anker recalled. “The beach was so short and I was so scared that I wet my pants.”

Anker, who turns 80 in December, is fighting a battle with congestive heart failure. He is a short bald man who doesn’t hear well, even with hearing aids. But when he tells his stories of war from a hospital bed in his Hollywood living room -- the same bed his wife died in a few months ago -- it brings a twinkle to his eyes, set behind thick black glasses.

He was born in San Bernardino in 1923 and moved with his family to Los Angeles during the Depression, after his father landed a job making bread at an El Monte bakery.

He attended Hollywood High, where he met his sweetheart, Marguerite Campbell. She played violin in the school orchestra; he played guitar in the band.

Although they had music in common, Anker was intimidated by her beauty and never revealed his deep feelings for her. They went their separate ways after graduation.

She went on to play and sing with bandleader Kay Kyser’s “Kollege of Musical Knowledge” and joined Sam Goldwyn’s bevy of “Goldwyn Girls,” appearing in glamorous films of the 1940s, including “Best Foot Forward” in 1943 with Lucille Ball.

In 1942, at age 18, Anker was recruited to play jazz guitar and bass in the Coast Guard’s 42-piece band, which was led by celebrity Cesar Romero.

After a year of playing at ship launchings, officers’ clubs and hospital wards, he yearned for more action. He persuaded his bunkmate, actor-photographer Alan Hale Jr. -- who would become famous as the Skipper in “Gilligan’s Island” -- to pull some strings and get him reclassified as a U.S. Coast Guard photographer’s mate 2nd class.

In 1945, he parachuted onto enemy-held islands off the coast of New Guinea to spy on the Japanese in the dark, literally and figuratively: His military records showed he had night blindness. For his heroics, he received a commendation from MacArthur and Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, along with a signed card extending “all privileges and courtesies” to him. He still has it today.

Anker used his body and a Jeep as a shield to protect MacArthur on the island of Luzon, driving in front of the general’s Jeep in case a land mine went off.

In the summer of 1945, the U.S. bombed oil refineries for 30 consecutive days at Balikpapan, Borneo, where Japan produced aviation fuel. Soon after, Anker and his buddy, cameraman Jim Lonergan, landed on the beach as part of one of the last amphibious landings of the war.

“Lonergan’s boat hit the beach first and he wanted me to take an action photo of his landing while he shot the beach scene,” Anker said.

Anker obliged; his shot would make photo history and become part of the National Archives collection.

Both men soon got lost in all the smoke and were captured by a small group of Japanese.

“We humored them by taking filmless photos” of them, Anker said. “But actually they were more interested in their own welfare than ours, which made escaping easy.”

The cameramen fled four days later.

It was there on the island where Anker shot some of his most haunting and disturbing film footage. When an Australian infantryman shot his flame-thrower into a cave, a Japanese soldier came running out engulfed in fire. Repulsed by the incredible horror, Anker remained focused to capture the footage of the man’s agonizing death.

“I can still smell the stench of his burning body,” Anker said. “But at the time, I also never forgot he was the enemy.”

On Sept. 7, 1945, five days after the Japanese formally surrendered aboard the battleship Missouri, Anker photographed the surrender at Okinawa to four-star Army Gen. Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who led the campaign that ended Japan’s occupation of China and the war in the Pacific. The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the month before, prompting Japan’s capitulation.

After the war in the Pacific was over, Anker used his card signed by MacArthur and Halsey to tour Tokyo, which was off-limits to most military personnel.

When he returned to the States, he married Bobbie Levey, a young woman he had met in San Francisco before he went overseas. They would divorce a few years later, after their two daughters were born.

He married again and divorced again, all the while running a family camera shop in Huntington Park. He later sold photographic equipment for Vivitar Corp. and owned a Long Beach photo studio.

In the 1960s, Anker, president of his high school alumni association, was in charge of his class reunion. The women hugged and kissed him. Except Marguerite Campbell. At the end of the evening, Anker got up the nerve to tell her: “I always wanted to marry you.”

“You never asked,” she replied.

Within a decade, they married and moved into her mother’s Hollywood home, where they shared the joy of making music together, he on the guitar and she on the piano. Their duets ended when she died of a respiratory disease last February.

On a good day, Anker finds the strength to walk a block north from his home to Hollywood High, where he lends a hand at the school’s alumni museum. His war photos are on permanent display.

He still takes photographs, especially of his new love -- a 27-year-old banking beauty and aspiring actress.

“My children say she’s after my money, but they don’t need any of it and someone’s got to get it,” Anker said with a laugh, and that twinkle in his eye. “Why not her?”