George Silk was a New Zealand-born Australian photojournalist. He served as a photojournalist for Life for 30 years.
Silk was born in the New Zealand town of Levin. His career as a war photographer began in 1939, when he was 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.
He began working for Life magazine in 1943.
Silk photographed many important events during World War II. He covered the war on the Italian front, the Allied invasions of France and the Pacific.
In New Guinea, Silk walked 300 miles with the Allied forces, an ordeal later described in the book War in New Guinea. He was with U.S. forces in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and was wounded by a grenade during a river crossing in Germany. His co-worker Will Lang Jr. reported on the Battle of the Bulge and the river crossing. Silk took the first photographs of Nagasaki, Japan, after the atomic bomb was dropped there on 9 August 1945, as well as Japanese war criminals awaiting trial in postwar Tokyo.