George Silk, a photojournalist who spent 30 years with Life magazine, earning fame for his coverage of World War II and later pioneering the use of a special camera for depicting athletes in motion, died Saturday at a hospital in Norwalk, Conn. He was 87.

Silk, born in New Zealand on Nov. 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. He shot the first pictures of the atom-bombed city of Nagasaki and Japanese war criminals awaiting trial in postwar Tokyo.

He became an American citizen in 1947, the same year he married the former Margery Gray Schieber. They lived in Westport, Conn., on Long Island Sound.

Silk 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,” Burrows said.

In December 1972, he 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 Monday, recalling how Silk had adapted a racetrack 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, when he parlayed some sports pictures he had taken as a photo store clerk in New Zealand into a position as a combat photographer for the Australian Information Department.

Among his best-known pictures was “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel,” a native stretcher bearer on Papua New Guinea, in 1942. Silk also covered 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, Silk walked 300 miles with Australian 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. During a river crossing he shot a series of photographs of surrendering German soldiers, one of whom decided to detonate himself with a grenade, wounding Silk in the leg.

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, this time as a Sunday insert, is survived by his wife, two daughters, and a son.