![]() ![]() ![]() The way Mallory describes his experiences in Tokyo, with details that are vivid and specific, it’s as if they happened yesterday. She joins him today as he talks about his wartime experiences, as does his visiting sister Joy Halstead, who served as a nurse during World War II. Today Mallory lives in pastoral comfort in rural Butte Valley with his wife, Thelma. What Mallory didn’t know then, couldn’t have known, was that 50 years after his encounter with Tojo, long after he’d retired from his Chico dental practice, the story of the false teeth he made would surface publicly, and that it would start a worldwide commotion and bring the 78-year-old veteran his proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Mallory’s assignment: to make a set of dentures for General Hideki Tojo, then being held in the prison awaiting trial for war crimes-the notorious Tojo, whose very name stood for everything that was evil about the imperialistic Japanese military machine that had wrought so much destruction. After all, he was about to meet the very man who had started the war in the Pacific, in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians had died, by ordering the bombing of Pearl Harbor five years before. ![]() When a fresh-faced Navy dentist named Jack Mallory walked down the corridors of Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison one day in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, he knew he was about to have an experience he would remember for the rest of his life. ![]()
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