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. After all, he was about to meet the very man who had started the war in the Pacific.
Mallory's assignment: to make a set of dentures for General Hideki Tojo, then being held in the prison awaiting trial for war crimes.
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.
After consulting with Mallory about the need for full dentures, Tojo declined, Mallory says. As the Japanese interpreter accompanying him in the prison dentist's office explained it, Tojo knew he would not need his teeth in six months. He fully expected to be executed for war crimes. As a result, it was agreed that Mallory would create only an upper denture.
Once word got out that the young naval officer was in charge of the task, hospital staffers began urging him to pull a prank on the general.
The military procedure for dental appliances was to engrave the name, rank, and serial number of the individual on the dentures themselves, Mallory explains. His colleagues pressured him instead to put the phrase "Remember Pearl Harbor" on the dentures.
After thinking it over, Mallory decided to go through with the prank, but to do it in a way that was less obvious and thereby safer--by using Morse code to write the message. He carefully drilled the dots and dashes into the dentures, engraving them with an unforgettable slogan forever ingrained in the American people's minds. Only his roommate, Foster, knew what he had done, however.
"You could see it clearly when it was dried, but 99 percent of the time you couldn't tell," Mallory said.
In February 1947, Mallory divulged his secret to two new dental recruits when he led them out to the prison and asked Tojo if he could examine the dentures. The recruits were amazed at Mallory's handiwork. After the examination, one mentioned the story in a letter to his parents in Texas, and the tale leaked to a local radio station.
From there it snowballed when it was picked up by the news services and printed in newspapers worldwide.
Before they could fix the situation, however, the Armed Forces' Tokyo radio station, WVTR, got hold of the juicy tale and included it in a broadcast. When Hill heard that, he called Mallory and asked if the inscription possibly could be ground out of Tojo's dentures--as soon as possible.
It was a snowy Feb. 14 night, Mallory says, when he and Foster drove in a Jeep out to the prison, leaving a cheerful Valentine's Day party early to follow through on Hill's orders.
"George knew the guard from the prison whose shift started at 11 p.m.," Mallory says. The two dentists had the guard wake Tojo to get his denture and then quickly went to work behind closed curtains to grind away any trace of the Morse code message. They then gave back the denture. Tojo no doubt wondered why they'd needed it, but as far as Mallory knows he never found out what the original denture had said.
His story was rekindled in 1995, however, when his youngest son, Paul, urged him to write a memoir recounting his days in Tokyo. The younger Mallory typed up his father's tale and sent it to the Enterprise-Record newspaper, thinking it might get published because of the 50th anniversary commemorating the end of World War II.
To the Mallorys' surprise, the memoir not only got the attention of the local paper, but also received coverage from the Associated Press, Time and Life magazines.
http://www.newsreview.com/issues/chi...2/backbeat.asp