In 1944, when Army Pfc. Anthony F. Mendonca’s family learned the 28-year-old Waipahu resident had been killed in the battle for Saipan but his remains were not recovered, his older sister, Violet Souza, could not believe he was dead, said her daughter, Henrietta Lee.

“They couldn’t find his body, so she thought he was still alive and hoped he would come home, until one of his friends in the Army told her he had seen Uncle Tony shot dead,” Lee said by phone from her home in Grants Pass, Ore.

Thereafter, her mother pressed the Army to find Mendonca’s body until she died in the late 1970s, Lee said.

“He was her baby brother, and she adored him.”

On Tuesday, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that Mendonca’s remains had been identified and accounted for on April 9, 2020. His survivors were notified and, now that a finalization process has been completed, he will be laid to rest Dec. 16 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

Lee expressed the family’s relief at having closure and their gratitude to the Army for having continued the search for so long.

”We’re just so happy to have found Uncle Tony,” she said, her voice choking with emotion as she added, “I just wish my mother was here.”

While Lee and other survivors were too young to remember Mendonca, they learned of his courage through the records of the circumstances of his death in the Army’s files, said a grandniece, Wilma Boudreau of Kailua.

According to the agency announcement, Mendonca was a member of Company A, 106th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division, when American forces participated in the battle for Saipan, part of a larger operation to secure the Mariana Islands.

He was killed during fighting on June 28, 1944, and his remains were reportedly not recovered.

The report in Mendonca’s files, Boudreau said, described how for more than a week, his regiment battled entrenched Japanese defenders in pillboxes and caves, in low visibility due to heavy vegetation, and “they called him the stay-­behind man, because he fought to let others escape, and he never made it back.”

The cause of death, she said, was gunshot wounds to the head. The file contained photos of Mendonca’s remains.

“When I saw the bones and how they reconstructed the body, it was very sad and emotional,” she said, noting the shock of seeing two large gunshot holes in his skull, and how touched she was by how thorough the work had been, leaving the body almost intact, “only missing some fingers and toes.”

The agency’s announcement summarized the long forensic investigation, beginning when “remains identified as Unknown X-10 were first reported as buried in Army Cemetery #1 on Saipan July 10, 1944,” it said.

The remains were transferred and reinterred in the Fort William McKinley Cemetery, now the American Battle Monuments Commission’s Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, in the Philippines on Feb. 5, 1952.

On Jan. 20, 2019, Unknown X-10 was disinterred and sent to the DPAA laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor­-Hickam where DPPA scientists used dental and anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial evidence, and scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA analysis to successfully identify Mendonca.

“Finding him felt wonderful for the family,” Boudreau said. “They were thinking about (their missing uncle) constantly.”

Reading Violet Souza’s letters in the file, she said, conveyed “her anguish when she was trying to locate Tony.”

Throughout, she added, “the Army has been so good, so thorough, so comforting.”

For its part, the agency’s announcement saluted Souza, whose actively “pressing the Army to resolve the case and also provide timely info to the family” helped lead to its solution.

“Mrs. Souza pressed it on,” it said.

In addition to Lee and Boudreau, Mendonca, who was unmarried and childless when he died, is survived by nephews Peter Souza, of Santa Rosa, Calif., and Edward Souza, of the Big Island, as well as numerous grandnieces and grandnephews, Lee said.

She added Mendonca was the 12th and last child of Jose Ferndes de Mendonca and Honorate de Gouveia Mendonca of Santana Madeira, Portugal. He attended Saint Louis College in Honolulu and worked as a welder for Inter-Island Steam Navigation Co.

Mendonca’s name is recorded on the ABMC’s Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, along with others who are still missing from World War II. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.

Mendonca will be buried at 11:30 a.m. Dec. 16 at Punchbowl, Boudreau said, adding those who wish can make contributions in his name to the Portuguese Culture and Historic Center in Honolulu.