On Feb. 10, 1945, Tony Mantuano wrote a letter to his mother in Kenosha.

Tony, who enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 with his parents’ permission late in 1943, didn’t say precisely where he was or where he was headed.

“The reason that you’re not hearing from me is because I’m aboard ship and going into combat,” he wrote.

It ended as did all his letters home — except for the final sentence: “Say hello to everybody for me. Love to the kids. Love to you and pa. Please try not to worry too much.”

It was his last letter home.

Tony died 12 days after writing it, killed when his tank took a direct hit from a Japanese antitank shell three days after his 5th Marine Division landed on Iwo Jima.

His family wouldn’t learn of his death in the blood-soaked, 35-day battle for the South Pacific island until well after it ended on March 26, when a bicycle messenger arrived at the Mantuano home late on a Friday night bearing a telegram: The eldest of Sam and Jessie Mantuano’s six children, one of some 70,000 U.S. Marines who fought nonstop to defeat a well entrenched garrison of 21,060 Japanese troops, was among the 5,885 Marines killed in action.

The terrible news broke the hearts of the immigrant Italian couple who owned and operated Mantuano’s Grocery, the little mom-and-pop store that once stood at 4323 17th Ave. Sadness washed over their remaining children, at least those old enough to comprehend the family’s wrenching loss.

His parents have since died, but memories of that Friday night and of Tony are still vivid for his siblings: Eugene “Gidge” Mantuano I, now 81; Alfredo “Al”, 75, or “Chub” to close friends and family; and sisters Loretta Goff, 80, and Elma Heiring, 79. All the siblings but Al, now in South Carolina, still live in Kenosha.

Sam, Jr., 68, “June” to the family, 2 years old when Tony joined the Marines, has no direct memories of the brother he never got to know.

Telegram arrives

Sam was 4 the night the telegram arrived, asleep, as was Al, then 11.

“Me and Chub and pa were home, and somebody outside was flashing a light. Pa must have had an idea because he ran right out,” Sam recalled Tuesday. “Ma started cryin’ as soon as she got home, and she cried a lot after that. She was devastated.”

“I can remember it. Something like that has quite an impact,” Al said. “My mother and sisters went downtown because all the stores were open on Friday night. It was probably nine o’clock at night. I woke up and everybody was cryin’. I didn’t know what to do or what to make of it.”

For Loretta and Elma, the happy mood shopping downtown with their mother changed the instant they returned home and their father broke the news to their mother. “He took her aside and told her,” Alma said.

“She put on all black after that, like Italian women did back then,” Loretta said.

“I remember just like it was yesterday,” Gidge said. “I was at friend’s house playing cards, and Loretta called. She said, ‘Gidge, you better come home; we got a telegram.’ When I got to the house everybody was in tears: my mother, my sisters, my little brother. My pa, yeah, he was sobbing and crying, too. My mother was never the same again. She never got over it. My ma said when he left, ‘I’ll never see him again.’ You know, she was right.”

“When he left, he came in the bedroom and said good-bye,” Loretta nodded. “That was it. We never saw him again.”

“When he died, the whole neighborhood mourned with us, not just the Italian people, but the Polish, the Lithuanians, the Jewish people, too,” Elma said. “When they came in the store, they couldn’t express how sad they were.”

Their mother’s desolation was profound, having given birth to Tony at 16 and becoming the youngest Gold Star mother in Kenosha at 35 when he was killed.

“Ma wanted no part of the blue star flag or the gold star. She said she didn’t want to advertise it,” Elma said.

Nor could Jessie Mantuano bring herself to hold Tony’s posthumous Purple Heart. “My mom never wanted it,” Gidge says. “She said, ‘I want my son back. I don’t want this medal.”

“There was no Christmas that year for us,” Sam said.

“We had no TV back then. We had radio. We didn’t play that radio for at least a year. They (their parents) didn’t allow it. They were very sober, very somber,” Gidge said. “There was no fun at all. Our mother would do nothing at all, just bawl, cry.”

The next year, Elma and Al, with their father’s blessing, brought home a Christmas tree to brighten the holiday again. But Gidge says it was 10 years before Jessie Mantuano began to come to terms with Tony’s death. “She did start to come out of her shell, but it scarred her for life. War is an ugly thing, and people don’t know how bad it is until you go through something like this,” said Gidge, who was drafted into an Army tank unit a year after Tony’s death.

Today, the older siblings share memories of Tony’s love for the used guitar he bought and taught himself to play, the only item he asked his parents to send him in the Marines. Each remembers him in their own way, too.

Gidge and wife Dorothy named their eldest son after Tony, who Gidge revered. He treasures the letters Tony wrote to him, keeps them with photos of Tony and other mementoes. They played baseball together, Gidge catching his older brother’s overpowering throws for a championship team. “I’m lost without you,” Tony wrote to him in one of the letters.

Then, as now, Gidge says he was proud of Tony, happy that Tony realized his dream of becoming a Marine. “But I was sad, too, because he wasn’t there anymore,” says Gidge, explaining why he holds those last letters from Tony so close. “It’s a part of him, part of Tony. Anything I can find that’s part of him, I want to have it. I lost my brother, my big brother. He was my idol.”

Al recalls being excited when Tony wrote him a few brief letters. “I wrote to him, too,” he said. “I was very proud: My big brother was in the Marine Corps fighting the war. I never was worried about him. I never was too concerned. He was in good shape. He was in the Marine Corps, and he was in a tank. What could go wrong? Of course, that was a kid thinking. I know better now.”

“I know he was gentle,” Loretta said. “Everybody liked him. I know in junior high school at McKinley he was very popular.”

“I missed out on all of that, the kind of guy he was,” Sam says. “I just wish I got to know him. But at the end of every letter, he wrote, ‘Hugs and kisses to Junior.’“

“Like he was our father,” Elma says, smiling. “Always, ‘love and kisses for the kids.’ He would have made a good daddy and a good grandpa.”