Army Pvt. 1st Class Luther Bagley holds his son Nathan Bagley while posing beside his wife Eleanor in this photo taken during World War II before he shipped out to Burma where he joined Merrill’s Marauders. (Jonnie Melillo Clasen)
On the morning of May 14, Nathan “Woody” Bagley received a call that left the 80-year-old speechless.
The remains of his father, missing since 1944 when he was killed in Burma while serving in the famed Merrill’s Marauders, had been found and identified.
A member of the Army Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Division at Fort Knox, Ky., told him that Luther E. “Buck” Bagley, who had died at age 22, had been identified through DNA testing.
“When I got off the phone, I sat there for a few minutes and thought about it,” Nathan Bagley told Stars and Stripes by phone Friday from his home in Georgia.
He then got up to tell his wife Pat in another room.
“When I got in there, I couldn’t talk,” Bagley recalled. “She thought I’d gotten some bad, bad news. She was upset because I couldn’t tell her anything for many minutes.
“I guess it took a few minutes to hit home,” he said. “It had more emotion attached to it than I thought it would have.”
Bagley has no real memories of his father, who was killed about a week before his son’s first birthday.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “He was a part of my life that was out there someplace that I couldn’t get my head around. It was not like a relative or dad I’d grown up with. It was like a distant memory that I’d never really grown up with.”
The memories are living, however, for Bagley’s 99-year-old mother, Eleanor Stark, who lives nearby.
She was 19 and working at Southeastern Shipbuilding Corp., in Savannah, Ga., when a relative came to her workplace and told her Bagley had been killed in action.
A few hours after receiving the call this month, Nathan Bagley, joined by other relatives, went to his mother’s home to give her the news.
“I told my mama to come and sit down,” he said. “I told her that I’d gotten a phone call that day and they told me that my dad’s remains had been found and identified.”
For a short time, she sat and said nothing.
“Then she started crying and said, ‘I didn’t think this day would ever come,’” Bagley said.
Eleanor Stark holds a photo of her late husband, Luther Bagley, while flanked by their son Nathan Bagley and Georgia state Sen. Ed Harbison at the Georgia Military Veterans Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Columbus, Ga., Nov. 4, 2023. (Jonnie Melillo Clasen)
Luther Bagley served as a reinforcements for the top-secret 5307th Composite Unit Provisional, better known as Merrill’s Marauders, during World War II. (Jonnie Melillo Clasen)
Luther Bagley had been one of about 2,500 reinforcements for the top-secret 5307th Composite Unit Provisional, better known as Merrill’s Marauders, who were flown into Myitkyina, Burma, to battle a better equipped and provisioned Japanese 18th Division.
Luther Bagley was 20 years old when he was drafted in 1942 from his hometown of Fitzgerald, Ga., where he had been working in a cotton mill after dropping out of high school.
Stark and the infant Nathan were only able to visit Luther one time before he shipped out of Fort Meade, Md. The private first class was assigned to K Company in the 5307th and arrived in Burma in May 1944.
He was killed on July 25, 1944, about a week before the 5307th captured the town of Myitkyina, completing its mission. The unit was dissolved Aug. 10, 1944.
Family members will meet with Army officials on July 10 to receive complete details on the identification and to work out plans for a military funeral, Bagley said.
“My mother and I thought it was a done deal,” he said of their assumption that the missing father and husband would remain missing.
“This is one of those things that is very, very bitter and sweet,” he said. “It’s been quite a rollercoaster thing for the past week.”
