Remains of Merrill Marauder identified 80 years after his death in Burma

Army Pvt. 1st Class Luther Bagley holds his son Nathan Bagley while posing next to his wife Eleanor in this photo taken during World War II before his expedition 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 octogenarian speechless.

The remains of his father, missing since 1944, when he was killed in Burma while serving in the famous Merrill's Marauders, had been found and identified.

A member of the Military and Mortuary Operations Division at Fort Knox, Kentucky, told him that Luther E. “Buck” Bagley, who died at age 22, had been identified through testing DNA.

“When I hung up, 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 there, I couldn’t talk,” Bagley recalled. “She thought I had received very bad news. She was upset because I couldn't say anything to her for several minutes.

“I guess it took a few minutes to get home,” he said. “There was more emotion attached to it than I thought.”

Bagley has no real memory of his father, who was killed about a week before his son's first birthday.

“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “He was part of my life, somewhere in a place I couldn’t understand. He wasn't like a parent or father I grew up with. It was like a distant memory that I never really grew up with.

The memories, however, are vivid for Bagley's mother, 99-year-old 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.

Hours after receiving the call this month, Nathan Bagley, joined by other relatives, went to his mother's home to tell her the news.

“I told my mother to come and sit down,” he said. “I told him I had received a phone call that day and they told me my father’s remains had been found and identified.”

For a brief moment, she sat silently.

“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, flanked by their son Nathan Bagley and Georgia State Senator Ed Harbison at the Georgia Military Veterans Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Columbus , in Georgia, November 4, 2023. (Jonnie Melillo Clasen)

Luther Bagley served as reinforcements for the top-secret 5307th Provisional Composite Unit, better known as Merrill's Marauders, during World War II. (Jonnie Melillo Clasen)

Luther Bagley had been one of approximately 2,500 reinforcements from the top-secret 5307th Provisional Composite Unit, better known as Merrill's Marauders, who were flown to Myitkyina, Burma, to fight a Japanese 18th Division better equipped and stocked.

Luther Bagley was 20 when he was drafted in 1942 in his hometown of Fitzgerald, Georgia, where he worked in a cotton mill after dropping out of high school.

Stark and infant Nathan were only able to visit Luther once before he left Fort Meade, Maryland. The first private class was assigned to Company K 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 disbanded on August 10, 1944.

Family members will meet with Army officials July 10 to receive complete identification details and to develop 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.

“It’s one of those things that’s very, very bitter and sweet,” he said. “It’s been a real roller coaster ride this past week.”