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The funeral for Luther E. “Buck” Bagley, a 1944 MIA Merrill’s Marauder replacement whose remains were confirmed in May, will be August 10, 2024, in his Fitzgerald, GA hometown, according to his son, Nathan “Woody,” Bagley.
August 10th was selected for the funeral, said Woody because that was the important day in 1944 when the 5307th Composite Unit Provisional, commonly known as Merrill’s Marauders, disbanded in Burma.
Buck was among the first of around 2,500 replacements to the 5307th CUP flown into northern Burma’s Myitkyina airfield after it was seized May 17, 1944, by approximately 200 remaining Marauders still capable of combat.
While fighting valiantly to seize the town of Myitkyina and hold the airfield, Buck was Killed in Action July 25, 1944, barely more than two weeks before the unit disbanded.
The military is relentless in its efforts to identify MIAs and Woody learned in May that DNA he had provided years ago to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) was instrumental in identifying his father’s remains.
Had Buck lived, he and the other replacements along with about 100 remaining Merrill’s Marauders would have become the 475th Infantry Regiment which would later be known as Mars Task Force.
Woody was an 11-month-old baby when his 19-year-old mother, Eleanor, was notified where she was working as a Rosie the Riveter in the Savannah shipyards that Buck had been killed in action at age 22.
And in the 80th year of Buck’s death, it was her son, Woody, who visited his mother, Eleanor Stark, in Pembroke, GA to tell her Buck was finally coming home.
Although Eleanor remarried and has three wonderful daughters, she said Buck was “the great love of my life. I have never given up hope that he would come home. And now it’s happening.”
Please contact Paulk Funeral Home for additional information. 229-423-2022
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