Ships
- USS Bagley (DD-386) Captain from 12 June 1937
Lieutenant Commander F. W. Morris of the United States Navy took command of the destroyer Bagley on 12 June 1937. The ship was placed in commission that day, and Morris was her first commanding officer.
Bagley (DD-386) was the name ship of a class of eight destroyers built for the fleet in the mid-1930s. Her keel was laid at the Norfolk Navy Yard on 31 July 1935, and she was launched on 3 September 1936. She was a fast fleet destroyer of about 1,500 tons, armed with four 5-inch guns and sixteen 21-inch torpedo tubes in four quadruple mounts, a heavier torpedo battery than most American destroyers then carried.
The name honored Ensign Worth Bagley, killed on 11 May 1898 aboard the torpedo boat Winslow in fighting off Cárdenas, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War. He was the first United States naval officer lost in that war. The new destroyer carried that name onto the fleet list as the Navy added ships in the years before the next world war.
Morris took the ship as she passed from the yard into service. The period after commissioning was given over to trials, gunnery and torpedo practice, and the fitting together of a new crew and a new hull. Those ships were meant to screen heavier units and to deliver torpedo attacks with a fleet that expected to operate far from home. From 12 June 1937, Lieutenant Commander F. W. Morris was the officer in command of Bagley as that work began.