Over in BUAERO, we burned the midnight oil preparing the admiral’s testimony. The spadework consisted in assembling the answers to specific questions propounded by the Morrow Board. Such questions were farmed out to different branches of the Bureau and then assembled for final study. Final editing of these comments fell to Lieutenant Commander Du Bose and myself but the larger issues were debated all over the Bureau. The interested parties were pretty well consolidated in opposition to the independent-air-force proposal, but they were divided almost equally on another organization question: should the admiral favor the formation of a corps of aviators, generally similar to the highly regarded United States Marine Corps? In support of this idea, many of the old-timers worked hard on the admiral right up to the night before the Old Man was scheduled to appear before the Board. Then as we gathered around the long table for his final decisions, with that important subject all that remained to be agreed upon, I put it up to the admiral. “Sir,” I said, “here is a question that can’t be straddled.” The admiral twisted nervously in his chair. Strong pressure had been brought to bear on him by the leading old-timers, men whose friendship he regarded highly, and, politician that he was, he would have given almost anything to be able to accommodate them. But underneath this issue lay certain fundamentals on which he had strong convictions. He had gone to sea in the old days when the Engineer Corps and the line officers had fought so bitterly in the ancient feud between the “black gang” and the “deck force” that the service had been shaken to its foundations. As the only way out of an impossible situation, the Department had finally amalgamated the conflicting forces by absorbing the engineers into the line. The admiral, recognizing the need for specialization, was firmly convinced that it should be had without putting the specialists in a separate corps where corps loyalties might transcend loyalty to the service. Now he had to face that issue alone; there could be no agreement within his Bureau and this time he could not induce them to persuade him to do what he wanted. “You are all my friends,” he said, lifting his hand in a gesture to include all present, “and I’m sorry not to go along with some of you. The young pilots,” he added, “will think I’ve let them down. But the time will come when they will thank me.” He paused, and then with greater earnestness than I had ever heard in his voice, he concluded, “I’d rather see those kids dead than inflict on them the misery I suffered along with everyone else in the old days of deck force versus black gang.”