by Steve Vogel
A new headquarters
The War Department already had a spanking-new headquarters building, a big, neoclassical structure at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Northwest Washington. The New War Department Building, as it was officially known, had been planned for years, built for $18 million, and was set to open in June 1941. Henry Stimson was not particularly impressed, complaining the façade looked like the entrance to a provincial opera house. Looks were the least of its problems. The new building, meant to replace the temporary headquarters in the Munitions Building on the Mall, was far too small.
Through much of the 1930s, the Army had been clamoring for a new home and more space. General Malin Craig, Marshall’s predecessor as chief of staff, found it not only humiliating but potentially dangerous to have the department dispersed in so many locations, which included offices in Washington, Virginia, and Maryland, various shacks, apartment buildings, and Leary’s Garage at 24th and M streets. The problem “results in unavoidable delays and difficulties that could not be expected to have other than the most serious consequence in the event of an emergency,” Craig warned in February 1938.
Congress finally approved funding that year for a new War Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, on a rectangle of land along Constitution Avenue that federal planners had marked earlier in the decade as the future home for the War and Navy departments. Roosevelt personally approved the site and in 1939 sketched out an idea for a colonnade connecting the two proposed buildings to a neutral meeting area. “That is a small office where the Secretary of War will meet the Secretary of the Navy,” Roosevelt explained. “You know, neither one will go to see the other.”
Construction of the New War Department Building had proceeded apace. But when Stimson inspected it on the morning of April 25, 1941, the secretary was dismayed. Though the building had 500,000 square feet, only 270,000 square feet were available for office space. “It is a most wasteful building…,” Stimson noted that day in his diary. “There was great difficulty in fitting in what we want…. So at present we are considering my staying in the old building, but I confess I don’t like that very much.”
A month later, Stimson told Roosevelt that the War Department needed more space. The world picture was darkening. The London Blitz reached new heights, and German bombers had badly damaged the House of Commons and Westminster Abbey. In the Pacific, U.S. fears of Japanese aggression were growing. The 24,000 War Department workers were now spread out in twenty-three buildings. The New War Department Building could accommodate perhaps four thousand workers and reduce the scattering to seventeen buildings, but it would be a temporary reprieve: New employees were arriving in Washington at the rate of a thousand a month. By the end of the year, the number of workers was expected to reach thirty thousand.
It was a far cry from the year 1800, when the War Department moved from Philadelphia to the new capital with a total of eighteen employees, or nineteen including the secretary of war. Its first home in Washington, a rented three-story brick private home on Pennsylvania Avenue, was soon destroyed by fire. A subsequent headquarters nearby fared no better; it went up in flames when the British burned Washington in 1814. A permanent home was then built for the War Department near the White House on the southeast corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street. The War Department building, with drab-painted brick and a Corinthian colonnade across its façade, was completed in 1820 and housed the department for nearly six decades, including momentous days during the Civil War when Abraham Lincoln would walk over from the White House to the War Department telegraph office and read the latest dispatches from the field. The building was razed in 1879 to make way for the enormous and ornate State, War and Navy Building, whose construction curiously presaged that of the Pentagon in some respects. With its thick granite walls, sixteen-foot ceilings, and almost two miles of black-and-white marble tile corridors, the 662,000-square-foot building was reputed to be the largest office building in the world; many said it was also the most unsightly. The flamboyant French Second Empire architecture stood in startling contrast to the sober classical revival buildings common in Washington. Mark Twain called it “the ugliest building in America,” while Henry Adams labeled it an “architectural infant asylum.”
Ugly or not, the building provided a good home to the War Department for another sixty years. But its prime location was coveted by the White House, which also needed more space, and during the 1930s many War Department offices were forced out. In late August 1939—as German troops massed along the Polish border—Marshall and then Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring were moving out of the department’s longtime headquarters.
When World War II erupted in Europe September 1, the War Department found itself newly headquartered in a factory-like temporary building on the Washington Mall. The Munitions Building—located between Constitution Avenue and the Reflecting Pool, roughly equidistant from the Lincoln and Washington memorials—was one of many temporary buildings constructed on the Mall during World War I. The curse of the Munitions Building, utterly without ornamentation, was that it was built too well to fall down on its own. Marshall actually preferred the Munitions Building to his old office, finding it more efficient to be reunited with War Department offices previously evicted from the State, War and Navy Building.
Yet it was no solution. With the eruption of war, the issue became not one of convenience, but one on which lives might depend. To those trying to coordinate the Army’s mobilization—what Marshall called “a great Army in the making”—the inefficiencies of a scattered War Department were endangering American readiness. The lost time, wasted motion, lack of supervision, and absence of personal contact were causing problems.
“The matter of office space for the War Department has become one of greatest urgency,” Under Secretary of War Patterson, who was overseeing the mobilization, warned Stimson in a confidential memo on November 29, 1940. “…There is no question but that the congestion is materially retarding the National Defense program.” Marshall insisted he needed his key commanders close at hand for “almost hourly conferences these days when the military establishment is being tremendously enlarged.” That fall, the chief of staff reversed a plan to turn some of the Army’s space in the Munitions Building over to the Navy. The War Department was “already suffering seriously from an unfortunate dispersion,” Marshall told the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark.
Even with the New War Department Building in Foggy Bottom nearing completion, the War Department was short a million square feet of office space in Washington. Stimson was so disgusted that he declared he would rather stay in the Munitions Building than move as planned into “so inadequate” a building—or as he called it, “this abortion that has just come into use.” In May 1941, Stimson directed that only Patterson’s office and the headquarters for the Corps of Engineers move into the New War Department Building.
To help house the War Department, Congress approved funding to construct temporary buildings in Washington. But the War Department, concerned about heavy traffic and parking problems in downtown Washington, was scouting locations in Virginia. The Army had recently acquired a large tract of land in Arlington, just across the Memorial Bridge from Washington. Directly east of Arlington National Cemetery, the land had been used for decades by the Department of Agriculture as a farm for experimental crops. The Army wanted to build seven two-story frame temporary buildings on the site, which was only a four-minute drive from the Munitions Building, “with no stop light at all” to slow traffic, as Marshall enthusiastically told a congressional committee. Roosevelt sent a letter to House Speaker Sam Rayburn on June 4 asking for legislative authority to build federal structures in Arlington, complaining that lack of space in Washington had “seriously retarded” defense activities. A week later, Marshall appeared before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee and asked that the department be allowed to build in Virginia. “To be able to build our temporary office buil
dings on the Arlington Farm site means everything to us,” Marshall testified. “We can do business if our buildings are placed there.”
But Somervell would have a bolder idea. It was obvious to him that something much bigger and more permanent was needed, and fast.
The overall solution
The real business at Representative Clifton Woodrum’s congressional hearing on July 17, 1941, came after the meeting ended.
Woodrum, a powerful Democrat from Roanoke in southwest Virginia and acting chairman of a House Committee on Appropriations subcommittee, had called the hearing to gather testimony about the proposal to build temporary office buildings for the War Department and other overcrowded federal agencies. Portly, with white hair and ruddy cheeks, Woodrum had the shrewd face of the pharmacist he had once been. The southern progressive had risen to power on the Appropriations Committee and regularly floor-managed important spending bills through the House. Though he often voiced support for fiscal conservatism, Woodrum had no problem supporting projects that brought home the bacon for the Commonwealth.
The proposal before the Subcommittee on Deficiencies was to spend $6.5 million to build temporary structures, including three for the War Department on the Arlington Farm site. Woodrum was dissatisfied with this proposal, the latest of several of what he considered “piecemeal” approaches to solving the War Department’s problem. After the testimony ended, he approached Brigadier General Eugene Reybold, the War Department’s representative at the hearing. In his deep baritone—Woodrum had a fine voice and was known as “the singing congressman”—he challenged the general. Why doesn’t the War Department work out an “overall solution” to its space problem, he asked Reybold.
Reybold promised Woodrum the War Department would report back to the subcommittee with a plan by the following Tuesday, five days hence. The bespectacled Reybold, a sturdy and low-key engineer who in manner and looks was more like a country doctor than an Army officer, quickly turned the matter over to Somervell.
With typical brio, the construction chief immediately took Woodrum’s words as an invitation for something much grander than a few temporary buildings. If it was an overall solution that was desired, then Somervell would construct a building big enough to house the entire War Department—a nerve center for the enormous military force gathering to fight a global war. Exactly when Somervell conceived this idea is not known; likely it had been percolating in his head for at least several weeks. In any event, on the evening of July 17, 1941, Somervell seized the opportunity presented by Woodrum’s question. The project that would become known as the Pentagon was launched that evening.
Aerial perspective of proposed War Department building by Socrates Thomas Stathes, July 1941.
Incidentally, the largest office building in the world
The first problem was where to put it. Major Pat Casey’s mind was still reeling from the secret instructions Somervell had given him the previous night, July 17, for constructing a massive new War Department headquarters—“incidentally, the largest office building in the world,” Casey later noted dryly. Energetic and experienced, Casey was one of the Army’s most brilliant engineers, an up-and-coming officer Somervell had quickly snagged upon taking control of the Construction Division.
Somervell wanted the plans on his desk Monday morning, July 21, and it was already Friday. Casey quickly saw big problems with the location Somervell had designated for constructing the building, the Washington-Hoover Airport along the Potomac River in Arlington. A week earlier, the Army had taken an option on the 147-acre airport, a hopelessly inadequate airfield at the foot of the 14th Street Bridge. Washington-Hoover had been the principal airport for Washington for fifteen years, but a modern airfield, National Airport, had opened in June about a mile downriver. After the congressional hearing July 17, Woodrum had suggested to Brigadier General Reybold, the supply chief, that the Army use the old airport in his home state for office buildings. Somervell—eager to win the Virginian’s blessing for the project—had seized upon the airport as the right site for his enormous new headquarters building.
But the foundation conditions at the airport worried Casey. The low-lying riverbed land was barely better than a swamp and subject to flooding. Reybold, who had similar concerns, went out to look at the site and concluded that the problem was even worse than realized. “It would be hazardous for us to build a building of a permanent nature there,” Reybold warned.
When Casey asked Somervell whether other sites near the airport might be used, the general did not rule it out. “So we looked over the map of Washington, and I tried to figure out other suitable areas,” Casey later said.
Obviously, it would have to be a big site. Somervell had ordered the building to be no higher than four stories, so as to not spark protests against a tall building along the river, as well as to avoid using the amount of steel a high-rise would need. “And not going vertically and requiring that amount of office space meant getting a vastly spread out area,” Casey said.
Casey’s practiced eye quickly zeroed in on a sixty-seven-acre tract about a half-mile upriver from Washington-Hoover, on a plateau sixty feet above the Potomac, just east of Arlington National Cemetery. It was Arlington Farm, the spot Marshall had endorsed a month earlier for temporary buildings. The site seemed ideal from the standpoint of foundation, utilities, water supply, elevation, and existing roads. A small party—operating discreetly to avoid any word leaking out—surveyed the terrain and reported back favorably. Reybold also recommended the site, and Somervell quickly approved the switch.
Like the adjacent cemetery, Arlington Farm had once been part of the grand estate of Robert E. Lee that had been confiscated by Union troops in the spring of 1861 for the defense of Washington. In 1900, Congress transferred four hundred acres of the Arlington estate to the Department of Agriculture to use as an experimental farm to improve agriculture. Arlington Farm served as an Ellis Island for plants sent to the United States by Americans traveling on government or private missions abroad. Scientists studied everything from new methods of breeding corn to ways of combating tomato wilt to new uses for hemp, and over the years thousands of foreign plants were naturalized there for domestic use.
The threat of war brought an end to this agricultural idyll. Marshall wanted to use the land for the garrison of infantry and cavalry troops at neighboring Fort Myer, which was responsible for the defense of Washington. In September 1940, Roosevelt personally approved the return of Arlington Farm to the War Department.
Perched on a hill above the Potomac, just below the Lee mansion and overlooking Memorial Bridge, Arlington Farm was one of the most prominent sites in the Washington area. In approving the site, Somervell and his planners agreed that the height of the proposed building should be reduced from four stories to three to keep it in harmony with the surroundings. The lower height, Somervell figured, would take care of any aesthetic concerns that might be raised.
Bergstrom gets to work
Late on Friday afternoon, July 18, Somervell directed George Edwin Bergstrom to get to work. A formal man with a brusque manner, his dark hair whitening at the temples, the War Department’s chief architect was an intimidating figure to the young officers assigned to work with him. He looked “the way architects should appear, like a Frank Lloyd Wright,” according to one. Bergstrom’s influence on the project would be profound, but his involvement would end in disgrace and personal tragedy.
Bergstrom—known by his middle name all his life—was born and raised in Neenah, Wisconsin, the son of a Norwegian blacksmith who had immigrated to America and built a successful foundry manufacturing plows and stoves. Edwin was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then earned a degree in architecture from Yale University in 1897, with further study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Young Bergstrom headed west and founded an architectural firm that soon became a leading force in the building explosion around Los Angeles in the early years of the twentieth century. The firm, Parki
nson and Bergstrom, specialized in “Class A” commercial buildings—structures built with steel frames and reinforced concrete—and designed more of them than any architectural firm in the West. In 1921, Bergstrom helped found the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, a cooperative society of thirty-three architects who collaborated on public works projects; the society designed the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and the curved wooden frame that served as the first shell sheltering musicians at the famed Hollywood Bowl.
By 1941, Bergstrom was sixty-five years old, an accomplished and experienced architect, but that was not the real reason Somervell had hired him in February to be chief of the Construction Division’s architectural unit. Bergstrom was president of the American Institute of Architects, the country’s preeminent professional organization of architecture; as such, he carried a cachet that Somervell coveted. In the same vein, Somervell hired the presidents or past presidents of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Society of Landscape Architects. Two dozen prominent engineers, architects, professors, and attorneys—a veritable who’s who in their fields—were brought in as consultants. They represented “the best in the country,” Somervell boasted.
It was essentially a public relations ploy, and an expensive one at that. Somervell’s hires were not the dollar-a-year men of lore; the consultants were drawing as much as $100 a day plus expenses. Luther Leisenring, a longtime civilian employee with the Construction Division who had served as supervising architect since 1930 until Somervell demoted him and put Bergstrom in his place, groused that the various society heads “just sat around in fancy offices and signed a few papers” and did no appreciable work.
