by Steve Vogel
Somervell would nonetheless remain, for all practical purposes, the boss of the War Department headquarters project. Everyone—Renshaw, McShain, Groves, even Roosevelt—still brought all important matters related to the building to him. The project was so thoroughly identified with Somervell that it did not seem to matter that he was outside the chain of command. Just as likely, no one else wanted the headache.
Speed is paramount
By the beginning of December 1941, three thousand men were working the job during the day. Brilliant flares lit up the work at night, and another thousand men were pouring concrete and driving piles through the evening and overnight shifts.
A letter had been delivered at the site recently to Captain Charles Smith, Renshaw’s operations officer. The curious thing was how it had been addressed: “The Pentagon Building.” The project was still known in the newspapers and Army documents by the clunky term “New War Department Building in Arlington.” But some of the construction workers and Army officers had taken to referring to the place as the “Pentagonal Building,” or sometimes the “Pentagon Building.” The letter was the strongest evidence yet the name was entering the official lexicon. “He got the letter,” Bob Furman recalled. “It was the first time we realized that the post office recognized something called the Pentagon.”
From above, it looked as if the Pentagon was racing along. Aerial photographs in December showed steady progress since the October day Furman took his surreptitious ride aboard the Goodyear blimp. Three sections of the pentagon were now emerging from the ground, and the crisscross pattern of pile caps outlined a portion of a fourth. Blocks of limestone were being hung with steel hangers onto outer brick walls to form the façade. A forest of cranes, tower hoists, and construction platforms had risen from the ground. Mountains of supplies—cement, lumber, and reinforcing steel—were piling up.
But the numbers told another story. An audit completed November 15 showed only 2 percent of the construction had been completed. At that rate—roughly 1 percent of the work per month—it would take more than eight years to finish the building.
That assessment was obviously too pessimistic, but it was clear changes were needed. When construction had started in September, the Construction Division had restricted how much concrete could be poured to prevent unsightly shrinkage cracks. Similarly, the division guidelines dictated an interval of several days after a slab had been poured before a new slab could be placed adjacent to ensure the first one had cured properly.
By late November, with the project falling further behind schedule, the restrictions were seen as meddlesome niceties. Colonel Farrell—the veteran engineer assigned to find ways to speed the work—urged they be dropped. “It is essential to the progress of the job that pouring be permitted to the maximum extent possible because even moving as rapidly as possible, it will be extremely difficult to meet the scheduled completion date,” Farrell reported to Somervell on November 25.
Farrell recommended that workers be allowed to pour concrete slabs continuously from exterior wall to court wall and from expansion joint to expansion joint, enormous pours measuring 210 feet by 210 feet. Likewise, the contractor should be authorized to pour adjacent slabs without waiting. “In view of the urgency for completing the structure, we should take the few cracks and live with them,” Farrell said.
Somervell agreed, ordering Renshaw to pour new slabs as big and as fast as possible, cracks be damned. “Speed of construction is paramount,” the general told Renshaw.
A new complication had arisen: The Commission of Fine Arts was considering turning the nerve center for the coming war into an artists’ colony, complete with the world’s largest mural. At its meeting November 14, Commissioner Henry Varnum Poor, an accomplished and exuberant artist who had painted murals in fresco in the Justice and Interior department buildings in Washington, proposed setting aside the new War Department building’s five-acre courtyard as a “court of mural painting and sculpture.” The five inner courtyard concrete walls, stretching 360 feet in each direction, would be ideal surfaces for murals, Poor said.
“Here would be brought together, working on a carefully harmonized and unified architectural plan, the best mural artists and sculptors of the Nation, and the result of this harmonious but competitive work would bring to this one huge courtyard the finest and most inspired work American artists could give,” Poor proposed. The commission intended to take up the matter at its next meeting in December.
Renshaw was also dealing with nitpicking interference from higher-ups in the Construction Division. Rushing to keep up with the high pace at the work site, his office submitted requests for construction materials the moment the need arose. True, it would be more efficient to wait so that orders and delivery dates could be combined. But Renshaw and his men were desperate to get materials to the site as quickly as possible. Working on a Saturday in early December 1941, Renshaw received a memo scolding him about a requisition for delivery of hard green oak bridge timber that day, “which…date it is understood, is not a working day,” the memo lectured. The date was Saturday, December 6, 1941.
The Pentagon on December 4, 1941, three days before Pearl Harbor.
Some deviltry
The tails set Bob Furman back $110. For a first lieutenant making about $1,800 a year, that was quite a sum, but the occasion demanded it. John McShain had invited Furman to attend a formal party the builder hosted in Philadelphia on the evening of December 6. It had been an elegant affair, dinner and dancing, a nice diversion from the pressure of the Pentagon project. The Army lieutenant drove back to Washington in his Ford the following day, a crisp wintry Sunday, listening to the car radio.
In Washington, John McCloy went in early to War Department headquarters at the Munitions Building. Intercepted communications from Japan had raised uneasy suspicions that something was afoot in the Pacific, but no one knew what. George Marshall went for his regular morning horseback ride on the grounds of the old Arlington Farm next to the construction site, before a scheduled meeting in the afternoon at the White House with Roosevelt. Henry Stimson went to the State Department to confer with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox about the latest disturbing cable intercepts from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington. Afterward Stimson went home to his estate at Woodley for lunch. “Hull is very certain that the Japs are planning some deviltry and we are all wondering where the blow will strike,” Stimson recorded in his diary.
McCloy had read the intelligence intercepts too. “I was sure something was going to happen,” he later said. Perhaps the Japanese would attack Singapore or somewhere else in the Far East. But early in the afternoon he was approached by a military aide from the general staff. “Mr. McCloy, there’s a report around that they’re attacking Pearl Harbor,” the aide said.
“Don’t kid me, they’re not attacking Pearl Harbor,” McCloy replied. “…They wouldn’t dare attack Pearl Harbor.”
The Japanese had dared, and succeeded, though the first reports did not convey the full magnitude of the disaster that had struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet and Army in Hawaii. At the White House, presidential press secretary Steve Early announced at 2:22 P.M. that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Bulletins went out on the wire services and were aired immediately on the radio, interrupting broadcasts of symphony and swing and drama and sports. The shocking word came over Furman’s car radio. There was nothing he could do but keep driving.
The news caught Washington at a placid moment. The winter sun, battling clouds, cast an odd gray light on the marble of the Lincoln Memorial. A sailor and his girlfriend strolled across Dupont Circle. Downtown, parents were lined up with their children in front of theaters awaiting Sunday matinees, little girls gathering their skirts to keep them from flying in the breeze. Across the river, a skeleton Sunday crew was pouring concrete at the Pentagon project.
The largest gathering in Washington was at rickety Griffith Stadium, where a crowd of 27,102 watched the Washing
ton Redskins quarterback, Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, rifle a pass downfield as he led the football team against the Philadelphia Eagles in the last game of the season. Word of the attack reached the press box in the first quarter, but Redskins owner George Preston Marshall refused to air the news over the stadium loudspeaker—it was against his policy to announce nonsports news. Nonetheless the crowd stirred at the steady stream of announcements requesting this admiral or that cabinet secretary to report to their offices immediately. Rumors of war spread from row to row through the green grandstands and bleachers, and by the fourth quarter, when Baugh threw two touchdown passes to bring Washington back to a 20–14 win, many seats were vacant.
Helen McShane Bailey had sat down with her housemates in their 16th Street apartment for a Sunday dinner. She had arrived in Washington in April from her home in Colorado Springs, one of thousands of “government girls” who had come from across the country to work for the federal government. The twenty-five-year-old had been assigned to work in Marshall’s office at the Munitions Building. The news from Pearl Harbor arrived while Bailey and her housemates were still eating. One of the residents, a young man with a car, broke the stunned silence. He was driving to the Japanese embassy, if anybody wanted to come.
Automobiles choked Massachusetts Avenue in front of the embassy, and the sidewalk was lined with policemen. A crowd of onlookers milled around sullenly. Smoke was rising from the back of the embassy, where Japanese diplomats were burning secret papers in the garden. “We all looked at each other and knew our lives had changed forever,” Bailey recalled many years later.
Inside the Munitions Building, McCloy was casting about for some way to respond. “I did not know what you did as assistant secretary of war when Pearl Harbor was attacked, but I thought that we were at war, and that we had to protect the president,” he later said. McCloy consulted with Army chief of intelligence Major General Sherman Miles, a descendant of William Tecumseh Sherman, and Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant III, Somervell’s old rival in the Corps of Engineers. The three men went to see Knox to arrange for a cordon of Marines to surround the White House. An aide in the Office of Naval Intelligence, Marine Lieutenant Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., a Southerner and author of a Civil War history, brought the delegation to see the Secretary of the Navy. “Here’s the whole goddamn Union Army,” Thomason told Knox.
At the White House, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau nervously scanned the skies for German bombers and ordered the Secret Service to sandbag the entrances. Guards patrolled around the building with Thompson submachine guns, and when night fell the grounds were lit up with bright red lanterns. There was talk of putting tanks in front of the White House, but Marshall thought that unnecessary. Special police were dispatched to guard the Washington Aqueduct against sabotage. A partial blackout was ordered for downtown Washington and streetlights were dimmed. Machine guns were placed around the Munitions Building and soldiers took up around-the-clock positions there. By Sunday evening, armed guards were patrolling the Pentagon construction site.
Furman arrived home late in the day to the house where he rented a room in Aurora Hills in Arlington. Orders had been broadcast on the radio for all Army and Navy officers in Washington to report to duty Monday morning—in uniform, the first time in years for many of them. Furman hastily stuffed the formal clothes he had worn to McShain’s party into the back of his closet. “I never got to use those tails again,” he later said.
Absolute necessity
There was an air of expectancy among the three thousand construction workers reporting to work at the Pentagon project Monday morning, Donald Walker among them.
Walker had been on the job only a week as a rodman for the Kenmar Steel Construction Company, one of McShain’s subcontractors. He was a strapping nineteen-year-old with slicked-back blond hair, blind in his right eye since a stone was shot into it from a toy cork gun when he was five. Walker was a journeyman with the job of putting reinforcing steel into concrete beams and columns for $1.621/2 per hour. He had graduated from Mount Vernon High School in neighboring Fairfax County and was now working with four hundred other rodmen, many of them experienced steel workers who had come from across the country. Before Sunday, Walker had never heard of Pearl Harbor, and he was only dimly aware of how it was going to “change the lives of everyone.”
Shortly after noon, Walker took his lunch break, sitting in his pride and joy, a brand-new light-blue 1941 Ford convertible he had recently bought for $1,125. Walker turned on the radio as he ate his sandwich. A news report was broadcast from the U.S. Capitol, where Franklin Roosevelt, cloaked in his blue Navy cape, had just arrived in a closed black limousine, accompanied by Secret Service men with Tommy guns under their arms. After a stirring welcome in the House chamber, the president addressed a joint session of Congress at 12:31 P.M. Grimly, his patrician voice ringing with indignation, Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war against Japan. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory,” the president said, triggering roars of approval from the legislators.
“Glad of it, the dirty rats,” Walker thought to himself. He finished lunch and rejoined his crew, sharing the news with the other workers. There were no cheers or bravado at the construction site. Yet the atmosphere at the project was transformed.
The decision was made almost immediately to expand the size of the Pentagon building. The principals—McShain, Bergstrom, and Renshaw among them—were soon huddled in conferences with War Department officials. “It was at once apparent that a maximum of office space in the new building would have to be provided,” Somervell eventually explained.
The agreement that Frederic Delano and the White House had painstakingly crafted with Somervell to limit the building to twenty thousand occupants was unceremoniously pitched. “To meet the rapidly developing military requirements our originally announced plans to reduce the size of the building had to be discarded,” Groves later wrote.
Somervell had never really reduced the size much anyway; when construction started, it was planned to be 4.4 million square feet, as opposed to the original proposal of 5.1 million square feet. Now, however, all bets were off. The national outcry that accompanied the Japanese attack provided an excellent opportunity to build an even larger headquarters without bothersome consultations with the planning and fine arts commissions, or even Congress.
Congressmen who in November had criticized Somervell about construction costs could not have been more accommodating when Construction Division officers appeared before a House committee on December 8. “We were just given a blank check,” an officer later said. “That’s how quickly the damn thing changed.” The Commission of Fine Arts beat a hasty retreat from the idea of turning the inner courtyard into a training ground for aspiring muralists and sculptors, dropping the plan at its December meeting.
Within days, the War Department approved $3 million to excavate an additional half-million square feet of space in the basement. Renshaw requested and received the funds to pay for it. That was just the start of step-by-step additions over the following weeks and months that would increase the size of the Pentagon beyond what anyone had imagined.
It’s not fair to us to expect the impossible
The pressure had been high from the outset, given the building’s outlandish size and Somervell’s fantastic schedule, but Pearl Harbor had magnified the stakes. “When we began this building it was considered very desirable,” Groves wrote not long afterward. With the Japanese attack, he added, “it has become an absolute necessity.”
At Somervell’s insistence—and over the protests of the architects and builders—the schedule was moved up soon after Pearl Harbor. Somervell wanted twice as much space—one million square feet—ready for occupancy by April 1, a month earlier than the previous deadline. That was little more than three and a half months away.
It seemed an impossible demand, yet
Renshaw could not refuse Somervell. The price of speeding construction would be $1.5 million, Renshaw estimated, much of that for overtime. Somervell waved off concerns about extra costs; the only thing that mattered was time. “Instructions were issued to expedite the work in every possible way,” Groves reported.
Bergstrom had to be brought along kicking and screaming. “[T]he chief architect is unwilling to commit himself to such a schedule,” Renshaw reported to Somervell on December 22. “It will be necessary for me to take more active control of the architect’s activities but I can and will do so.”
Renshaw told Somervell the new deadline “has the concurrence of the contractors,” but that was not exactly true. McShain had only reluctantly agreed to move the date up to April 15 and was beside himself when Groves informed him on December 23 that the deadline was now the beginning of April.
“April first? It’s going up,” McShain sputtered. “Well, it’s almost a physical impossibility, particularly if we have a stretch of bad weather….It’s not fair to us to expect the impossible.”
“I don’t know why not,” Groves replied.
“That’s quite complimentary [of ] you and I appreciate it,” McShain said. He paused. “I feel you don’t mean it as a compliment.”
“No, I don’t,” Groves said.
Putting the screws to the delegees
Demanding the impossible was not new for Groves; on the Pentagon project, it was becoming routine.
The strategy was simple, as later explained by his son Richard Groves, who followed his father into the Corps of Engineers and retired as a lieutenant general: “If somebody tells you it takes a week, tell them to do it in five days. When he agrees to that, tell him three.”
