by Steve Vogel
Groves learned it from Somervell, master of the art. Somervell had an uncanny ability to “almost read your mind” and figure out a person’s weak points, Major General John Hardin, who worked with both men, told Army historians. “And Groves absorbed a lot of that and his procedures were based on the pressure tactics which Somervell had used to such success.” Groves’s “philosophy was to delegate wherever he could, and then put the screws to the delegees,” said Brigadier General William Wannamaker, another Corps of Engineers officer.
Groves was not a screamer and did not use profanity; instead, he would make infuriatingly sarcastic comments in a quiet, low-key voice. His technique was to make people “awful mad at him,” so pride would keep them working. Groves once assigned Bob Furman to take care of a problem, and when Furman came back with his report, Groves pulled from his desk a report by another officer to whom he had assigned the same problem. “That was a typical Groves technique,” Furman said. “It made everybody mad.” The sardonic humor Groves employed to incite his subordinates was often so dry that many missed the joke. (Physicist Edward Teller, who would work with the Army officer on the Manhattan Project, was shocked decades later when he read Groves’s memoir and learned that he enjoyed laughing at himself. “Neither through contact nor through rumor did I ever learn of Groves’ sense of humor,” Teller wrote.)
“Don’t you ever praise anyone for a job well done?” another Construction Division officer once asked Groves. “I don’t believe in it,” Groves replied. “No matter how well something is being done, it can always be done better and faster.”
Groves had stenographers record and type transcripts of all his telephone conversations with subordinates, with a copy then sent “to each officer responsible for the fulfillment of a promise,” he later explained. It was Major Gar Davidson’s job to take the transcripts and follow up to ensure “that all commitments were honored.” Davidson was Groves’s enforcer, his “eyes out in the field,” as he put it. “If a guy needed a needle, why, I had to reflect Groves’ desires,” Davidson later said. Square-jawed and athletic, Davidson was a perfect man for the job. He had been head coach for the West Point football team from 1932 to 1937 and was known for favoring initiative over spit and polish.
Like one of his few heroes, the hard-bitten Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, Groves preferred action to introspection. Groves “drove himself hard, and he drove his subordinates hard, and he was tough, and he didn’t take any excuses,” Davidson said. “He was demanding, and demanding of results. Not how, but results.” If anyone failed him, Groves “could really saw them off at the ankles.”
John McShain bore a heavy part of the pressure. The day after his formal party on December 6, the builder had been relaxing with his family at his home on Church Road in Philadelphia when he heard the news of the Japanese attack. “He was absolutely stunned, shocked,” recalled his daughter, Polly. McShain knew at once what it meant for the project. “I think the Pentagon was the greatest challenge he ever had, because he was conscious of the desperation of the War Department,” Polly McShain said. “To conduct a war when your resources are so scattered was a terrible, terrible situation…. It was really a matter of life or death in many ways.”
McShain suffered much of his life from depression and was subject to huge mood swings. Normally buoyant and jovial, he would sometimes become deeply morose. In the 1950s, he would be diagnosed as bipolar and would undergo a series of electrical shock treatments. Through it all, his wife, Mary, was his steady rock. “My mother used to say she didn’t know which was worse: trying to pull him out of the hole or trying to keep up with him when he was hyper,” Polly McShain recalled. Years later, the daughter asked her father what the depression felt like. “It’s as though you’re in a dark, dark tunnel, and there’s no light at the end,” he replied.
The tunnel was looking very dark in the days and weeks after Pearl Harbor. “After Pearl Harbor, there was more and more pressure on my father to finish it as fast as possible,” said Polly McShain. McShain was frustrated with Groves and Somervell, believing they did not fully appreciate the extraordinary difficulties of trying to marshal such a huge workforce in the face of constantly changing plans.
At least McShain was not in the Army. For Clarence Renshaw, there could be no escaping the wrath of Groves. “It was a very tough time for him,” Renshaw’s wife, Eileen, recalled more than sixty years later. “There was a sense of hurry, pressure, having to get the job done very quickly. He was dead-tired when he came home because his days were pretty long.”
Renshaw found Groves’s pressure techniques infuriating and insulting. “There was no love lost between them,” Eileen Renshaw said. “They had different ways of thinking and doing.” But Renshaw was too cool to rise to Groves’s bait. “They got along only because Renshaw was very, very careful,” Bob Furman said. “Groves was prickly. Renshaw was smart and careful with Groves. He’d document everything. He was careful how he spoke to Groves. He never gave Groves any reason to bite him.”
Groves was often on the road inspecting other Army construction projects around the country, but that was little relief to Renshaw. Given the project’s prominence and proximity to Washington—and the fact that Somervell was breathing down his neck—Groves was obsessed with the Pentagon. He assigned a special adviser, Henry S. Thompson—an old construction hand who had shared a tent with Henry Stimson when the two served in the New York National Guard at the time of the Spanish-American War—to spy on Renshaw. “He spent almost all of his time over there just wandering around,” Groves recalled. Groves also instructed Gar Davidson to monitor the project. “The two of us kept our fingers on that and watched it,” Davidson said. With Stimson’s old tentmate and the former West Point football coach looking over his shoulder and reporting back to Groves, Renshaw had no peace.
Edwin Bergstrom, the chief architect, was feeling the pressure too, though not only from the need to hurriedly revise the building plans. On December 17, two letters were sent by registered mail to Bergstrom at his office in the Eastern Airlines hangar. They were from the board of directors for the American Institute of Architects, where Bergstrom had served as president for two terms up to May 1941, and before that as treasurer for six years. Upon Bergstrom’s resignation, the board made some uncomfortable discoveries. During the two years of his presidency, the institute had paid $8,610 for Bergstrom’s accommodations at the Hay-Adams House near the White House. Bergstrom’s suite at the Hay-Adams was “purported to be an additional office” for the institute, a letter stated, though the board had never authorized the expenditure. Bergstrom had also billed the institute for $1,335 in personal expenses, when he was already a full-time salaried employee of the War Department. The board demanded Bergstrom immediately repay the $1,335 and provide a detailed explanation of the $8,610. Bergstrom—whether from the pressing demands of the Pentagon project or for lack of a good answer—did not reply.
Even Somervell, who had always thrived under pressure that had broken other men, was feeling heat. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, Somervell had many worries beyond the Pentagon project. In his new, unsought job as chief of supply, Somervell was responsible for developing plans to arm and equip an Army that would soon spread across the globe. The news from overseas was unremittingly bad. In the Philippines, Japanese troops had landed in Lingayen Gulf and Lamon Bay on December 22 and were advancing toward Manila from the north and south; U.S. forces—including Pat Casey, Somervell’s former design chief—were on the verge of withdrawing into the Bataan Peninsula.
Somervell’s three girls were home for Christmas—Mary Anne, twenty-one, and Susan, nineteen, returning from Sweet Briar College in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and Connie, fifteen, back from boarding school at St. Margaret’s in Tappahannock, Virginia. But with the pressures of his job, it was not much of a holiday at Somervell’s old tobacco farm south of Washington in Welcome, Maryland. Since Pearl Harbor, Somervell had been working late into every n
ight, and rather than going home, he would sleep a few hours at a bachelor apartment in Woodley Park in Washington that he shared with several friends from World War I. On top of everything else, Somervell’s wife, Anna, was not feeling well.
McShain went to see Somervell on December 22 to warn him of problems that threatened to delay the entire Pentagon project. McShain was shocked at the general’s weary and downcast manner. “I never saw him so worried in my life,” McShain said. “He was just sick.”
“The whole load has really fallen right on my shoulders,” Somervell told the builder.
“I had an awful lot to really go over with him but I didn’t have the heart,” McShain related to Groves the following day. “I…just dropped a couple hints to him that we weren’t making the progress we expected to and to sort of give him a warning.”
The obstacles they faced were endless. In McShain’s view, the architectural concrete walls Bergstrom had insisted upon were holding up work everywhere around the project. Carpenters had built forms for more floor slabs, but concrete could not be poured; no men were available to put steel reinforcement in the slabs. They were all tied up working on Bergstrom’s walls. “Now we’ve got miles of slab forms up there and no steel on them,” McShain said. “It’s a serious problem and I know it’s going to throw us behind.”
Despite Somervell’s despondency, McShain could not resist making a final, bitter complaint to the general for siding with Bergstrom in the concrete dispute. “I think it’s the one mistake you’ve made on the job,” McShain told Somervell.
“Well, that’s the only thing I didn’t give in to you,” Somervell replied.
“Well, that’s the most important,” McShain said. “I think you should have.”
“You die hard, don’t you?” Somervell replied.
Remedy this situation
What was really killing McShain was the continuing bottleneck with the plans. Any progress that Ides van der Gracht had made in his industrialsize drafting room was lost by the sudden need to redraw many of the plans after Pearl Harbor.
With fears of a Japanese or German attack on Washington, Somervell instructed engineers to figure out how to protect the building against enemy bombs. “There was an awful lot of scurrying about whether it wouldn’t be much too dangerous to have windows because the Japs might come over and bomb it,” van der Gracht later recalled. The shape and size of the building—“being such a big target,” in Furman’s words—compounded the worries.
A team of engineers recommended the building be constructed without any windows, just as Roosevelt had suggested three months earlier. Large office bays should be crisscrossed with walls to reduce the impact of a blast, and the open light courts running between the rings should be built up, adding stability as well as more office space. The changes would convert “the whole building into an essentially blast and splinterproof structure,” the engineers reported, and provide “protection against enemy gas.” There was no need even to lose any work time in the event of falling bombs. “The occupants of the building may remain at their desks during raids,” the engineers said. General Robins, chief of the Construction Division, estimated the changes would cost a minimum of $2.5 million and delay completion of the building by at least two months.
The engineers also recommended a bomb shelter be built underground about a quarter-mile northwest of the building, connected via tunnel, to serve as a headquarters command post in the event of attack. Somervell agreed to the blast protection and the bomb shelter on December 22, but the decision was being reviewed up the chain of command.
The pace inside the Eastern Airlines hangar was furious. At the order of Groves, Bergstrom put the draftsmen on overtime shifts. Luther Leisenring, the crusty sixty-six-year-old architect in charge of specifications for the Pentagon, suffered a heart attack in December and was carried out “on a slab,” in his words. But try as they might, the draftsmen could not draw plans fast enough.
Shortly before Christmas, Paul Hauck, the project superintendent, warned McShain that the plans were falling “far behind the schedule.” The lack of plans was not only retarding construction, it was preventing materials from being ordered. Plans for 523 different elements of the building were behind schedule, and specifications had not been issued for “critical portions of the work,” Hauck complained.
The decision to excavate a bigger basement meant foundation plans for the last three sections of the building—C, D, and E—were on hold while the design was finalized. By the end of December, three pile rigs had to stop driving piles. The remaining rigs were not driving as many piles as usual, even though only about half of the forty thousand piles needed for the building had been sunk. Moreover, Hauck had been ready to begin interior finish work six weeks earlier, but could not start without plans.
On December 31, Hauck formally notified the Army that the builders were not at fault for the mounting delays. “We cannot assume the responsibility for the progress nor cost of this work because of the lack of necessary plans and specifications continually hampering proper progress and increasing cost beyond our control,” Hauck wrote.
Groves received the news with his usual good cheer, which is to say, none at all. After inspecting the project on December 30, he wrote a blistering memo to Renshaw on New Year’s Eve ordering the major to solve the problem. “The building will not be done on time, and even more important at the moment, the initial office space promised and vitally necessary cannot possibly be ready on time,” Groves wrote. “This situation can and must be corrected promptly. You will report immediately what you propose to do to remedy this situation.”
Groves offered no suggestions.
Oh, to hell with it
Yet all was not bleak as the sun rose on the Pentagon construction site on a cold New Year’s Day, 1942.
As usual, progress looked better when viewed from above. On the morning of Thursday, January 1, Renshaw sent a messenger to Somervell with some new Army aerial photographs of the site taken on Christmas Eve. The vast amount of structure that had emerged from the bare earth in the three and a half months since construction began was breathtaking, no matter how serious the delays on the ground.
Somervell reviewed the photographs immediately. The sight seemed to lift the cloud hanging over the general’s head. “I am encouraged by what I see,” Somervell told Renshaw the same day, instructing the major to regularly send him photographs showing the work.
Progress was soon evident from the ground as well. About 12 percent of the building had been completed as of January 15, an Army auditor concluded, a vast improvement over the 2 percent recorded in the first audit two months earlier.
McShain and Hauck had come up with a novel way of building the Pentagon in the absence of plans: They used plans for Section A to build Section B. The drawings apparently served more as a guideline than as a strict road map for the contractors, who often improvised. More than a half-century later, architects and engineers renovating the Pentagon were astonished to find large sections of the building constructed for a while after Pearl Harbor for which drawings either do not exist or bear little relation to reality. “They just started to build without drawings,” said Stacie Condrell, an architect for the Pentagon renovation program. “A lot of them they never went back to—and there’s just a big area where it’s fill-in-the-blank.”
Still, there was no hope for the draftsmen to catch up until there was a final decision over whether or not they should try to protect the building against bombs by taking out the windows. Somervell had given quick approval, but the decision was still getting top-level review. Ides van der Gracht and the drafting force were helpless, watching the debate unfold like a tennis match: “The orders came through from on high: ‘Cut out the windows.’ Then they had second thoughts: ‘No, leave them in, at least some of them.’ And then the orders: ‘Well, no they ought to be out anyway’…Then they decided, ‘Oh to hell with it, let’s have the windows.’”
Renshaw had received word on Dece
mber 22 that the bomb-protection plan “is going to be approved 100 percent” and that he should “get going on it” immediately. Four days later, the order was revoked—the decision was being reviewed by the secretary of war. On New Year’s Eve, word came that Stimson had given approval, and Renshaw was ordered to “proceed at once with construction.”
Then Stimson, deciding Roosevelt needed to be informed, sent a memo to the president on January 2 seeking approval, calling the protective measures of “vital importance.” But Roosevelt was skeptical, and that was enough to throw the entire matter into doubt again. Renshaw warned a “furious” Bergstrom that he might have to tear up the plans once more.
Each time the order was changed, construction on many parts of the building was suspended. Contracts had to be renegotiated. Materials being fabricated were taken out of production. New architectural, structural, mechanical, and electrical drawings were started. All the while, the clock was ticking and the deadline for occupancy getting closer.
“This indecision has resulted in delay and confusion both to the design forces and to the construction forces and has seriously retarded progress of construction on the building,” Brigadier General Robins, chief of the Construction Division, warned Somervell. Lacking definite instructions from above, Robins unilaterally issued orders “to abandon, effective today, January 9, 1942, any attempts to make plans for the splinter proofing and to proceed with the original program.” Somervell concurred.
In the end, fear of delay trumped fear of bombs. The proposal for the bomb shelter—a $1.3-million three-story underground building that Stimson told Roosevelt would be “designed to withstand bombs heavier than any known to exist”—was likewise scotched. If the War Department had its own bomb shelter, Roosevelt told Stimson, he would be obliged to provide shelters “for other Departments of the government that are equally vulnerable.”
