by Steve Vogel
The resolution was a boost to the draftsmen. By January 21, a Corps of Engineers officer reported to Somervell that plans and specifications were no longer delaying construction progress.
Perhaps the biggest measure of progress on the Pentagon project was the money being spent. Construction expenditures in January were $5.1 million, more than three times the roughly $1.5 million that had been spent in December. “If you…think it is an easy task to spend a million dollars in a week,” John McShain later said, “I would suggest that you try it sometime.”
A growing army of workers
Most of the money was being spent on the growing army of workers at the site. More than six thousand men were on the job by mid-January; the number was jumping by the hundreds every week and would reach ten thousand by the beginning of March.
Any skilled laborer who presented himself was hired on the spot. Workers were coming from farther afield to meet the increasing demand. Hundreds of workers with specialty skills—reinforced steel workers in particular—came from around the country, sent by union locals answering the War Department’s call for help. Others were simple laborers, both black and white, many from the rural South, looking for a steady job. Some were recent immigrants from Europe. Many of those descending on Arlington had abandoned their homes and uprooted their families because they could not afford to run two households. T. R. Anderson, a sheet metal worker, arrived from Texas pulling his family in a trailer.
Hank Neighbors, a seventeen-year-old Ohio boy whose family had moved to Arlington in search of work, got a job at the site as a payroll witness. He was fascinated by the stream of workers who lined up for their pay at the McShain office in the old factory building on Columbia Pike. Some were hardened and tough construction workers with years of experience under their belts. Others were marginal workers, men well past their prime or never in it to begin with. As more young men enlisted or were drafted into the military, many of the new workers were older: thirty-five, forty, fifty, or even sixty years of age and beyond. “There were so many jobs, so much need for people, that they were digging pretty deep,” Neighbors said. “It was maybe not the ideal work bunch.”
At the bottom, wielding shovels, were the laborers making eighty-five cents an hour, with an extra nickel an hour if they worked night shifts. Truck drivers made up to a dollar an hour. Cement finishers made $1.50 and bricklayers $1.75, while structural iron workers were fetching $2 an hour. Top workers such as ironworker foremen could make $2.35. “You could almost tell by looking at them, what kind of equipment they had, as to what their job was,” Neighbors said.
The workers were paid in cash. The Corps of Engineers regularly sent a Brinks armored truck packed with greenbacks to the McShain payroll office. Two cashiers sat behind a table handing out money stuffed in pay envelopes. “They were operating on three different eight-hour shifts, so the place was busy night and day,” Neighbors said. Every Friday afternoon, carpenter Joe Allan would pick up his pay envelope, normally with $65 in cash stuffed inside, minus a dollar and some change for Social Security, but increasingly with extra pay for overtime. In support of the war effort, the unions agreed that workers would be paid time and a half instead of double time, but it still meant costs soared.
As a payroll witness, Neighbors’s job was to confirm that the workers received their money. “The key thing I dealt with were the workers who couldn’t sign their names—and there were a lot of them,” Neighbors said. “When the illiterate guy came up to get his pay, he was given cash, and if he couldn’t sign his name, he’d put an X down there on the receipt, and then I would sign for him.”
Thousands of men paid in cash spelled trouble. “We have thefts, we have robberies—you can’t have [that many] men together without having disturbances,” Renshaw complained. Lieutenant Furman was put in charge of a civilian guard force paid for by McShain. Four Arlington police officers who could arrest thieves, drunks, and other lawbreakers were also put on the payroll.
They had their hands full, particularly chasing out liquor salesmen. Men wearing big overcoats prowled the site and discreetly opened up their flaps, revealing fifteen pockets on both sides, each holding a half-pint flask bottle of Calvert’s blended whiskey for sale. The booze salesmen were especially active on the night shifts. “We couldn’t have liquor on the job,” Furman said. “It was the sort of thing you had to beat.” But it was impossible to catch them all.
McShain figured he could boost productivity by providing good, cheap meals, and he built an eighteen-thousand-square-foot wood-frame dining hall. It looked like an Army barracks, big enough to accommodate 750 workers at one seating, or 3,000 over the course of a lunch hour. Dining rooms fanned out on the sides. The kitchen and serving counters ran down the middle, and, like everything else on the job, it was an assembly-line setup, serving ten men a minute from each of four food lines. Sandwiches and pieces of pie sold for a dime apiece and coffee, milk, and soft drinks for a nickel. Seven canteens selling drinks and food were scattered across the site, and another twelve to fifteen were planned, enough to serve ten thousand workers. But at the rate the work force was growing, that would not be enough for long.
Even finding the canteens—or anything else—was getting to be a problem on the sprawling site. As the junior man in his steel gang, Donald Walker was sent every morning to get coffee from the canteen. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “I used to get lost every day.” Reporting for duty one morning, timekeeper Roy B. Pruitt could not find the engineer’s shack where he normally worked. A bulldozer had moved it to a new location during the night.
All signifying chaos
The workers descending on the Pentagon project were landing in the midst of a maelstrom. “Washington in wartime has been variously described in numbers of pungent epigrams, all signifying chaos,” wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fifty-one-year-old Army brigadier general who arrived in the city a week after Pearl Harbor with orders to report to War Department headquarters.
By 1941, the population of the Washington metropolitan area had exceeded one million, up from 621,000 in 1930. During the ten years before the war, Washington grew far more rapidly than any other city in the nation, jumping by 36 percent, compared to an average increase of 4.7 percent for the ten largest cities in the country.
Yet none of this was preparation for the tumultuous changes brought by the onset of war. “A languid Southern town with a pace so slow that much of it simply closed down for the summer grew almost overnight into a crowded, harried, almost frantic metropolis struggling desperately to assume the mantle of global power,” journalist David Brinkley wrote nearly a half-century later.
A war mindset had overtaken life in Washington. Concerned that Washington’s white marble buildings made excellent targets, Representative Frederick Bradley of Michigan proposed on the House floor that they be camouflaged with dark-gray paint. Blackout drills were held regularly, with teams of civilian air-raid marshals browbeating homeowners who did not dim their lights.
The most immediate problem for new arrivals was the housing shortage. Terribly overcrowded before the outbreak of war, Washington and its environs were now completely overrun. New government employees were arriving at the rate of more than five thousand per month, and many of them were coming with families. Landlords who already had three or four occupants crammed into single rooms added new bodies. Hallways and porches were converted into sleeping quarters. Families of eight or ten lived in basement apartments. “Newcomers discover private baths went out with Hitler,” a Washington Post headline reported in January.
Writer John Dos Passos, traveling the country to chronicle the state of the nation, described a typical lodging house in Washington, a mansion that had been partitioned into cubicles housing “a pack” of workers: “The house was clean, but it had the feeling of too many people breathing the same air, of strangers stirring behind flimsy walls, of unseen bedsprings creaking and unseen feet shuffling in cramped space.”
Workers turning up for t
he Pentagon project and hoping to camp out quickly discovered that trailer camps were prohibited in Arlington County. Hundreds of workers and their families, including T. R. Anderson and his family from Texas, had to set up camp miles away in trailer parks along Route 1, south of Alexandria.
The government’s need for housing and office space for workers was insatiable. Roosevelt in January even suggested that those living in Washington who were not contributing to the war effort—the president called them “parasites”—move out of town and make room for essential war workers.
Roosevelt’s dream of presiding over the demolition of the Munitions Building had evaporated. Instead, the president ordered new temporary buildings to be constructed on the Mall to join the old temporary buildings. A long gray line of two-story barrack-like buildings with rain-streaked cement-asbestos board walls sprouted up on the Mall—almost up to the base of the Washington Monument—“before you could say Franklin Roosevelt,” journalist Marquis Childs quipped. The Army and Navy seized buildings, land, and even a college campus in the city to use for military installations and office space. “It was said around town that if the military could seize and occupy enemy lands as quickly as it seized Washington’s, the war would be won in a week,” Brinkley wrote.
For all the dead seriousness of the situation, the most visible manifestation of war in the Construction Division was comical. Years of peacetime duty had left many of officers so out of shape and overweight that the fabric of their Army uniforms strained mightily against the added girth. “And that was the God-awfulest looking sight you ever saw,” recalled Gar Davidson, Groves’s aide. Marshall’s requirement that officers wear civilian clothes in peacetime Washington meant many had never worn their uniforms outside of rare ceremonial events. Some officers simply did not have uniforms, and long lines formed outside military-apparel shops. “And those that had to dig their uniforms out of mothballs were pretty sorry looking sights,” Davidson added.
Somervell, on the other hand, effortlessly made the transition from his seersucker suits and bow ties and looked like “a modern Beau Brummel in uniform,” a newspaper columnist wrote. Somervell believed an officer should always be able to fit in the uniform in which he had graduated from West Point, and he kept himself at a sleek 5' 10? and 150 pounds. Anytime he put on a few pounds, he would drink nothing but water and douse his food with vinegar, a dieting technique he picked up from the Romantic poet Lord Byron.
Renshaw and Furman, both trim, also had no trouble fitting into their uniforms. Groves was another matter altogether; as was often the case, he was on the losing side in his lifelong battle with weight. To disguise his extra pounds, Groves took to wearing a one-size-larger uniform, heavy on the starch. As Groves biographer Robert Norris noted, “Not many were fooled.”
All centered here
More than in previous American wars, command would be directed from Washington. In World War I, much of the War Department general staff had been headquartered in France, relatively near the action. This war, with American forces spread around the world, would be different, Marshall told Marvin McIntyre, a White House aide. “Today, due to the fact that we have a number of overseas theatres and are engaged in a colossal program of military material for our Allies, all of the responsibilities of the War Department of the first World War…have all centered here,” Marshall wrote.
“We have got to a point where we are actually impeded in our war effort due to the fact that the offices of the War Department are so widely scattered,” assistant secretary of war McCloy warned eight weeks after Pearl Harbor.
In late January, Roosevelt asked White House aide Wayne Coy to check with the War Department about progress of the Pentagon building. Somervell’s pre-Christmas demand that one million square feet be ready by April 1 seemed now to be an April fool’s joke. The time lost because of the design changes, the debate over bomb-protection—the sheer impossibility of the goal in the first place—led to some recalculations. Renshaw was willing to promise that a larger amount of space—1.3 million square feet—would be ready, but not until June 1. Groves altered the prediction, promising 500,000 square feet by early May, which was what Somervell had originally promised when work started. Word was relayed to the president. “The first part of the building will be ready for occupancy in early May,” Coy reported to Roosevelt. The entire building would be finished by November 15.
It would not be a moment too soon. Predictions were that the War Department, which now numbered 25,000 workers, would have 50,000 employees in Washington by July 1. Big as Somervell was building the Pentagon, it was not going to be big enough.
Construction field progress report, May 1942.
An overwhelming task
The concrete edifice rising from the low ground to the east could be seen plainly through the dreary winter morning light, and the percussion from the pile drivers floated up the hillside to the gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. Somervell had personally chosen the location, about a hundred yards down the hillside from L’Enfant’s tomb and the Lee mansion. It was a lofty spot, benefiting from the magnificent vista that had been spared when Franklin Roosevelt ordered Somervell to build his headquarters downriver. Shortly before noon on Tuesday, January 27, 1942, an Army burial team carried the casket with the remains of his wife, Anna Purnell Somervell, to the grave awaiting in the wet ground.
Connie Somervell, fifteen, watching with her father and two older sisters, tried to stop crying but could not. Down at St. Margaret’s, the boarding school she attended in the Tidewater area of Virginia, Connie had known little—only that the illness that had slowed her mother over Christmas had taken a grave turn. First it was thought to be a bad cold. Pinned down with work in January and spending his nights at his apartment in Washington, the general fretted about his wife, suffering with no one to care for her at the tobacco farm in southern Maryland. He arranged to check her into Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, where doctors found she was suffering from a staph infection that had developed into blood poisoning. “I used to write her everyday, then my older sister said, ‘Don’t bother writing mother, she can’t read your letters,’” Connie Somervell Matter recalled. “When you’re fifteen, you don’t believe your parents are going to die. I was distressed, but I presumed she was going to get well.” On Sunday night, January 25, Anna Somervell died at Walter Reed at age fifty-seven.
General Marshall was informed the following morning and sent a note to Somervell at the tobacco farm: “I just learned a moment ago that Mrs. Somervell died last night, and I want you to know that you have my deep sympathy…. The fact that I have burdened you with an overwhelming task at a time when you were suffering a personal tragedy, makes me feel all the more solicitous of your welfare.” A few days later, Henry Stimson personally awarded Somervell the Oak Leaf Cluster for his Distinguished Service Medal, this time honoring his work as chief of the Construction Division. Somervell had overseen “the greatest building program of modern times” and done it in “record-breaking time,” the citation noted. “I am very glad that this trifle of encouragement and recognition of his superb services has come to him at this time,” Stimson noted in his diary.
The loss of the Red Cross volunteer he had brought home from Germany after World War I, a doting and graceful mother who adored her husband, profoundly saddened Somervell. “He was devastated,” Connie Somervell recalled. Yet it slowed him not in the least. In the days before and after his wife’s death, Somervell was busy engineering another rise to power. Unlike his machinations the previous summer and fall, this effort would prove more fruitful.
Somervell’s rise was perhaps inevitable, once peacetime niceties were cast aside. War had a way of bringing his like to the fore. Four days after Pearl Harbor, Stimson, concerned about the “tremendous burdens” on Marshall’s shoulders, privately advised the chief of staff that “it was time to pick out young men [with] outstanding brains and character and bring them forward.” Somervell was one of three names Stimson mentio
ned; Marshall agreed.
Marshall, fed up with an archaic administrative system that divided much of the Army into fiefdoms, already had in mind a radical reorganization to streamline the War Department headquarters. His ability to make quick decisions was crippled by the need to consult with myriad bureaus and commands that tended to jealously guard their prerogatives. Seizing on the opportunity presented by the shock of Pearl Harbor, Marshall moved quickly to do away with much of the headquarters apparatus, cutting the number of officers who had direct access to the chief of staff from more than sixty to six.
Learning in January of Marshall’s intention, Somervell immediately got to work influencing developments. He advanced his own plan in February to create a unified supply command, combining disparate bureaus and agencies into one organization that controlled all equipment, construction, supply, and transportation. It fit perfectly with Marshall’s vision. Somervell was not shy about suggesting he was the logical choice to head this massive new command. Marshall and Stimson agreed.
On February 28, Roosevelt signed an executive order reorganizing the War Department and dividing the Army into three major commands. Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair was appointed commander of all Army ground forces, Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, commander of all Army air forces, and Somervell, newly promoted to lieutenant general, commander of all Army supply forces. In effect, all of the Army not directly involved with combat now reported to Somervell. Training of troops, communications, military justice, chaplains, quartermasters, engineers, and ordnance, among many other areas, were now part of Somervell’s domain. To Somervell fell the task of supplying eight million soldiers scattered across the globe with weapons, bullets, food, shoes, uniforms, medical care, and transportation. “In military annals not even Napoleon’s quartermaster could approach the magnitude of the job he had to do,” The New York Times wrote.
