by Steve Vogel
“I will say this for General Somervell,” a wary Harry Truman told fellow senators, “he will get the stuff, but it is going to be hell on the taxpayer.” Truman was right on both counts.
At the suggestion of Marshall, who wanted him “handy,” Somervell moved from his tobacco farm into Quarters Two at Fort Myer, a stately redbrick home next to Quarters One, the home reserved for the chief of staff. Somervell’s eldest daughter, Mary Anne, a chemist with the Bureau of Standards, moved in with her father and ran the household, planning menus and seeing that her father’s uniforms were pressed. She would breakfast with him at seven o’clock—the eighteenth-century oval mahogany table set with gold-rimmed service plates bearing the Somervell family crest, and a pot of tea at the general’s place—before he rushed out the door.
Somervell soared to national prominence. Within weeks, he was on the cover of Life magazine, and soon after that, Time. He spoke to war workers around the country and with typical flair braced Americans for the sterner realities of war. “Hitler and the Japs aren’t interested in the forty-hour, fifty-hour, or sixty-hour week,” he told two thousand cheering factory workers in Yonkers.
In little over a year, Somervell had risen from lieutenant colonel to three-star general, a climb surpassed in speed only by a few, among them Eisenhower. In the process, he had leapfrogged in rank over dozens of more senior officers. (He was only forty-nine, but, knowing Marshall’s penchant for younger generals, Somervell played it safe and did not tell the chief of staff he would turn fifty in May.) Major General Reybold, who as chief of engineers held the job Somervell had so desperately coveted, was now below Somervell in his new command. Likewise Major General Gregory, the quartermaster general who had taken quiet pleasure at Somervell’s comeuppance, now found himself reporting to his former subordinate.
Somervell was again directing all Army construction, now from a much higher level. Hundreds of camps, airfields, and depots needed to be built across the country and around the globe, so many as to make the tremendous $2 billion effort he directed the previous year look like a pittance. From December 7, 1941, until the end of February 1942, the Corps of Engineers was launching construction projects costing an unheard-of $200 million a week. In March, when Somervell assumed his new post, the figure reached $250 million a week.
“The undertaking was truly gigantic, dwarfing those previous great endeavors, the building of the Panama Canal and the emergency construction programs of 1917–18 and 1940–41,” Fine and Remington wrote in their official account of Army construction in World War II. “In urgency, complexity, and difficulty, as in size, it surpassed anything of the sort the world had ever seen. The speed demanded, the sums of money involved, the number and variety of projects, the requirements for manpower, materials, and equipment, and the problems of management and organization were unparalleled. So formidable was the enterprise that some questioned whether it was possible.” It would be, as Somervell immodestly but perhaps not incorrectly later called it, “the most brilliant chapter in world construction history.”
Among many other responsibilities, Somervell was officially back in charge of the Pentagon construction. Of course, he had never really relinquished control of the project, but now the chain again led directly to him, and he wasted no time exercising his authority.
On March 25, Somervell sent a short memo to Reybold that the chief of engineers, knowing Somervell as he did, could only have read as ominous. “The occupancy of the new War Department must be assured at the earliest possible date,” Somervell wrote. “I am counting on your personal efforts to see that this is done and in any event that occupancy may be begun on May 1.”
The next day, Colonel Frederick Strong, a veteran engineer and trusted aide to Somervell, passed the message on to Groves. “General Somervell and I discussed your ‘big building,’” Strong told Groves. There could be no retreat from the deadline: “On account of commitments made to the President and the Chief of Staff, the above schedule will have to be carried out despite all obstacles.”
Just when it looked as if winter was over and that McShain and Renshaw could count on some decent weather, a Palm Sunday storm on March 29 dumped eighteen inches of snow on Washington. The blizzard left whole sections of the city blacked out, paralyzed the region’s roads, and slowed work at the job site, but it did not stop Somervell from showing up at his office first thing the following morning and sourly looking over his staff with a gimlet eye: “Which one of you sons of bitches remarked that spring was here?”
From the bottom of the Potomac River
Slipping past Alexandria and looking upriver, the captain of the night tug noticed with a start that the dome of the Capitol was blacked out. It had been darkened ever since Pearl Harbor several months earlier, but after fifteen years working the Potomac River, he was still shocked every time he saw the familiar beacon was missing.
Inside the dark pilothouse, the captain gently turned the wheel. A light drizzle began falling, further darkening the night and blurring the remaining lights on the inky shore. Upriver, the captain could see the flashing green buoy at Hains Point, where the Anacostia River flowed into the Potomac. He noted the location with a cross in his mind. “Cross marks spot where the battle begins tonight,” the captain muttered.
The tug was pulling two barges, both heavily laden with gravel. The captain wanted to deliver the gravel upriver to a concrete plant in Georgetown, where he knew it would fetch good money. Builders were desperate for concrete to finish half-built apartments, roads, and houses all around Washington. But the War Department was buying almost every ounce of gravel dredged from the Potomac, feeding the insatiable appetite for concrete to build the Pentagon. The captain would have to get past McShain’s concrete batching plant in the old airport lagoon, where Army officers kept a keen eye on the river, ready to motor out in a launch to intercept any load of gravel that—by virtue of wartime materiel priorities—they could claim.
The captain had ordered his crew to darken the tug as much as possible. Lanterns were kept off the deck and the portholes blacked out. The doors to the engine room were shut. It was futile, perhaps, since he had to keep his green-and-red navigation lights on. But every little bit might help. This could be the night he slipped past, the captain thought, but then he stopped himself. “Oh, I always think that.”
On board the tug listening to the captains was Charles E. Planck, a forty-four-year-old Kentucky native, an aviation writer with a keen eye who had taken a job with the Civil Aeronautics Administration as an information officer. Planck watched as the captain swung wide around the buoy at Hains Point, calculating his turn with an expert eye, and then braced himself for the final run up the river. “All the trip had led up to this one ten minutes,” Planck wrote in an account of the unnamed captain’s journey.
“He watched the southern shore,” Planck continued. “He wished his navigation lights could be doused. He wished his engine would breathe a little more quietly. He even wished that little gray launch which represented defeat to him might suddenly lose a bottom plank from stem to stern and sink in two minutes.”
The tug slipped under the 14th Street Bridge, just below the lagoon. There was no sign yet of the launch, and for a moment the captain again had hope. Then he spotted a small, dark-gray vessel nosing out from the mouth of the lagoon. “He could see the faint white plume of its wake as it headed straight for him,” Planck wrote. “Soon he heard the little bump as it came alongside and then the officer’s shoes hit the deck. He gritted his teeth as he heard the man’s feet on the ladder rungs and saw his face dimly as it came up into the pilot house.”
The officer’s genial greeting broke the silence. “Howdy, captain,” the officer said. “Guess we can use these two loads.”
The War Department could indeed use it. The need was inexhaustible. Concrete was being poured on a scale never seen for a building—410,000 cubic yards would be required for the Pentagon compared to 62,000 for the Empire State Building.
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p; The location chosen to construct such a building was a wise one, from the standpoint of the basic ingredients needed. Just south of the site, beneath the waters of the Potomac and below a layer of soft mud, lay a boundless supply of sand and gravel. The melting of glaciers when the Ice Age ended fifteen thousand years ago had turned the Potomac into a vast waterway carrying enormous volumes of both materials. The glacier melt left gravel deposits up to eighty feet deep beneath the bed of the Potomac near where National Airport was built, giving the area its name, Gravelly Point.
The Pentagon was being built out of the Potomac—some 680,000 tons of river sand and gravel when all was said and done. “It is interesting that more than one-half the weight of the building…came out of the bottom of the Potomac River,” Renshaw later observed.
Though the supply of sand and gravel was inexhaustible, the amount dredged was not. The Smoot Sand & Gravel Company, the main supplier, struggled to meet the demand, particularly in January, when two of its river dredges broke down and some of the company’s most experienced dredge operators were drafted by the Army. Many area construction jobs suffered, yet Smoot managed to supply enough for the Pentagon project, which had priority.
Floating dredges scooped up sand and gravel from various beds in the river. The stones were sand-colored, rounded and smooth from the force of water, their coarseness varying with which river bar was being worked. The dredges loaded the sand and gravel onto barges—including the ones delivered by the unnamed and unwilling captain. Shipping the aggregate directly to the construction site saved not only time but also money—about thirty-five cents per cubic yard of concrete.
On the bank of the expanded lagoon, the concrete batching plant run by the Howat Concrete Company of Maryland received barges twenty-four hours a day. Two stiff-legged derricks, equipped with big clamshell buckets, scooped the aggregate off the barges and swung it over into an enormous receiving hopper. The aggregate was dropped from the hopper onto a radial stacker, a 185-foot-long conveyor belt that carried the material to the top of a mountainous stockpile. From there it was drawn as needed through a buried timber tunnel to more conveyor belts that carried the aggregate to one of two batchers, where it was weighed and measured to reach a proportion of roughly two parts sand to three parts gravel. Portland cement, brought to the plant via a rail spur, was added to the mix, along with precise amounts of water.
The massive operation produced as much as 3,500 cubic yards of concrete daily, requiring about 5,500 tons of sand and gravel, 937 tons of cement, and 115,000 gallons of water every day. When concrete was being poured, which was most of the time, mixing trucks lined up beneath the batchers to fill up. Each truck carried four cubic yards of concrete, mixing it as they hauled to save time. Often twenty or thirty trucks made runs back and forth, along dirt roadways laid out to speed passage directly to the foot of tower hoists next to the building and other locations where concrete was needed.
Steam-powered hoists lifted it in one-cubic-yard buckets. Reaching the proper level, the concrete was dumped into chutes that carried it into small hoppers. With cries of “Concrete!” workers rushed it in wheelbarrows and concrete buggies over planks to its final destination. To speed up the pouring, Renshaw tried using concrete pumps, a new technology. Pumps were set up in the courtyard with pipes attached to carry the concrete up into the building. “When the pumps worked they could really put a hell of a lot of concrete in the building,” Bob Furman recalled. But they sometimes broke down, creating an unholy mess and slowing the work. “Then the pipe would be full of concrete setting up—it’d be a bitch,” he said. Most of the concrete ended up being hoisted to the deck hoppers and distributed in buggies.
It was a freewheeling operation, so much so that other military projects lacking the same priority were filching concrete from the site. “Apparently we didn’t supervise them too carefully,” Furman said. “Later we learned that the Army bases that were being built or renovated in the area were sending trucks over and lining up with our trucks.”
The pouring continued nonstop in good weather and bad, many times simultaneously in different sections of the building. Big pours were scheduled every Friday, often lasting well into the night, giving the concrete time to cure relatively undisturbed over the weekend, when smaller crews were at work. “We built so damn quickly, I remember one column wasn’t even poured,” Furman said. “We stripped the [forms], and there wasn’t any column there.”
The constant pouring of concrete meant the carpenters, Joe Allan among them, had to race to keep up. “There was always concrete going in,” Allan said. “Every morning some of the forms were ready to be poured. There were concrete trucks all over the place every morning, pouring, and then in the afternoon and the evening too. They didn’t waste any time.”
The carpenters set up assembly-line operations to build the forms. Each of the building’s five sections had its own mill, manned by large crews of carpenters with power saws who cut and assembled lumber into modular forms for the columns, beams, slabs, and walls. Allan was assigned to the mill for Section D, where he used an electric skill saw to cut the lumber to the proper lengths—three-quarter-inch-thick boards, a foot wide and six to eight feet long. The forms were assembled using tongue-and-groove joints and secured with battens.
“It was like a mimeograph,” Allan said. “It was designed so it could be done easily.”
The mass-production techniques, rough at the start of construction, were constantly refined by Paul Hauck and his foremen, and by spring the pace of work was rapidly accelerating. New workers quickly picked up the simple and repetitive assignments. “Coming from different backgrounds and different unions and different experiences, they were able to comprehend immediately what to do and how to do it,” Allan said.
So much wood was being cut that several carpenters at each mill did nothing all day but sharpen and set the teeth on saws. A sudden and unexpected lumber shortage in the spring left the Army scrambling to get enough. The forms were broken up and the boards reused, but the job still required enormous amounts of lumber—more than twenty-three million board-feet in the end.
After a spectacular fire at a hotel under construction in Washington in February, it suddenly dawned on Groves that the War Department site might erupt into the world’s largest construction fire. He ordered Renshaw to immediately rid the site of fire hazards. Renshaw decided that an officer on his staff must be at the site at all times to respond to any emergency. In the middle of a huge office bay in Section A, McShain’s men walled off a small bedroom, which was outfitted with three beds, a bathroom, shower, and telephone. Furman, rotating duty with four other officers, spent every fifth night there. He would get up every three or four hours and walk around the entire site, looking for trouble. “I can tell you right now there are 921 and a half feet to a side,” Furman recalled more than sixty years later.
Their emergency preparedness was soon tested when a large toolshed used by construction workers caught fire one night. The next day, the construction site security chief presented Furman with a report proudly listing how quickly firefighters responded to the blaze. “His report read to that point as the most efficient call to put out a fire you could ever imagine,” Furman recalled. “Then the bottom line read, ‘The building burnt to the ground.’”
Are there really guys buried down there?
Given the vast size and fast pace of the concrete pours, it did not take long for rumors to start spreading about workers who had fallen into wet concrete and perished. Sometimes the worker disappeared without a trace, the story went; other times the body had to be removed with jackhammers. “That was the scuttlebutt,” recalled Donald Walker. In the version he and his steel crew heard, workers had stripped the forms off a beam and found a body embedded in the concrete. Walker had no trouble believing it. “Oh, yeah, it was very feasible,” he said.
Working as usual on a weekend, Clarence Renshaw brought along his eight-year-old son, Alan, to see the work one morning. They went to
the top of the building, where from up high the boy marveled at the sights: cranes swinging about with supplies, fleets of trucks moving on the roads below, and mountains of material. As his father conferred with McShain, Alan walked over to watch concrete being poured. A rough-looking worker stopped him. “Hey, kid, don’t get too close,” the worker barked. “We lost two guys down one of these holes last week.”
Such stories spread around town. John Brockwell’s parents, like many families in the area, opened their house in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria to war workers needing room and board. One of the boarders was a worker on the Pentagon project, a mixing truck driver nicknamed “Concrete.” He would come home covered in it. Concrete told a story about a worker who fell into a deep pool of freshly poured concrete when the long pole he was using to stir the mix snapped. “He said they started to stop the concrete pour, but the foreman told them to keep going because the worker would be dead before they could get to him, and the effort wasn’t worth stopping the concrete job,” Brockwell recalled years later. “So on they went, leaving the worker’s body inside the concrete foundation. Whether that actually happened, I don’t know, but it made a good story for ‘Concrete’ at the time and was a great story for a kid like me.”
The stories only multiplied with time. An unnamed construction supervisor told the Army-Navy-Air Force Register in 1961 about a worker who failed to show up for work the day after he had been assigned to oversee the pouring of a column. “The construction section boss ordered the molding to be stripped from the pillar and, as was feared, workers found a body embedded in the drying cement,” the Register reported. “Jack-hammers were needed to release the deceased from his concrete tomb.”
