by Steve Vogel
A vast crowd of Pentagon employees had gathered in the five-acre courtyard on the gray and chilly afternoon—fifteen thousand, by one estimate. Many others looked on from the five floors of windows surrounding the courtyard. Renshaw had succeeded in cleaning out all the debris, but it was hardly a garden spot, with a few scraggly trees, none of them Japanese cherries. The courtyard was surrounded by towering five-story concrete walls, with bastion-like landings at each corner, reminiscent of a medieval castle. Most employees stood on the walkways that crisscrossed the courtyard, trying to avoid the puddles and mud, like the veteran plank walkers they were. Yet the scene had an air of grace and beauty. Looking down from a window, one observer noted, the thousands of Army officers and civilian employees standing on the intersecting walks “unconsciously formed a huge star.”
The audience—whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks—sang as the Army Air Forces Band played “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World,” and a choir made up of some two hundred black War Department employees sang spirituals. An NBC microphone was on the stage to broadcast the event by radio around the country. “It was a very impressive and pleasant occasion,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “A very large crowd was there, filling up all the standing room that there was in the courtyard and the speeches went off very well and the music was very good.”
Somervell spoke first, addressing the throng in the place he had dreamed up seventeen months before. He was hatless but bundled against the cold in a heavy gray Army overcoat with three stars on the shoulders. The general was gracious in his praise of the work being done in the Pentagon, but, of course, he asked for more. “Much of the blackness is back of us,” Somervell said. “A year ago we were a stunned people. We had not asked for war. It was thrust upon us. We faced what seemed an impossible task. Today it is different. We have done the impossible. Now we must perform the miraculous.”
The choir sang more spirituals and the audience joined in carols, and then Stimson spoke, addressing his words to his fellow Pentagon workers in the most personal terms his austere Eastern establishment makeup would allow. “[Y]ou and I have been obliged under the pressure of our work to hurry past each other in crowded corridors without any full realization of our real comradeship,” he said. “Today we are able to celebrate our Christmas face to face and all together, and it is very fitting that we should do so.”
Stimson was relieved to find his voice in good shape and carrying well over the loudspeakers. (“I felt that it was reaching the people that I spoke to although the audience covered an enormous piece of ground,” he later wrote.) Stimson continued, telling the employees that every worker in the building had a vital, “personal share in the task before us.” During the past year, the War Department had taken no holidays, even working through the Fourth of July. “But Christmas we could not ignore,” Stimson said. “Although all necessary operations of the War Department must continue as usual, those of you who can be spared will have tomorrow to spend with your families in customary enjoyment of the most important holiday in the Christian world. In the midst of total war, Christmas has a very special significance to us all.”
There had been no ceremony when ground was broken for the Pentagon in September 1941, nor when the plaque was installed at the mall entrance a year later, nor would any note be taken when construction was finished in early 1943. The Christmas Eve 1942 gathering was the dedication ceremony the Pentagon never had. As darkness approached following Stimson’s speech, the music continued and everyone sang “Silent Night,” and then to close the evening, “The Star Spangled Banner.” A newspaper account described it this way: “The huge court, bounded by the five interior faces of the world’s largest building, echoed again and again the glorious chords of free men singing.”
Popular Science graphic from 1943 showing the shortest route between offices and comparing the relative sizes of the Empire State Building, an ocean liner and the Pentagon.
Able and fearless constructors
The Pentagon was still not finished in the New Year. Some five thousand construction workers remained on the job. They rushed to get the fifth floor ready for occupancy, and they tiled, painted, and plastered the basement. Outside, crews poured the last of the road network, battling cold weather. John McShain had a theory as to why it always seemed impossible to finish a job: Construction crews had a built-in bias against completing the work and losing their jobs. “If you want to finish on time, fire everybody, and bring a whole new crew in,” he told Bob Furman. McShain was joking, but only just.
The goal of completing the building by November 15 had long since been abandoned, pushed back to January 1, 1943, because of the additional fifth-floor work. Following a visit to the Pentagon on New Year’s Day, Groves reported to Fat Styer, Somervell’s deputy, that work would be completed by January 15. Official construction progress reports record the building as “substantially complete” by January 15. This has been adopted as the Pentagon’s official completion date, recited in fact sheets, and used to mark the building’s anniversary.
Yet “substantially complete” was not the same as finished; records show the building was not quite done by January 15, and thousands of employees had yet to move in. The main holdup was installing pipes for the heating and air-conditioning on the fifth floor; War Department employees could not move in until it was done. Steam fitters and mechanics needed for the job were in such short supply that McShain was scouring other cities for available workers. By January 9 Groves had postponed completion to February 1; on January 14 McShain told Groves they would not meet this date either. “While we have every desire to meet your request and complete the building by February 1st, we are of the opinion that it is a physical impossibility to accomplish this date,” McShain wrote. He promised they would finish by February 15. This they did.
Whether the official completion date is considered to be January 15—some sixteen months after ground was broken, or February 15, seventeen months after—is of little import. Either way, it was a stunning accomplishment.
The auditor from Harold Smith’s Bureau of the Budget, so appalled at the design, scale, and cost of the building, nonetheless tipped his hat to the builders. The speed with which the Pentagon was built “unmistakably indicates that the men responsible for this project were able and fearless constructors possessed of a large fund of amicability and common sense,” he wrote.
Able and fearless they had been—Somervell, Groves, Renshaw, McShain, and Hauck chief among them.
The Pentagon
In the Pentagon, the War Department now had a headquarters that was four times the size of the British War Office at Whitehall, the German Kriegsministerium in Berlin, and the Japanese General Staff headquarters building in Tokyo—combined.
Originally proposed to have 5.1 million gross square feet, cut to 4 million square feet by groundbreaking, the official tally as 1943 dawned was calculated to be 6.24 million gross square feet. The Pentagon also included more office space than previously thought. Instead of the 2.3 million net square feet of office space figured the previous fall, the engineers calculated that 3.6 million net square feet could be occupied, once the fifth floor, the conversion of the basement from storage to offices, and other alterations were included. Its massive size told of the vast scale of the American war mobilization, as well as the U.S. Army’s reliance on a huge staff—not to mention the overwhelming force of Somervell’s personality.
In short order, Somervell had conceived and built an institution that would rank with the White House, the Vatican, Buckingham Palace, and a handful of others as symbols recognized around the world, a building in whose name pronouncements were made and declarations issued. At a price of about $75 million, more than twice what Somervell promised, the building also represented the Pentagon’s first cost overrun.
Upon its creation, the massive concrete building assumed an aura of permanence that made it seem as if it had always been there—“a large geometrical form existing almost beyond tim
e or place,” in the words of architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson.
On February 12, 1943, Major General Alexander D. Surles, chief of the Army’s Bureau of Public Relations, sent a memorandum to Marshall’s office concerning the official designation of the new War Department headquarters:
1. As time goes on the permanent home of the War Department will occupy a place of increasing dignity and distinction in the Nation’s history. The building will be world-famous and its name a household word.
2. It has been suggested that the designation, “The Pentagon,” would be more in keeping with this historical character than the one now in use, “The Pentagon Building.”
3. It is recommended that the building officially be designated as “The Pentagon.”
Not everyone was taking the building’s name so seriously; Roosevelt, ever the punster, had taken to calling it “the Pentateuchal Building,” a reference to the first five books of the Old Testament. The president’s quips notwithstanding, Stimson’s office approved Surles’s recommendation on February 15, and “The Pentagon” was made the official name by a general order signed by Marshall on February 19.
Surles’s memorandum was striking for saying the Pentagon would be the permanent home of the War Department. This was entirely contrary to official policy, which was that the War Department would move back to Washington after the war. Surles had recognized a truth that nobody in the Army was saying publicly: They would never abandon the Pentagon.
The miraculous takes a little longer
The focal point of the Pentagon was above the River entrance of the building, on the third floor of the E Ring, where Stimson and Marshall’s suites lay and where momentous decisions would soon be made. At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Roosevelt—to Churchill’s surprise—had publicly declared that the Allies were fighting a war that would end only in the “unconditional surrender” of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Returning from Casablanca on January 29, Marshall set to work with Stimson to chart the path. Of immediate concern, operations in North Africa were at a standstill and tough fighting lay ahead in Tunisia. Marshall was determined to find ways to help Eisenhower deal with mounting military and political crises. At the same time, preparations were needed for the next step, advancing on Italy via an invasion of Sicily, which Marshall had agreed to despite his misgivings about getting bogged down in the Mediterranean. Plans were also in the works to recapture Burma, overrun by the Japanese in the spring of 1942. Overriding everything else were decisions to be made about the cross-Channel invasion of western Europe from England—Operation Overlord, now set for 1944.
Marshall’s routine at the Pentagon was already well established. He was picked up from Quarters One at Fort Myer at 7:15 A.M. in an Army Plymouth for the short drive around Arlington Cemetery to the Pentagon. At Marshall’s order, the driver often would stop to pick up young Army officers or other war workers left stranded by overcrowded buses; the shocked riders would be quizzed about their jobs by the chief of staff during the rest of the trip to the Pentagon. At the River entrance, the driver would take Marshall down a ramp leading into a garage beneath the building, pulling up to a door that led to the private elevator he and Stimson shared. (One predawn morning, when Marshall stopped by without his building pass on his way to go duck hunting, the guard at the elevator would not let him in, failing to recognize the man in the hunter’s garb.) Marshall preferred taking the private elevator up from the garage directly to his office to avoid wasting time with hallway chatter. This drove Marshall’s staff to distraction, as they could never be quite sure when the general had arrived.
Early on the agenda every morning was a briefing on the situation with U.S. forces around the globe, with much of the emphasis these days on operations in North Africa. There was a minimum of ceremony; Marshall was usually joined by Hap Arnold, commander of air forces, Major General Thomas T. Handy, head of the operations division, and often Somervell. The briefing officers, who had been at the Pentagon all night reviewing the message traffic coming into the Signal Center and communicating with all the theaters, would speak for ten or fifteen minutes. Marshall would often make decisions on the spot. “A question would come up and you could get the general’s thinking on it right then and go on and do something about it,” Handy recalled. Even if there was no immediate answer, the policy was to get back to the theater within twenty-four hours with some kind of reply while the issue was further investigated.
Stimson often would come visiting soon afterward. The door connecting his office to Marshall’s was never locked—one measure of the enormous respect and trust the two men had for each other—and the secretary would walk in two or three times over the course of the morning to consult. Two other doors led into the chief of staff’s office, further complicating the task of keeping track of who was in the room.
Marshall’s office, Room 3E-921, served as a de facto conference room, with a half-dozen leather chairs spread about. A succession of officers came in and out, sometimes stacking up in the tiny anteroom outside Marshall’s office as they awaited a chance to go in. Peering into Marshall’s office to see if the general was available was a serious mistake. Marshall hated being spied upon, and anyone poking his head in would be met with a stern order to enter the room. A junior officer might find himself stating his business before Marshall and a half-dozen generals. Marshall soon pasted a three-by-five card on the door leading from the anteroom with a warning: “Once you open this door, walk in regardless of what is going on inside.” That eliminated most of the peeking.
Somervell was a frequent visitor to the command suites, enjoying close if formal relations with Marshall and Stimson. He had, of course, ensured that the headquarters for his Services of Supply (SOS) was not far from the seat of power. Somervell’s office, Room 3E-672, set grandly atop the Mall entrance to the building, was in the next section of the E Ring, on the same floor as Marshall and Stimson. Somervell kept two telephones on a side table within arm’s reach of his desk, and a door in his office led to a soundproof room with four secure, direct-line telephones, including one to the White House. In many respects the Pentagon was Somervell’s building, and not just because he was responsible for its creation: His enormous Army services organization occupied just over half of the Pentagon’s office space. By comparison, the Office of the Secretary of War and the Office of the Chief of Staff, including the entire general staff, occupied 22 percent of the building, and the Army Air Forces 11 percent.
There was no downtime in Somervell’s office. “He streaks through the day like a Lockheed Lightning,” recounted a reporter who spent a day with the general. Within five minutes of arriving in his office, Somervell had “pressed down every buzzer in sight” to summon aides. His top officers—among them his deputy, Fat Styer, and a talented brigadier general named Lucius D. Clay—came in frequently to confer and study oversize wall maps in Somervell’s office. One showed the United States, the other the world, and they were covered with a forest of yellow, blue, and white pins, each representing a different SOS project.
When Somervell’s temper flared—generally a dozen times a day—he would jettison his gracious manner, drop his voice even lower than normal, and tug agitatedly at his neatly clipped mustache. His latest method to try to control his temper was to go into another room, walk violently back and forth, and return with an unconvincing smile on his face. Somervell had given up cigarettes in the summer of 1942 and preached against smoking with the zeal of a convert, but on stressful days his secretary, Katherine King, would find billowing clouds of smoke in his office. As Somervell figured out the logistics for supplying the North Africa campaign, he hurled invectives about “bathtub admirals” and “knotty-pine powder-room strategists” or anyone else slowing him down. Occasionally Somervell had reason to regret his outbursts—he publicly raged about “golf-playing industrialists” after being unable reach one on the telephone the previous summer and since then had been forced to give up his favorite sport, fearing it woul
d be unseemly if he were spotted on a golf course.
On the wall of Somervell’s office was a framed photograph of his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, and a sign bearing the words that Somervell had popularized as the Services of Supply motto: “We Do the Impossible Immediately. The Miraculous Takes a Little Longer.” Somervell and the SOS were proving it to be more than a slogan.
Attending the Casablanca conference in January with Marshall, Somervell learned that Eisenhower desperately needed more trucks and other equipment. Somervell quickly contacted Styer at the Pentagon, dispatching a cablegram “as long as a book” listing equipment to be sent immediately to North Africa: trucks, locomotives, boxcars, tank engines, carbines, artillery sights, machine guns, tractors, and road equipment, among other items. The staff in Somervell’s office, well versed in their master’s ways, “settled down to furious days and sleepless nights.” Across America, wires hummed, orders were typed, trains rolled, and cargo planes flew. Somervell told Eisenhower he would have 5,400 trucks at U.S. ports in three days, ready to be shipped. The arrival of the trucks three weeks later—“which by the way won the Africa campaign,” Eisenhower later said—enabled the commander to keep his battlefront supplied and to transfer troops rapidly around Tunisia to fight the forces of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. When all the trucks and equipment had been sent, an exhausted Styer sent a plaintive message to Somervell, still in Casablanca: “If you should happen to want the Pentagon shipped over there, please try to give us about a week’s notice.”
A foretaste of the future
