by Steve Vogel
Somervell’s performance in Mexico won him a spot in the first Army engineering detachment sent to France after America entered the Great War in 1917. Assigned to the 15th Engineer Regiment—with Pot Graves again his immediate superior—Somervell landed in France with the unit on July 25. Now a captain and soon to be a major, Somervell constructed a great munitions dump at Mehun-sur-Yèvre, a hundred miles south of Paris, and then was sent to straighten out a mess near Dijon at Is-sur-Tille, where poorly trained engineer troops building an advance depot were floundering. Somervell shook the troops from their lethargy with reveille at dawn and worked them from first light until dark, with barely a break for meals. Somervell’s hurry-up style was evident in all he did. Finding no proper sleeping quarters for the regiment, he bought new tents without waiting for a purchase order. The Army billed him for $17,755 and threatened to deduct the cost from his pay, but Somervell argued his way out.
For over a year Somervell toiled, building dumps, barracks, and a poison-gas depot, and he was awarded with a temporary promotion to lieutenant colonel and the Distinguished Service Medal for his record of “unusual vision [and] initiative.” Somervell was far from satisfied. He begged for transfer to combat duty, but he had made himself too useful to supply commanders, and they refused to spare him. Given leave in the fall of 1918, Somervell spurned the chance to relax in Paris, instead pleading with Pot Graves to lend him his Army sedan, a big Cadillac, so he could make “just a little visit” to the front. It was not merely adventure he was seeking; calculating as always, Somervell was also thinking of his career. “I have yet to hear a hostile shot and I’m not going home with that on my record,” Somervell insistently told Graves.
The gruff but good-natured Graves finally capitulated and did not see his Cadillac again until after the armistice. Somervell’s timing, as usual, was prescient. He arrived at the front October 31, the day before the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne offensive that would break the German army. Somervell worked his way to the headquarters of the 89th Division, which was taking part in the push to the Meuse River. The division’s operations officer had just been captured by the Germans while on reconnaissance, and a replacement was needed.
“What do you know about military tactics?” Somervell was asked.
“Practically nothing,” he admitted.
“An ideal man for the job,” replied a sardonic officer. But the 89th was in a fix, and Somervell got the post.
The division chief of staff, Colonel John C. H. Lee, found his new operations officer to be “truly an answer to prayer. He learned with lightning-like rapidity, was fearless and brilliant.” By November 5, the 89th had reached the Meuse opposite Pouilly in northeast France, where the retreating Germans were thought to have destroyed all bridges in the area. Late in the day, the division learned that the Germans had failed to blow a bridge leading to town. Somervell accompanied Lee on a reconnaissance to the frontline, along a canal that paralleled the river. Reaching the approach to the bridge, they found it had been damaged, but in the darkness could not tell how badly. Shortly before midnight, Somervell went forward with two scouts, moving more than five hundred yards beyond the last American outposts and fording three branches of the Meuse. Across the river, they encountered a German detachment and drove it off with a brief exchange of fire. Somervell considered chasing them but wisely turned back. The bridge was passable, Somervell reported to his superiors. The division crossed the river several days later and was advancing when word came after sun-up on the morning of November 11 that an armistice was to go into effect at 11 A.M. that day.
For his exploits at Pouilly, Somervell was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest decoration for bravery. Now a certified war hero—one of only nine officers to win both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal during the conflict—Somervell’s reputation was made. Pot Graves’s evaluation of the subordinate who absconded with his car was succinct: “This is the best officer I ever saw, or hope to see.” It was high praise, but Graves’s words hinted at the ambivalence some officers felt about Somervell. His brilliance was darkened—and in part fueled—by an aggressive and opportunistic nature so powerful that his peers, many of them quite aggressive themselves, were taken aback. “He called himself a mean son-of-a-bitch, and he was,” said William Hoge, an engineer officer who would cross swords with him. “Watch Somervell,” it was said around the Army, and not always meant favorably.
Assigned to the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland, Somervell enjoyed life stationed in the ancient city of Koblenz, founded by the Romans at the strategic confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers. His reputation among friends as “a gay blade” suffered after he met Anna Purnell, a young YMCA volunteer from a privileged Chicago background who helped entertain the 89th Division troops. She was lovely, with wavy, Titian hair, a woman of “rare personal charm,” in the judgment of Colonel Lee. Somervell married her on August 28, 1919, in the Kaiser’s private chapel in Koblenz. A year later, Somervell returned to the United States with his wife and the first of three daughters.
Magnitude never seemed to bother him
More than one major controversy in Somervell’s career presaged the splash he would make with the Pentagon, including the tempest that arose while he served as District Engineer for Washington, D.C. In 1929, Somervell pondered a grandiose scheme to make the Potomac River the national waterway by connecting it with the Ohio River. It was a dream first pursued 135 years earlier by George Washington, who began building a canal that would have tied the fledgling country to the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains. The modern project would construct twenty-seven dams to turn 185 miles of the Potomac’s upper reaches between Washington and Cumberland, Maryland, into navigable water; it was an enormous undertaking that Somervell reluctantly concluded would be prohibitively expensive. Instead—perhaps as a consolation—he advocated tackling a portion of the project. Somervell wanted to dam the Potomac at two points upriver from Washington, including at Great Falls, a scene of primeval beauty where the powerful river cascades over a series of jagged boulders, falling seventy-six feet in less than a mile.
Somervell was pitted against a formidable foe: Lieutenant Colonel Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the Union general, who was executive officer of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. He was well-known in Washington, having led what the newspapers dubbed the “war on neckers” during the summer of 1928. Grant demanded that visitors to Washington parks sign a pledge promising to “refrain from any action, posture or public display of amorousness that might be offensive to others or could set a bad example to the children.” Despite his disapproval of park romances, Grant was a lover of nature, and he was appalled by Somervell’s proposal to flood majestic Great Falls. His planning commission came down squarely against the plan.
Somervell was not the least intimidated about taking on a brother officer of the Corps of Engineers, even one who outranked him and bore such a famous name. To the contrary, Somervell publicly ridiculed Grant, issuing a statement to the press calling Grant’s criticism “too far-fetched to claim the attention of any thinking person, much less an engineer who is supposed to know about such matters.” Congress, however, sided with Grant and soon passed a bill that established an extensive park system along the Potomac, including at Great Falls.
The whole affair was vintage Somervell, from the supremely confident case he made for building the dams to his fury at anyone—Grant, in this case—who tried to stop him. Most notably, it laid bare Somervell’s deep, almost megalomaniacal passion for operating on a grand scale. Building huge ammunition depots during the Great War had merely whetted his appetite. He saw himself as a builder, and the bigger the project, the better. “Magnitude never seemed to bother him,” said General John Hardin, a fellow Army engineer. “I think he loved the bigness of things.”
Somervell was bitterly disappointed by the outcome of the Great Falls debate, but before long he had another c
anal to build, this one even grander. In 1934, President Roosevelt appointed Somervell to a board studying the feasibility of building a canal across northern Florida, connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, an idea that, like Washington’s Potomac canal, had been contemplated for centuries. The board recommended the project, and, a year later, Roosevelt allocated $5 million in relief money as a means of putting men to work. To no one’s surprise, Somervell—now a lieutenant colonel—was placed in charge.
Congress was decidedly dubious about the project because of its high cost and environmental problems. Where the estimated $120 million needed would come from, nobody knew. But Somervell was not to be dissuaded and tried to force congressional approval with a fait accompli. In the town of Ocala, Florida, just five days after Roosevelt’s announcement, Somervell presided as a thundering blast sent a geyser of dirt into the air, tearing out the first hole for the canal. Within three weeks, Somervell had three thousand men on the job and was pressing Washington for another $20 million. “He got his orders one morning and before Congress could get around to stopping the project he had that great ditch well along in construction in a matter of a few weeks,” an Army engineer later wrote. “I doubt if there are many equals to that performance.”
Somervell was completely in his element. The canal, running 195 miles across Florida, would be of a suitably Somervellian scale, twice as long as the Suez Canal and four times the length of Panama’s. There was no other job in the world he would rather have, he said.
Attracted by the grand scope of the canal, a roving newspaper columnist for the Scripps-Howard chain visited the project headquarters in Ocala in the spring of 1936 to interview Somervell. Arriving at Camp Roosevelt at 5 P.M. on a Sunday, Ernie Pyle walked into the administration building and found one person at work. It was Somervell—at forty-four, his hair turning silver—wearing blue trousers with a light-gray pullover. He wasted no time in charming the columnist. “I’m glad you came. I wanted to quit work anyhow,” said Somervell, rising to greet Pyle from behind a desk covered with foot-high piles of charts and reports.
“Somervell surprised me,” Pyle—who became the greatest American reporter of World War II—told his readers. “I had expected to see an old, hard-bitten engineer veteran, tough as a horse-hair lariat and meaner than Pilate. Somervell is tough all right, I guess, but he doesn’t look it…. It would make him sore to say so, but he is a handsome man.”
In full, folksy Will Rogers mode, Somervell regaled Pyle with tales of Arkansas, Pancho Villa, and the copperhead snake one of his daughters had killed, skinned, and made into a bandeau the previous summer. “He’s a fellow you can sit down and talk with,” Pyle wrote. “He’s a tremendous reader, and seems to know something about everything.” Somervell, the columnist predicted, might well take his place among the storied engineers of past great projects. “Panama had its Goethals, the Brooklyn Bridge its Roebling, and the Florida Canal will have, I suppose, its Somervell,” Pyle wrote.
It was not to be. Several months after Pyle’s visit, Congress cut off all further funding for the canal, and the project was shut down. Somervell would have to make his mark elsewhere.
A gleam of light on the horizon
Somervell’s time in Florida was not entirely wasted. Among those he met in Ocala was a slim, somewhat wan former social worker from Iowa whose mild-mannered appearance completely belied the power he bore as confidante and alter ego of the president. Harry Lloyd Hopkins, the impassioned and resilient New Deal high priest leading the largest work-relief effort in the nation’s history, was impressed with Somervell’s performance putting thousands of men to work on the canal. When that enterprise collapsed, Hopkins saw Somervell as the ideal man to straighten the embarrassing New York WPA mess. Somervell cultivated his relationship with Hopkins, recognizing the aide’s tremendous influence with Roosevelt. Somervell’s accomplishments in New York over the next four years solidified a deep bond between the soldier and the social worker. More importantly, Hopkins appreciated what Somervell might still accomplish. Though by then terribly frail from a cancer operation that removed three-fourths of his stomach, Hopkins became Somervell’s great champion.
Somervell needed one. By the summer of 1940, he was agitating to get out of New York, worried he would miss the boat if war came and he was stuck at the WPA. For years, Somervell had believed another war with Germany was inevitable. (“If I hadn’t,” he said, “I would have got out of the Army long before.”) The stunning evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in late May 1940 convinced him the time was near. Somervell began “frantically pulling wires” to get back on active service, pressing his case with a senior officer on Marshall’s staff.
La Guardia, by now a fervent believer in Somervell’s abilities, twice blocked his efforts to leave the city with appeals to the White House. Somervell used his own White House entrée to appeal directly to Roosevelt in October, arguing that the WPA was running smoothly and that he could better serve the country if he were back on military duty. After FDR promised La Guardia he would appoint a worthy successor, the mayor reluctantly agreed to Somervell’s departure. “It hurts,” a disappointed La Guardia told reporters when the news was announced November 7. Somervell, the mayor said, “leaves here permanent and impressive monuments to his executive skill.”
Leaving New York was only half the battle. Somervell’s performance did not earn him much credit among his peers in the Army, who held a low regard for the WPA and its decidedly unmilitary projects. Somervell spoke briefly with Marshall, asking to be considered for a field command and reminding the general of his highly decorated combat service in World War I. Marshall, though impressed with Somervell’s work building the airport in New York, was noncommittal. To his dismay, Somervell subsequently learned that the chief of engineers, Major General Julian Schley, who viewed Somervell as a bit too ambitious and a bit too shrewd, was assigning him to a respectable but lackluster position as executive officer for a new engineer training center to be established in the Midwest. No location had been selected yet, giving Somervell a reprieve.
Arriving in Washington in November 1940, Somervell began desperately fishing about for a better assignment. He need not have worried. Unknown to Somervell, Stimson and Marshall were watching him with another job in mind. The secretary of war, fretting over the Army’s camp-construction debacle, was impressed with what he saw. After meeting Somervell, Stimson wrote in his diary, “A gleam of light…came into my horizon.”
Waiting in the wings
Brigadier General Charles “Baldy” Hartman, chief of the Army’s Construction Division, had heard the rumors for a week that his head was on the block; stubborn, proud, and a bit nervous, he ignored them and went about his work. He was not surprised when his superior, Major General Edmund Gregory, showed up unannounced at the division headquarters in the Railroad Retirement Building on Capitol Hill early in the afternoon of December 11, 1940. “I knew by the scared look on his face he had bad news for me,” Hartman later said. He was right.
Being chief of construction was the culmination of a quarter-century of dedicated service for Hartman. He was a West Point graduate who had been one of the Army’s youngest colonels in World War I, and he was beloved by his staff for his honesty and modesty. But his timing was bad. He was appointed to the job in March 1940, just weeks before the national emergency prompted by the fall of France overwhelmed the Construction Division. “The Lord Himself could not meet the construction timetables and cost estimates,” reported a construction expert sent to assess the situation for the government. But that did not matter. Angered by the delay in the Army’s mobilization, Marshall’s staff complained that Hartman was “making a complete mess of the construction program.” Baldy, one critic said cuttingly, was a “nice old gentleman who was used to being bawled out by colonels’ wives over furnaces.” It was a cruel judgment, unfairly smearing an officer who in ordinary times would have been a fine construction chief. But Hartman’s best was not good enough
, not now.
Marshall had come to Stimson’s office the morning of December 11 to tell the secretary he intended to replace Hartman with Somervell. Stimson felt a bit queasy about axing Hartman, despite his deep dissatisfaction with construction progress. “It is a pathetic situation because Hartman has been a loyal and devoted man,” he wrote in his diary that day. “…But he apparently lacks the gift of organization and he has been running behind in the work.” Stimson approved the change.
The pressure had been building for weeks. The White House had threatened to take the construction program away from the Army and put it under civilian control. Momentum for the move waned as soon as Army officials let the White House know that Somervell would be put in charge. That satisfied the critics. Harry Hopkins, in particular, gave Somervell an “enthusiastic” endorsement.
Gregory, who was the Army’s quartermaster general and who in theory should decide who would head the Construction Division, still balked at the switch, not out of loyalty to Hartman, but because he did not in the least trust Somervell, whom he considered “brilliant, but slick.” Marshall’s deputy chief of staff, Major General Richard C. Moore, warned Gregory that unless he accepted Somervell, the entire construction program would be stripped from the Quartermaster Corps.
Gregory finally saw the light. Arriving in Hartman’s office, he wasted no time with pleasantries and informed Baldy that he was relieved at once from the Construction Division. “I did not give him the courtesy of a reply,” Hartman later said. He closed his desk and left his office.
Somervell was waiting in the wings. “Somervell walked in one door, and Hartman walked out the other,” Hartman’s secretary later recalled. Somervell had been eagerly preparing since November, when a Stimson adviser had asked if he would be interested in the position; before the job was even his, Somervell had launched a “whirlwind” four-state inspection tour and produced a fourteen-page report criticizing the construction program.