by Steve Vogel
September 11, 1941
The heat finally broke on September 11, 1941. The mercury had reached a miserable, sultry ninety-six degrees the day before, marking “the hottest September 10 in Washington weather annals,” The Washington Post noted. Seven cases of heat prostration and one drowning were reported. During the night a wedge of cold air from the Great Lakes reached the region, scattering the tropical front that had broiled Washington. The temperature dropped twenty degrees overnight, and Thursday, September 11, dawned as the sort of perfect late-summer day that sometimes blesses Washington, with a crystal-clear blue sky and a hint of fall in the air.
The cool air sweeping over the dusty job site in Arlington was accompanied by news from the War Department: The new construction contract had been signed and approved by all parties, and a notice to proceed had been granted by letter that day from the secretary of war’s office. At 9:45 that morning, Renshaw, McShain, Hauck, and Bergstrom met at Groves’s office at Construction Division headquarters. They had approval to begin.
There was no ceremony, no digging of a first spadeful, no recording of the moment. They simply got to work. Steam shovels operated by men from Potts & Callahan dug into the heavy clay and began leveling the ground for Section A, on the south. It was the side farthest away from the river, away from the low airport land, on more or less flat ground—the best part of the site with the least potential of causing problems.
Somervell had eight pile drivers ready to go, but neither the Commission of Fine Arts nor the National Capital Park and Planning Commission had given final approval to the layout of the building. Moreover, foundation plans showing where the piles were to be driven were ready for only twenty of the five thousand pile caps the building would need. “We…found ourselves in the sad predicament of starting construction with practically no plans whatever,” McShain later said.
Regardless, the general gave orders for workers to start driving piles the following day. “We are starting three pile drivers to work tomorrow on those parts of the building where we feel we can do so without any lost motion,” Somervell wrote on September 11 to planning commissioner Frederic Delano. The general wanted quick approval by the commissions “so that we can put all eight of our pile drivers on the job.”
Alexander Surles, the Army chief of public relations, had asked permission to issue a press release about the new contract. Somervell approved only on condition that no real information be included, in keeping with his earlier instructions. “The amount of the contract should not be given to the press in view of the fact that plans are not yet developed to the point where the cost of this building can be determined,” Somervell told Surles.
The four-sentence press release September 11 was a model of nonspecificity, saying only that a contract to build the new War Department building in Arlington had been awarded that day to McShain and the two Virginia contractors, Doyle & Russell and Wise Contracting. “The contract is on a cost-plus-a-fixed-fee basis, and the amount will be determined by plans for the building as finally approved,” the release stated.
In fact, the construction authorization included specific amounts. The construction contract was for $31.1 million, including a fixed fee of $524,000 for McShain and the Virginia contractors. The Army, which would provide all the engineering save mechanical, was allotted $1 million for those services. An additional $265,000 would cover outside architect and engineer fees. The Quartermaster General’s office would receive $809,000 for overhead costs, bringing the total to $33.2 million.
Somervell was correct in a larger sense: Those numbers bore no relation to reality. Groves protested to Somervell that the estimates were too low, but the general refused to raise them, pointing out he had already doubled Bergstrom’s original estimate of $17.5 million. In any event, Somervell was not about to alert Congress or anyone else that there were doubts as to whether the building could be constructed for even the $35 million he had promised for the original, larger proposal. Army budget officers wanted some of the $35 million back, but Somervell refused to give the money up. He knew he would need every cent. Indeed, the size of the building was creeping upward. The gross area, as recorded September 7 in the personal notebook of David Witmer, the deputy chief architect, was nearly 4.4 million square feet—not a whole lot smaller than the 5.1 million square feet of Somervell’s original proposal.
The press release also made no mention of the fact that work at the site had begun, and the papers took no notice. Much was happening in the world on September 11. At his headquarters in the Munitions Building, Stimson received “disturbing news” about the German siege of Leningrad, which had begun three days earlier. At least fifteen Russian divisions were entirely cut off within the city, he was told.
At the White House, a grim Roosevelt was putting the final touches on a much-anticipated fireside chat he would make to the nation that night. The speech, postponed by his mother’s funeral, would respond to a September 4 incident southeast of Greenland in the North Atlantic in which a German U-boat had fired several torpedoes at an American destroyer. The U.S. ship, the Greer, was not wholly innocent, having aggressively tailed the submarine, but Roosevelt had seized upon the incident as a way of whipping up support for his controversial decision to have the Navy escort British supply vessels in the Atlantic.
At 9 P.M. on the night of September 11, Roosevelt addressed the nation from the White House, his words carried on every radio network in the land and sent around the world by shortwave. The president spoke somberly, a black band of mourning on his left arm. “The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility,” he said. “The danger is here now.”
Roosevelt announced he had issued orders to the Navy to shoot on sight any Axis warship found in American defensive waters, a broad definition that included much of the North Atlantic. At Woodley, his eighteen-acre estate in Northwest Washington, Stimson listened to the address, encouraged that after much back and forth Roosevelt was taking such a strong position. “It was the firmest statement and the most forward position yet taken by the President and I heard it with a great sense of relief,” he wrote. Roosevelt, as historian James MacGregor Burns observed, “was in effect declaring naval war on Germany…. The Atlantic cold war was over. Now it was a hot war.” Passions in living rooms around the country were enflamed by Roosevelt’s powerful words: “[W]hen you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.”
Across the river in Arlington the next morning, the pile driving began.
Those damn pile drivers
The pounding was incessant and inescapable. Hydraulic hammers struck steel time and time again, driving deep into the ground, and continuing around the clock. The metronomic drumming energized Joe Allan as he hammered together wooden forms. It “created a lively pulsation and rhythm of continuous activity on the job site,” he recalled.
Major Gar Davidson, working exhausting hours for Groves in the Construction Division, was less enamored of the racket. At night he would retreat to the Arlington apartment where he lived with his wife and two young boys a mile away from the construction site. Trying to sleep, Davidson found home was no sanctuary from work. “I could hear them all night long, those damn pile drivers,” he later said.
The sedimentary soil at the site—layers of loam, silt, sand, gravel, and water-bearing material—was not good for driving piles and would only get worse the closer they got to the river.
The engineers had briefly considered using wood piles, the cheapest option, but quickly rejected the idea when they realized that with variable water conditions in the ground, “their life would be limited and uncertain” in any event, suppliers would have difficulty providing the huge amount needed. Steel piles were in short supply and could not be used. The Raymond Concrete Pile Company had the answer: cast-in-place concrete piles.
These were corrugated casings of sheet metal with a steel core, or mandrel, fitted inside. The pile drivers, rising high like oil d
erricks, drove the mandrels to the required depth; then the steel core was pulled out and replaced by concrete poured into the corrugated sheath. The casings, each projecting about a foot above grade, looked like tombstones from a distance. They were driven in clusters of three to twelve piles, depending on the load they would carry; each pile was capable of bearing at least thirty tons.
After concrete was poured into the casings, Allan and other carpenters went to work. Two-man teams assembled four-foot-high wood forms around each cluster. Steel reinforcing grids were put inside, and then concrete was poured into the forms to create pile caps that would serve as the base for building columns. These caps would be the rafts upon which the foundation would be laid. It was a tried and true technique—Renaissance builders in Italy used piled-raft foundations in cities such as Pisa and Florence, where the land was soft, wet, and flat. At the Pentagon, the technique was being applied on a scale never before seen.
After a week they had sunk about a hundred piles, but it was only a start, the equivalent of banging a few dozen nails into a soggy field. This site would need five thousand caps, meaning probably forty thousand piles, the engineers estimated, more than one for every occupant the building was supposed to hold. The first piles had to be driven twenty or thirty feet into the ground before they hit bedrock. Later, workers drilled fifty and even sixty feet down before they met real resistance. Some of the piles disappeared into the muck, never to be seen again.
A week after ground was broken, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission again discussed the building. Planning director John Nolen, unaware that ground had been broken, suggested that commissioners rearrange the layout of the site. The building, Nolen said, should be moved back from the river and oriented “to some important feature on the Washington side.”
Brigadier General Reybold, the Army Corps of Engineers representative to the commission, broke the news that Somervell now had eight machines driving piles. “I think he is committed to that location,” Reybold said.
This infernal hole
Somervell was indeed committed. A thousand men were on-site, working in a miniature dust bowl. The earth-shattering pounding of pile drivers was accompanied by the grinding of cement mixers and banging of hammers. At night, the spirals of dust, illuminated by flood lights, looked like columns of fire from across the river.
The cool weather that had greeted groundbreaking had been quickly followed by another heat wave. It was the driest September in fifty-seven years—barely half an inch of rain in the entire month and not a drop for nineteen straight days. In his diary, Henry Stimson cursed “this infernal hole they call Washington” and felt his vitality—so remarkable for a seventy-four-year-old man—sapped by the hot weather. “The flatness of the atmosphere is beyond belief,” he wrote.
Workers, many wearing overalls and grimy shirts with caps or hats on their heads, had bought into the idea that they were racing the clock. “We’ll have government clerks in here in April,” a sweating construction worker boasted.
On September 19, Groves ordered crews to work forty-eight hour weeks, which meant plenty of overtime. Construction was under way seven days a week. To keep workers from straying off the site to eat, McShain brought in a lunch cart, a humble start to what would become a vast food operation.
After two weeks, hundreds of thirty-foot piles had been sunk and capped, and atop some of them building columns had been poured. On September 25, concrete was poured for the first part of the floor slab for Section A.
What was left of Hell’s Bottom quickly came tumbling down. A handful of wood and cardboard shacks, still sporadically occupied by about fifteen people, were knocked down by Hauck’s men. “When I say shacks, these were really, really rough shacks,” recalled Lieutenant Bob Furman, Renshaw’s executive officer. “There was a lot of low-life down there, prostitution. They just left. I don’t think we thought much about their welfare.”
Wrecking balls knocked down the brick buildings and smokestacks of the fertilizer plant, the oil refining companies, and other factories along Route 1. The pawnshops were torn down as well, to the shock of their clients. Furman watched people riding the bus from Washington get off at Route 1 and Columbia Pike, clutching items to pawn or tickets to redeem, looking surprised. Washington-Hoover Airport was taken over by the Army, which unceremoniously canceled the leases of all flying organizations. All commercial air traffic had already moved downriver to National Airport, but private aircraft still regularly flew in and out of the old airport, posing a danger to “life and property,” Renshaw complained. Furman posted a notice at the airport September 23 ordering flying terminated. Some pilots simply ignored the order, landing and taking off even as heavy equipment tore up the runways.
The airport pool was shut down too. Furman delivered a check to the owners and returned after the place had closed. Water had been drained from the pool and the office was strewn with paper. Furman found a box of season passes for the pool, which he impishly signed and handed out to friends.
By early October, the framework for the first floor of Section A was rising rapidly. Carpenters banged together wooden forms for the columns, which rose like a string of watchtowers. Workers prepared to pour concrete for another section of slab. “It was moving along,” said Joe Allan, the young carpenter. “It was kind of a frantic pace, a rhythm.”
When construction started, the rolling 320-acre site varied in elevation from as low as eight feet above sea level on the old airport grounds to fifty-five feet farther west. The western two-thirds of the building was to be constructed on ground that averaged forty feet above sea level, while the eastern third was being placed on land only ten feet above sea level. Some six million cubic yards of earth would be required to raise the lower areas above flood stage, as well as to properly grade the land for roads and parking lots. It was more earth than had ever been moved to construct a building. “That is one record that will probably stand for all time,” Popular Mechanics observed.
The excavation and grading operation grew rapidly from modest beginnings; several horse-drawn excavators helped move dirt during the first weeks of construction due to equipment shortages, to Renshaw’s dismay. Potts & Callahan, the subcontractor in charge of excavation and grading, soon built up a fleet of 376 pieces of heavy equipment, including 230 dump trucks, 60 tractors and bulldozers, 19 steam shovels, and 10 cranes, and the horses were retired.
Bulldozers and steam shovels leveled off high ground and trucks carried the earth to lower ground. But more fill was needed than what was available at the site. Some two million cubic yards of earth would have to be trucked in from excavation sites all around Washington. Fill left from the construction of National Airport was used. Tons of earth came from the hills of Rock Creek Park in Washington, where a bridle path was being widened. More fill came from nearby Fort Myer.
Dump trucks lumbering to and from the construction site clogged Washington roads, to the irritation of drivers. Laborers waved red flags to stop traffic on heavily traveled Arlington Ridge Road, backing up cars for a half-mile to make way for trucks coming in and out of the site. “Streams of trucks follow each other on mysterious but purposeful ways, dropping dollops of dirt that flatten out under many wheels and merge with the asphalt,” The Washington Post reported.
The Army had considered constructing a levee along the west bank of the channel to make the low land safe for building. Somervell elected to instead raise the low ground eight feet or more, to eighteen feet above sea level. Boundary Channel, an arm of the Potomac that ran along the airport and formed a small lagoon, would be dug out and the lagoon enlarged by thirty acres. This would provide fill and improve the looks of the site; but the lagoon had another purpose, critical to the rapid construction of the building. It would serve as a harbor for a concrete batching plant to be built along the waterside. River barges would be able to deliver sand and gravel directly to the site, cutting time and expense.
In the first weeks of construction, the lagoon wa
s attacked from both land and water. Dredges scooped out silt and deepened the channel. Working behind the safety of a clay dike, steam shovels excavated the ground next to the channel. Workers drove well points—hollow pointed rods—into the ground and pumped out water, lowering the water table and further protecting against flooding. The excavators dug fourteen feet below the normal high-tide level of the Potomac. Then a dipper dredge—a floating dredging machine with a machine-operated bucket working on an arm—opened a passage through the dike. The batching plant, constructed simultaneously, was soon ready for deliveries.
More than one million cubic yards of ground was excavated to enlarge the lagoon, and the muck was dumped immediately to the northwest, raising the level of that ground. In effect, more than a hundred acres of marginal land was being converted into seventy acres of usable land. Ironically, tons of dirt that Potts & Callahan trucks had hauled to Washington-Hoover Airport five years earlier to fill low areas had to be dug out to expand the lagoon. “We have accomplished a total of nothing,” a worker groused.
We’d better leave town
A month after groundbreaking, a fundamental decision had yet to be made: What material would be used to construct the building’s walls?
The original plan was to make the building’s exterior brick. Somervell had told a House subcommittee in July that limestone was not being considered. “We did not even dream of getting anything that good,” he had said. Yet the tentative plans now called for 150,000 cubic yards of Indiana limestone on the building’s exterior.
The light-colored, fine-grained stone was known for its durability and ease of shaping. It had been used in city halls, churches, and statehouses across the land, as well as the National Cathedral in Washington and the Empire State Building in Manhattan. McShain had pushed for limestone on the building’s exterior. “I am sure that we all want to be quite proud of this building after it is finished,” McShain wrote Groves. “Therefore it is essential that the exterior of the building be very presentable in order to avoid public criticism.”