The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  Somervell soon issued instructions to build a fifth floor. It had never really been in doubt. Whatever problems the fifth floor was going to cause, and whatever the cost, Somervell was not going to turn down an invitation to make his building bigger. While he was at it, Somervell also approved converting more than 300,000 square feet of storage space in the basement into offices for more than a thousand employees, including the world’s biggest reproduction plant, where the War Department could do its own offset printing, mimeographing, and photo printing.

  No public announcement was made about the additions. Army documents submitted to Congress and published in the Congressional Record described the new space on the fifth floor as “Fourth floor—intermediate.” It was not unlike Somervell’s subterfuge of describing the first floor as the basement and the basement as the sub-basement.

  Nor was it the only subterfuge. The War Production Board, which oversaw the allocation of critical materials, “started to raise thunder” about steel window sashes ordered to build the fifth floor. Groves, suffering a case of “the jitters,” directed that Renshaw deceive the board by pretending the material was for the lower floors. “The only thing we want to be damn sure of is we get the material, and don’t make it look as though it’s being ordered for the top floor,” his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Donald Antes, told Renshaw on July 25.

  To further cover their tracks, they concocted a fiction that the War Department had always intended to include a fifth floor. “Here’s the story, as I see it: This story has been planned from the beginning and just deferred,” Renshaw suggested. He was sick of struggling with the board every time he needed materials for the building. “The War Department is having a hell of a time functioning over here,” Renshaw told Antes. “[T]hey’d better leave us alone if they want [us] to run this war.”

  Groves wanted Renshaw to get started on the new floor before anybody changed his mind. No plans had been drawn yet, but that was just a nicety. The builders would use schematic designs based on the construction of the lower floors while the actual plans were drawn. Without plans, it was impossible to say realistically how much the work would cost. “We can fake it, certainly, but we won’t have that design for two and a half months, although we’re going to start to build tomorrow,” Renshaw said.

  When they started construction of the new floor on July 25, workers did not even bother to rip out the old roof in some sections. To their surprise, crews renovating the Pentagon sixty years later discovered roofing tiles between the fourth and fifth floors. Even given this haste, the additional work meant that completion of the building would be pushed back six weeks, to January 1, 1943. “To get the whole thing in November 15th is more of a miracle than I want to bargain for,” Renshaw said.

  McCloy, you blackmailer

  One problem remained. Revised blueprints had been sent to Roosevelt, and the president was taking his fine time with them, exercising his architectural fancies, McCloy later recalled. Weeks passed, and construction of the fifth floor continued unabated, but eventually the president’s approval would have to be secured. Somervell enlisted McCloy’s aid to get the plans back from Roosevelt, but the assistant secretary had no luck. “Every time I tried it, the president would snap me over the fingers and say, ‘I’ve got some other ideas,’” McCloy recalled.

  Help came from an unlikely source: an unsavory, half-American Nazi named Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. Educated at Harvard, where his acquaintances included Roosevelt and T. S. Eliot, Putzi had been a member of Hitler’s inner circle from the days of the Beer Hall Putsch. He served as Hitler’s personal foreign press chief from 1933 to 1937. Fleeing Germany after falling out with the Nazis, Putzi was taken into British custody in 1939 and eventually moved to Canada. Roosevelt had personally arranged for his old Harvard classmate to be flown secretly to Washington on June 30, 1942, and put to work as an intelligence operative. He was taken to Fort Belvoir in Northern Virginia and began providing the White House with his assessments of the Nazi leadership. The British warned that Putzi was “an adventurer, untrustworthy and a liar,” and his intelligence estimates quickly proved to be of dubious value, but Roosevelt remained intrigued. Nonetheless, the president wanted to distance the White House from the project and asked for the War Department’s help. A White House aide spoke to McCloy. “Can’t you take Mr. Hanfstaengl…off the president’s budget?” the aide asked him.

  McCloy, ever the wheeler-dealer, saw an opportunity. “So I sent back word if we get those Pentagon blueprints okayed by FDR, I’ll take care of Mr. Hanfstaengl,” McCloy later said. “And that’s how we got them.”

  McCloy recalled that he helped arrange for a “safe sinecure” from which Putzi could continue his intelligence reports, and the revised Pentagon plans were approved. At the next cabinet meeting, Roosevelt saw the assistant secretary. “McCloy,” the president said, “you blackmailer!”

  Great strain

  Even as War Department employees moved into the Pentagon, the site remained a dangerous place. On the morning of June 20, James D. Mitchell, a fifty-seven-year-old ironworker from Washington, was directing the movement of a giant hoisting crane when it struck a high-tension wire. The cable broke and fell across wooden concrete forms, setting them afire. Mitchell pulled the wire away from the forms and was electrocuted. George R. Love heroically but foolishly tried to pull Mitchell away from the wire. The twenty-six-year-old laborer from Glen Burnie, Maryland, also died from the shock. A few weeks later, Percy Bailey, a thirty-five-year-old worker from Washington, was changing a tire on a concrete truck when the tire exploded and the rim flew off, hitting him in the throat and leg. He died at the hospital.

  A heat wave settled over the region in July, tormenting the workers with high temperatures and stupefying humidity. Thomas Lauria, a fifty-five-year-old cement finisher from Staten Island, collapsed on the job late on the afternoon of July 17 and died soon afterward of prostration. Thousands of Washingtonians, desperate for a breeze, abandoned their homes at night to sleep in Rock Creek Park or other open areas. Wilting in the heat, Henry Stimson fled to the cool climes of the Adirondacks at the end of the month. Escaping the city regularly was a necessity for him—Stimson considered the climate in Washington to be “designed for the destruction of the sanity of government officials.”

  Even Paul Hauck, the great rock of the Pentagon construction, was starting to crack. With the job more than half done, McShain’s job superintendent had yet to take a day off, sometimes working twenty-two hours straight, and never less than fifteen hours a day. Hauck, McShain noticed, “was beginning to show the great strain he was under in driving the project.”

  Against Hauck’s will, McShain ordered his superintendent to take a two-week vacation. McShain would personally supervise the Pentagon construction during his absence. It was a typical McShain gesture—the generous solicitousness toward his loyal employees. But also typically, McShain could not resist turning his stint into a competition. McShain raced all over the site night and day, coaxing and prodding workers to pick up speed and outdo Hauck’s pace. His target was Hauck’s record of 2,250 cubic yards of concrete poured in one day.

  Hauck, too wound up to relax, spent his vacation traveling to different parts of the country to expedite shipment of building materials to the Pentagon. The day before Hauck returned to work, McShain and Lew Edwards, one of the section supervisors, were on their feet eighteen hours supervising a new record concrete pour, 2,875 cubic yards. Hauck came back to the job only to hear McShain’s endless boasting about how the boss had set a new record for the job. The record stood, too.

  One day I’ll be famous

  The job and the weather were taking their toll on McShain as well—he had lost eight pounds in the heat subbing for Hauck, and he punctured his foot walking around the site. McShain had to answer to a higher authority. His wife, Mary, watching her husband for signs of a physical or mental breakdown, ordered him on vacation. “Mother would use these words: ‘John, go upstairs and get the s
uitcases. We have to go away,’” Polly McShain recalled. “She knew it was either sickness, death, or a vacation, and she would not let him kill himself.”

  Yet there was little time for McShain to relax. Building a bigger Pentagon, McShain wanted assurances he would be paid accordingly. By the terms of the contract, the builders were to be paid a fixed fee of $524,000. The contract had provisions for increasing the fee, but the amount depended on how much space was added, a figure open to interpretation given a building as vast as the Pentagon. “There’s loads of tricks to this figuring on this building,” Renshaw observed.

  The Army put McShain off, insisting in August that the matter be settled only after the building was finished. “We’ll have one grand fight instead of a lot of little ones,” a budget official explained. McShain—“a pretty hard customer,” in Renshaw’s words—yelled long and hard, but to no avail. Groves, as usual, was entirely unsympathetic. “If he’d been as much interested in doing the job cheaply as he is in fighting for this little amount of fee, why, we’d have saved a lot of dollars,” he told Renshaw.

  Meanwhile, open warfare broke out among the contractors over the wording of a dedication plaque naming the principals in the building’s creation that was to be placed at the Pentagon’s Mall entrance. The inscription approved by Renshaw in late July listed John McShain, Inc., as the contractor, and the two Virginia firms, Doyle & Russell and Wise Contracting Company, Inc., as “associated contractors.” The Virginia firms objected, insisting that the wording on the panel match the language of the contract, which listed all three companies as contractors.

  Contract or not, it was a presumptuous complaint. The Virginia firms had served primarily as underwriters for the project, each contributing 20 percent of the financing and each receiving 20 percent of the fee. Except for one man—John F. O’Grady of Doyle & Russell, chief accountant for the job—the two Virginia firms supplied managers only in minor supervisory roles. “There is no question but that Mr. McShain has received little assistance from the other firms in this venture,” Groves noted. “…They have taken little if any part in the management of operations, or in the solution of the many difficult construction problems.”

  Indeed, the first time Hobart E. Doyle, president of Doyle & Russell, visited the Pentagon site was when he came to complain about the wording on the plaque. “Whoever it was, it was the first time I’d ever seen him,” said Groves.

  The contrast with McShain was obvious. Arguments about fees were one thing, but to McShain the plaque was sacrosanct. It represented the recognition of the ages that he, John McShain, had built the Pentagon.

  Renshaw and Groves backed McShain, but the argument raged through August. Lee Paschall, the president of Wise, visited Renshaw’s office on August 29 and was so abusive that Renshaw threatened to call the Pentagon police to escort him out of the office. Paschall apologized and Renshaw accepted it, but Groves was unforgiving, considering the contractor’s behavior “disgraceful and disrespectful.” Groves dismissed the Virginia firms’ demands. “We can force them to accept anything,” Groves told Renshaw.

  However, the Virginia firms had an important benefactor—Representative Clifton Woodrum, the Virginia congressman largely responsible for getting them the contract. Woodrum called Somervell August 31, and during their chummy conversation they settled the matter in less than a minute. “These people, the Virginia contractors, they’re just a little bit upset,” Woodrum explained. “They have a little pride of authorship in that building.” Would it be all right to list all the contractors equally?

  “Oh absolutely,” Somervell said. “I’ll have it done right away.”

  That was that. The limestone plaque was installed on the Mall entrance not long afterward. There was no ceremony and no photographs; the date was not even recorded. The job was “too rushed to take the time,” Hauck recalled. The stone had Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name at the top, followed by Henry L. Stimson, Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, and General George C. Marshall. (Patterson’s middle initial was mistakenly carved as “B” and later corrected, but the change remains obvious.) Below were the officers directly responsible, including Somervell, Groves, and Renshaw. Next were the chief architects, Edwin Bergstrom and his replacement, David Witmer. (There had been debate about including Witmer, but Renshaw insisted; Witmer had solved numerous design conundrums after Bergstrom’s departure.) Next were the contractors; as consolation, McShain was listed above Doyle & Russell and Wise, a first among equals, at least. Last was the builders’ manager, J. Paul Hauck.

  Just before the rectangular panel was placed in the wall, two more names were added, unbeknownst to almost all. Captain Bob Furman and Major Charles H. Smith, Renshaw’s operations officer, took some tar and impishly wrote their names on the back of the stone. “Roosevelt’s on the front, and we’re on the back,” Furman later said. “One day, I’ll be famous.”

  Hell-an-gone

  Why anyone would want his name on the building in the first place was beyond the comprehension of the plank walkers. As summer wore on, the good-natured patience of Marjorie Hanshaw and the other government girls was wearing thin. “Hell-an-gone” was one of the nicer nicknames they came up with for the place. Some employees claimed that the architect had gone insane after his design was completed; others insisted he was insane before he started.

  The more people moved in, the more chaotic the place got. The question of racial segregation in the cafeteria had been settled, but the food operation was still an endless headache for McShain and Renshaw. Between the construction workers and the War Department employees, they were feeding as many as 25,000 people, going through two tons of meat, four tons of vegetables, and 625 gallons of coffee every day. “I am inclined to believe that the task was even greater than that of erecting the building,” McShain later remarked.

  There was no kitchen in the building nor would there be one until the end of the year, when the permanent cafeteria was built. Groves deemed temporary stoves a fire risk, so food was prepared in the construction workers’ cafeteria in a big frame building with a kitchen the size of a football field. Hot food was loaded into vacuum containers and delivered by truck several hundred yards to the Pentagon.

  Two temporary dining rooms now operated in huge unoccupied office bays, and together with the construction cafeteria, there was seating for ten thousand people—if only employees could get through the long lines. The thirty minutes that war workers were allowed for lunch simply was not enough. “It takes that much time to walk to the cafeteria and stand in line to wait your turn,” complained J. H. Beswick of Washington. “If you are too long waiting you make a dash for the beverage bar only to learn that the things they call sandwiches are all gone. There is no other place to eat, no time to go elsewhere. You have to eat this outfit’s food or do without.”

  Those eating in the Pentagon dining rooms complained of flies and dust or worse. In June a young Ordnance clerk reported to first-aid carrying a “filthy, lousy” sandwich he said he had bought at the cafeteria and had made him ill. Simultaneously, an anonymous caller telephoned the newspapers to report the sandwich was infested with maggots. The story unraveled like a dimestore detective novel. Renshaw ordered the first-aid nurse “to hold the person and the sandwich” and rushed over officers to investigate. “The first thing we found out were the bread and the meat were entirely different brands than we used,” Renshaw told Groves. Under interrogation by Furman and two other officers, the kid admitted the sandwich was planted, but said he “wasn’t going to squeal on anybody.” Renshaw suspected a union operation aimed at embarrassing the contractors.

  Nonetheless, most complaints were coming from employees who needed no instruction from the unions or anyone else. “If the city has an epidemic, it will be a safe bet where it started,” wrote the Times-Herald.

  Groves worried obsessively about the complaints, convinced that as much as any other feature, food service would determine whether people considered the building a succ
ess. He ordered Renshaw to inspect the cafeteria regularly for cleanliness and to make sure the silverware was polished. “I think until I stop getting complaints, you’d better eat there about every other day,” Groves told Renshaw on July 30.

  “That’s a permanent assignment, Colonel,” Renshaw protested. “Because they’re never going to stop complaining.”

  Groves was particularly worried about conditions in several dining rooms reserved for Army officers. “Have you got some good-looking hostesses in those other rooms?” he asked Renshaw.

  “Beautiful, Colonel,” Renshaw replied.

  “How many have you got?”

  “One in each room.”

  “Well, you better double that number, and get them better-looking,” Groves ordered.

  Still dissatisfied, Groves took to sending an officer on undercover missions to inspect conditions in the cafeteria. After receiving the spy’s reports, Groves sent Renshaw a memorandum on August 6 complaining of “a considerable fly problem” and critiquing in detail the condition of the butter patties: “The individual butter pats were piled six deep, separated by layers of oil paper but were in an unsightly condition and had a strong scent inasmuch as no ice had been placed around or underneath the butter.”

  Renshaw was infuriated. Here he was trying to construct the world’s largest office building in record time and Groves was sending spies to examine the butter patties? Renshaw reported the butter was now being iced, and as for the flies, workers were spending three hours every morning spraying. “Instead of starting at 5 A.M. we come in there at 3 A.M. and spray everything,” Renshaw said. “If we spray anymore we’ll be poisoning the people.”