by Steve Vogel
Renshaw had proudly displayed a gold star that had been awarded the cafeteria by the Arlington County Health Department. The undercover officer recommended that it “be removed entirely, or placed in an obscure location, inasmuch as this undeserved trophy is regarded with manifest scorn by the diners.”
The plank walkers reserved their greatest scorn for the sweltering conditions inside the Pentagon. Air-conditioning was still a novelty for many Washington workers, but in most buildings they could at least open windows and doors to get a draft. In the Pentagon, most workers were stationed far from any openings. Those close to the windows, like Lucille Ramale, were not necessarily better off—the construction was right outside. “When the noise got so bad, and the dust got so bad, we couldn’t even open the windows,” she said. “So I remember getting combs to put my hair up off my neck, because it was so hot. You’d just ruin your clothes because you’d just sweat them completely wet every day. It was miserable.”
Air-conditioning the Pentagon was an unprecedented challenge for the relatively young technology. Not only was the building far bigger than anything previously air-conditioned, its seven-thousand-plus windows and low, spread-out design left it extremely vulnerable to changes in outdoor temperature.
Charles S. Leopold, a renowned Philadelphia mechanical engineer who had air-conditioned big buildings such as the New York Stock Exchange and Madison Square Garden, had been hired by Somervell for $85,600 to design the heating and cooling for the Pentagon. Leopold set up the largest air-conditioning system of its kind, with twelve centrifugal compressors manufactured by the Carrier Corporation of Syracuse, New York. They operated on huge amounts of water—46,600 gallons of water were pumped per minute from the Pentagon lagoon and carried to the building through a 1,200-foot tunnel, where it was chilled by the compressors to forty-three degrees and used to cool the air. The system may have been impressive, but in the hot summer of 1942, with temperatures soaring and more than ten thousand employees in the building, the air-conditioning was simply not working.
It was impossible to cool the building, given it was still a construction site with large sections open to the sweltering humidity. More than three thousand employees were working in areas with no air-conditioning, and there was little hope of getting it to them before the end of August. Huge fans were installed to improve air circulation in the building, but the plank walkers remained thoroughly unimpressed.
The situation here is tragic
The final insult was the commute. Epic traffic jams were being reported with only a fraction of the employees in the building. “The afternoon outbound trip is something like a retreat from Singapore,” the Washington Daily News wrote May 27.
The maze of roads around the building was not even half completed. All around the building, roadbeds were being graded, bridges built, pavement poured, and overpasses constructed. The trip was a nightmare for drivers—routes to the building seemed to change every day. Hundreds of cars would end up lost every day, “their drivers completely confused and befuddled, not knowing whether they were going toward the building or in the opposite direction,” McShain later said.
Military police directed the traffic, but it seemed to make little difference. “We’re putting on more MPs, and they run them around in more circles,” Renshaw complained.
Drivers who did make it to the building found parking saturated. By June, spaces had been paved for three thousand cars, but with nearly twenty thousand construction workers and War Department employees, they went fast. Those who were able to find a spot often would have trouble finding their cars after work. A layer of fine Virginia clay dust stirred up by the construction coated every vehicle in the lot, giving them all the same orange-red color. Robert Sanders, a Services of Supply employee, took to tying a colored ribbon to his radio antenna so he could spot his car.
Traveling by bus was not a pleasant option. Nelson Clayton, an eighteen-year-old from the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains working as a telephone installer, paid a nickel every morning for an adventurous bus ride from his sister’s home in Arlington. “You’d ride the bus in, if they could find a way in,” Clayton recalled. “But they’d get lost, the roads would change, they’d stop out in the middle of the fields and you’d have to walk in through the mud. ‘There’s the building, we don’t know how to get there.’ You’d hike in half a mile maybe.”
In the evening, employees swarmed out of the building and into long lines to cram onto scarce buses. “Girls would smack each other over the head with their purses to get into the buses,” secretary Marie Dowling Owen later said. Most were left behind, coated with dust.
The Capital Transit Company, the largest of three private companies that served the building, had thirty-five buses, about two hundred short of what they would need once the building was finished. There was little immediate prospect of getting more, since the War Production Board had frozen the manufacture of buses. Those that existed were mostly wheezing old heaps. The ancient red bus Hanshaw rode home one day was unable to even climb up Columbia Pike. She and the other passengers got off and walked so the bus could make it up the hill.
Getting to and from the building was such a nightmare that a War Department official suggested the top two floors be converted into dormitories. Numerous war workers demanded transfers to other agencies to escape the Pentagon; others resigned from the government altogether. Plank walkers were going public with their criticisms. “Some may reproach us, and some do, for complaining about working conditions when our boys are dying in fox-holes,” an anonymous war worker wrote in a letter to the Times-Herald published September 5.
However we would like to inform the general public about our working conditions. Primarily we spend approximately three hours daily traveling to and from work.
We don’t mind the crowded conditions of the transportation vehicles, for we have already completed our course in the sardine stance. We don’t mind the poor air conditioning that causes one to perspire during the hot weather…. We don’t mind catching apermanent cold or dying of rheumatism. We wouldn’t mind the devil himself if we might be able to buy a decent lunch during our half hour recreation period.
The situation here is tragic. When this building is completed forty thousand people will be employed within this geometric castle. Forty thousand people ill-housed and ill-fed. The Army marches on its stomach—what about the War Department?
The most fantastic operation
General George Marshall, at least, did not think the situation entirely tragic. Throughout the construction, Marshall had been a frequent visitor to the Pentagon, often trotting down from Fort Myer during his evening horseback ride on Prepare, his chestnut gelding, to watch the progress. He and Somervell toured the building in August, and Marshall declared himself impressed with the cafeteria. On a September morning a few weeks later, Renshaw warned Paul Hauck that Marshall would be arriving in thirty minutes to inspect the Pentagon with a visitor. Marshall wanted to show off the building to British Field Marshal Sir John Dill, chief of the British military delegation in Washington. Personable and forthright, Dill had forged a close relationship with the Americans, particularly the Army chief of staff, and he had single-handedly improved the tenor of British–U.S. military cooperation.
Hauck took Marshall and Dill up to the roof, where they could see the entire project. Reaching the edge, the generals looked over a vast panorama of men and bulldozers, trucks and steam shovels moving in every direction, raising spirals of dust. The building was more than 80 percent complete and now home to about seventeen thousand war workers. Concrete was being poured for the upper floors of Section E, the last of the five sections. Workers were constructing the fifth floor atop the interior rings. All around the Pentagon, they could see a bewildering mix of half-built roads, intersections, and overpasses—many of them standing incongruously alone, like bridges in a desert.
Marshall and Dill surveyed the scene without speaking. The longer they looked, the more nervous Ha
uck grew. Finally Marshall asked Dill for his impressions. After a pause, Dill replied. “George, I’m speechless,” he said. “This is the most fantastic operation I have ever witnessed. It’s unbelievable.” The Pentagon, he told Marshall, was one of the most amazing buildings in the world. The building made a further impression on the visitors when Marshall and Dill wandered down a corridor with David Witmer, the chief architect, and were soon entirely lost. Hauck managed to track down the party and rescue the heart of the Anglo-American military alliance.
Even before its completion, the Pentagon was entering the national consciousness as a vast, unfathomable maze. A soon-to-be-famous joke made its first known appearance in print on August 17 in the Washington Post: “And have you heard this one? About the War Department messenger who got lost in the Pentagon Building in Arlington and came out a lieutenant colonel.” Almost everyone had heard it before long. It was told on the radio and in wire service accounts appearing across the United States. With time, the joke evolved and generally involved a freckled-faced Western Union messenger boy who went into the Pentagon to deliver a telegram on Monday and walked out Friday a full colonel; others insisted he came out a major. Another popular story told of a visitor who was hopelessly lost in the Pentagon. Sitting down at an empty desk to rest his feet, he was promptly outfitted with a phone, blotter, desk set, and secretary.
Soon after Marshall and Dill went missing, large wooden pentagonal-shaped maps showing the building floor plans were put up in all corridors, with arrows identifying the viewer’s location. They only helped a little. Lieutenant Katharine Stull, a Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps officer from Muskogee, Oklahoma, was striding down a Pentagon corridor when she noticed an Army captain staring uncomprehendingly at a wall map.
“Sir, may I help you?” Stull asked.
“Lady, I’m lost,” the captain responded. “But don’t tell me where to go. Lead me by the hand!”
Among all the visitors to the Pentagon that summer, perhaps none was more bewildered than an investigator sent by the Bureau of the Budget, the White House agency headed by Harold Smith, who had been so skeptical of Somervell’s project in the first place. The unnamed investigator was not lost, but he did spend five days in August inspecting the project, reviewing plans, specifications, and official records, and interviewing McShain, Renshaw, and others. What he learned shocked him. By his calculations, the building would reach an estimated size of 6.6 million gross square feet, which was far bigger than what had been initially proposed. Groves had told the congressional committee in June that the building was four million gross square feet, a figure the War Department repeated in a press release in July. Even Somervell’s original, grandiose proposal a year earlier had encompassed only 5.1 million gross square feet, before it was cut back under pressure.
Moreover, the investigator figured, the Pentagon’s cost was far beyond the $35 million approved by Congress a year earlier. It was far beyond the $49 million cost that Somervell had reported to Congress in May. It was $25 million beyond that, in fact.
“This project, with its building, access roads, parking areas, landscaping, terraces, utilities, all estimated to cost in excess of $74,000,000…is an entirely different project than that which was placed before Congress during the summer of 1941,” the investigator wrote in his August 31, 1942, report, which was not made public.
The only similarity between the building, as proposed, and that now being constructed is its intended use. The location of the site, the design and architecture of the building, and the cost of the project or building is in no way similar to that which was presented to Congress.
Information as to who was directly responsible for the radical change is very meagre.
1943 illustration from Popular Mechanics showing how many Capitol buildings could fit into the Pentagon.
Washington’s demon investigator
Albert Engel had a pretty good idea who might be responsible. Like the anonymous investigator from the Bureau of the Budget, Engel, a Republican congressman from Michigan, had been poking around the Pentagon construction site over the summer of 1942. As fall approached, Engel was taking dead aim at Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell.
Engel was “Washington’s demon one-man investigating committee,” in the words of the Saturday Evening Post. The “mop-haired, jug-shaped” congressman specialized in dropping in unexpectedly on Army camps, munitions plants, and other military installations under construction around the country. Engel would cram his 5' 7? 235-pound body behind the steering wheel of his car and take off for days or weeks, his stuffed briefcase and a paper sack with sandwiches and an apple on the seat next to him. To avoid tipping off his presence, Engel would arrive in town around dusk and find accommodations in a rooming house or a fleabag hotel. More often than not, workers at the plant he was investigating would be staying there too, and they would be quizzed by the visitor. By midnight, Engel would station himself at a neighborhood hamburger joint, pumping workers coming off the evening shift for more intelligence. After a few hours’ sleep, he would be up at dawn and report to work with the morning shift.
By the time authorities learned of his presence, it would be too late. Armed with his findings, Engel would interrogate the project’s officers and contractors, taking voluminous notes with a stubby pencil on ruled yellow paper and typing them up at night. By sundown he would be on his way to the next project on his list. “Usually, they fire off a sixteen-gun salute, wine and dine you and then say ‘Goodbye and God bless you,’ but I went in as a worker and talked with everyone—a time-keeper here, a carpenter there, and I took a picture here and there,” he proudly said.
Engel was nothing if not dogged. During one extended tour of defense plants, his car broke down and he left it at a repair shop in Detroit. Engel continued to Ohio in a new automobile, but was struck by a train as he crossed railroad tracks. The car was destroyed and Engel was rushed to a hospital in Akron suffering lacerations to his scalp and two black eyes.
“No anesthetic,” Engel told the emergency room physician. “I’m in sort of a hurry.” An hour and twenty-two stitches later, Engel was on his way in a taxicab to the train station, ready to resume his journey.
In early 1941, after discovering that the Army was running a deficit of more than $300 million in its construction program, Engel launched his most ambitious tour yet. Somervell, then head of the Construction Division, solicitously offered to arrange the trip for Engel and provide an Army officer to serve as his guide (and doubtless as a spy for Somervell), but the congressman would have none of it. Over the course of several weeks, driving alone through snow and weather as cold as fifteen degrees below zero, Engel covered fourteen thousand miles and made unannounced visits to thirteen construction projects from upstate New York to northern Florida. “He had four generals backed into a corner, peppering them with questions,” said a fellow congressman who happened to be visiting Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at the same time as Engel in mid-February. “They looked as if they would rather have been facing a firing squad.” An officer at Fort Bragg telephoned Groves to warn that Engel planned to attack the Construction Division when he returned to Washington. “Encourage him to go further away,” Groves replied.
Engel did make it back to Washington and presented his findings on the floor of the House on April 3, 1941, mincing no words. “I say here and now that the officers in the United States Army who…are responsible for this willful, extravagant and outrageous waste of the taxpayers’ money, ought to be court-martialed and kicked out of the Army,” he declared.
Somervell was irritated, considering an attack on his methods to be tantamount to an attack on the United States. “I have been speculating, without being able to get an answer in my own mind, as to just what help these speeches are going to be to national defense,” he remarked to his staff the morning after the congressman’s speech. Engel, he told Groves, should be “very carefully watched” from then on.
Engel’s investigation made a big splas
h, but then died away. Especially after Pearl Harbor, Congress and the public were not in the mood to curb military spending. But by mid-1942, after the shock of war had worn off, Engel was quietly at it again, this time investigating the project being built right under his nose across the river from Washington.
The man on horseback
Somervell by then was reaching new heights of fame and notoriety. Since taking command of the Services of Supply in March 1942, he had created a vast global logistical empire and was now one of the most powerful figures in Washington. Rumors were circulating that summer that George Marshall would be sent to England as commander in chief of Allied forces and that Somervell would replace him as chief of staff of the Army. It was “brilliant, dashing” Somervell, wrote Time magazine, who “beyond all others in the Army except Douglas MacArthur has caught the public eye.”
Somervell’s rise inspired loathing from both sides of the political spectrum. The conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., railed against Somervell as a Roosevelt stooge and political appointee, describing him on the air as “a sort of personal protégé of that mystic figure who lives at the White House, Mr. Harry Hopkins.”
Roosevelt’s own liberal secretary of the interior did not entirely disagree. “There is more and more talk about Somervell supplanting Marshall and everyone seems to agree that he has the active backing of Harry Hopkins,” Harold Ickes wrote in his diary on June 21. The secretary, still aggrieved that the Pentagon was being built, was now smarting that Somervell had launched an astonishingly bold—and ultimately foolhardy—project to build an oil field, pipeline, and refinery for military use in uncharted mountainous terrain in Canada and had done it without so much as consulting the Interior Department, which was ostensibly in charge of oil concerns. Ickes seemed to believe Somervell was on the verge of launching a coup. “He gets things done but he is arbitrary and dictatorial—just the kind of a man who could become a danger in certain situations,” he wrote.