by Steve Vogel
Groves monitored the newspaper coverage, a key barometer of how much damage they had sustained. On the bright side, the New York papers largely ignored the affair. “The ‘New York Times’ gave but scant attention to the matter, on an inside page,” Groves informed Somervell. But all the Washington newspapers gave Engel prominent, front-page coverage, some with screaming headlines that the War Department had squandered millions of dollars and tried to squelch Engel’s investigation.
The day after Engel’s speech, Somervell—aided by Groves—composed a letter stoutly refuting the charges. It was quickly delivered to Woodrum, who rose in the House that afternoon brandishing the letter, declaring that it vindicated Somervell.
“I cannot agree that the War Department failed to keep faith with the Congress in respect to this building,” Somervell wrote. The letter noted that the general had warned from the start that moving the building from his preferred site at Arlington Farm would increase the $35 million cost. Further, Pearl Harbor had necessitated a bigger building. Somervell had informed the Appropriations Committee in May that the price of the building would be $49 million. Including the Virginia contractors had been necessary owing to the “size and complexity of the undertaking.” As for the secrecy that had surrounded the project, Somervell wrapped himself in a cloak of national security. “An alert enemy, and our enemies are alert, gains valuable information from the disclosure of facts not generally recognized as military secrets,” he wrote.
Finally, no one could now argue that the Pentagon was unnecessary. “The wisdom of the Congress in providing this building has been proven by the events of the past year,” Somervell concluded. “The efficiency of the War Department has been tremendously increased.”
Engel declared himself unimpressed. “He’ll have to do better than that to convince me I’m wrong,” he said. Somervell, Engel said, had displayed “an utter disregard” and “contempt” for Congress.
Yet there was no demand in Congress for further inquiry, nor did Engel request any action—for the time being, at least. Engel, Groves later wrote, “was a peculiar man. He enjoyed the respect of his colleagues in the House as a man of complete honesty, but he was also known as a man who started many things with a flourish and then abandoned them once his publicity had been achieved.”
Somervell’s response to Engel’s charges, also given front-page play, muted some but not all the public criticism. “It is to be doubted if Congress would have approved the building, had these costs been known then,” the Evening Star commented.
It was not just the price tag that was shocking. Everyone had known the Pentagon was big, of course. But until now, few had understood that Somervell had built a headquarters even larger than what had been proposed a year earlier. “The public was led to believe that the size of the building had been scaled down,” The Washington Post lamented in an editorial. “…Actually, however, the size of the building was enlarged even beyond its inflated proportions…. Congress was not asked to authorize this enlargement of the project. It has merely been informed of a fait accompli.”
This was entirely true. The newspapers were further shocked when Engel announced a few days after his speech that a fifth floor was being added to the Pentagon. Though that work had been under way since July and was now nearing completion, this was the first the press or public had heard of it. The War Department, after all, had labeled the space “fourth floor intermediate.”
It was all cause for heartburn. “Washington has many reasons to regret the construction of the gigantic War Department Building,” the Post editorialized. “…All our enemies know, of course, that the War Department has located a magnificent target just south of the Potomac.” The editorial included this prediction: “If the finished project is now to cost 70 million dollars, as Representative Engel charges, it may easily stand out as one of the worst blunders of the war period.”
Clifford Berryman cartoon from the Washington Evening Star, April 1944.
By command of General Somervell
The race was on to get Henry Stimson and George Marshall into the Pentagon, and as far as Groves was concerned, an act of God would not suffice as reason for delay. The invasion of North Africa—Operation Torch—was imminent, and it was vital to have the command post ready for the secretary of war and the chief of staff of the Army. More than nine thousand construction workers were still on the job. Groves had issued orders that the offices for Stimson, Marshall, and the rest of the high command be ready by November 1, 1942.
“If unfavorable weather occurs it will not be accepted by me or offered by you or any of your personnel as an excuse for failure,” Groves informed Renshaw on October 22. “I am not interested in excuses or explanations, only in the accomplishment of the desired results.”
Renshaw had cause to worry. Acts of God were not out of the question, though it helped to have Somervell on your side. Just a few days earlier, on Friday, October 16, word arrived that a massive flood was coming down the Potomac River toward Washington. Days of soaking rain in the Shenandoah Valley had raised the river to record levels. At 1:15 P.M., the Army’s Military District of Washington launched emergency preparations. Informed later that afternoon that the impending flood might be the gravest in Washington history, Roosevelt telephoned Somervell from the White House seeking his help to protect federal buildings in low-lying areas. “The Potomac will be over Constitution Avenue before morning unless you stop it,” the president told Somervell. “Stop it.”
Somervell was at the scene within two hours with 1,100 soldiers and a battery of heavy equipment—a half-dozen bulldozers, four large steam shovels, five cranes, eight fire pumps, and 130 trucks hauling dirt for sandbags. Laboring under floodlights, soldiers and civilian crews had six hours to reinforce a half-mile-long levee and fill in a gap at 17th Street before the waters crested. Somervell’s emergency aide for the night—Major Munro Leaf, a gentle soul who before the war had written The Story of Ferdinand, a lovely fable about a peace-loving bull—watched in astonishment as the general leaped into the breach. Somervell joyfully sloshed through the rising water to direct operations in the soaking rain, wearing a floppy old hat, a rumpled raincoat with no stars on the shoulders, trousers rolled up above his knees, and galoshes, which unaccountably could not be fastened. It was the happiest anyone had seen Somervell since before the war and before Anna Somervell died.
The flood proved as dangerous as feared. The Potomac crested Saturday morning at the Wisconsin Avenue gauge in Georgetown at 17.7 feet, or more than 10.5 feet above flood stage, the highest recorded before or since. Hundreds of families were evacuated from their homes and five people in the region were swept to their deaths. Residents of Georgetown were rescued by boat from their rooftops. The newly completed Jefferson Memorial was an island. But the dike protecting the federal buildings held. “By command of General Somervell, the water stopped short of Constitution Avenue,” Newsweek reported.
The waters spared the Pentagon as well. Despite the Army’s own warnings against constructing any permanent buildings on the low ground of the former Washington-Hoover Airport, the easternmost portion of the Pentagon—including the area where Stimson and Marshall were to go—jutted onto that land. Construction crews had filled the area, raising the water table from ten to eighteen feet above sea level, and engineers were confident the building was safe, but no one had wanted the flood of the ages to be the first test. Some roads to the building were cut off, the concrete plant was inundated, and hangars on the old airport grounds used to repair construction vehicles were halfway underwater, but the building itself remained unscathed. Those War Department employees able to make it to the Pentagon worked on uninterrupted. The engineers had raised the ground just enough, as it turned out. Still, the water was so high that there were fears a German U-Boat plying the waters off the East Coast might wend its way up the Potomac and deliver a torpedo directly into the Pentagon’s doors. Wags responded that not even a bomb could enter the building without an appointment.
Our lives depend on that
The Pentagon had survived the flood of 1942, but Renshaw was hardly in the clear. From outside, the Pentagon hardly looked like a finished product. Limestone was up on only about half the building; stone setters were still hanging the stone on Section C and had not even begun Section D, where Stimson and Marshall would go. Atop the building, crews were still pouring sections of the new fifth floor. The fifth and final section of the building, Section E, remained under construction, including an enormous terminal on the ground floor where buses and taxis would disgorge passengers within the building. An armada of heavy equipment was filling, surfacing, and grading the grounds for roads and landscaping. Mounds of concrete debris, wood forms, and trash were scattered about, particularly in the inner courtyard, which construction crews used as a dumping ground. The rains left the courtyard such a muddy mess that a concrete truck sank to its belly.
Somervell had made sure Stimson had the best view in the house, doubtless mindful of the secretary’s warning the previous year that he would refuse to move into a windowless office of the type Roosevelt had briefly contemplated for the Pentagon. Facing toward the Jefferson Memorial, the secretary’s suite on the third floor of the outer E Ring in Section D had a panoramic vista overlooking the lagoon and river, with the Capitol and Washington Monument in the background. Stimson would also be overlooking a dump until construction was finished and the mess cleaned up.
Much exacting work was needed to finish the suites for Marshall and Stimson, which could hardly be thrown together like the average office bay. Groves wanted everything in pristine working order, including the heating and ventilation. It would not do to have the secretary of war freezing or sweating, like many Pentagon employees. Stimson’s spacious suite would include paneled walls and thick scarlet carpeting, with an adjacent wardrobe room. Directly next to Stimson, connected by a door, was Marshall’s office, smaller but similarly plush. A private elevator—the only passenger lift in the building—would serve both Stimson and Marshall’s suites, and a moving escalator would carry visitors to their floor. Stimson’s office included a map alcove, with twelve-by-eight-foot panels that would slide out on tracks and push back into a wall recess when not needed. Across the hallway, workers were finishing an elegant private dining room with seating for twenty-four and an adjacent serving pantry.
Groves had been unsure what to use on the walls lining the entrance to Stimson’s office. Groves thought marble would look nice, but that was impossible—he himself had strictly forbidden its use. He consulted with Stephen Voorhees, a member of the War Department’s Construction Advisory Committee. “Why don’t you use wood?” Voorhees suggested.
Groves objected that this would cost even more than marble.
“Who said anything about cost?” Voorhees replied. They used wood.
Inspecting the building, Somervell was particularly interested in the accommodations for Stimson. He instructed Renshaw and Hauck that before the secretary moved in, he wanted “everything pretty near right for the big boy.”
Renshaw told Somervell that with Engel on the hunt for extravagance, they were striving to make the building “less ornate.”
“Well, don’t do it for the Secretary,” Somervell replied. “Our lives depend on that.”
The same was true for the various assistant secretaries of war and top generals. An officer representing Lieutenant General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, and Robert Lovett, the assistant secretary of war for air, demanded his bosses get the same kind of paneled suite that Somervell and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy were getting, including a private bathroom with a shower. Renshaw hesitated—their suites had already been plastered and adding special features now would cost at least $15,000. “I don’t see any sense in it,” Groves agreed.
Somervell certainly saw the sense in it. The general was “much put out that we even questioned it,” Renshaw reported a few days later. The private bathrooms went in. Renshaw took to calling the Army Air Forces area “the Gold Coast suites.”
Most irritating of all were the demands for special treatment from Colonel Edward F. French, a pompous Signal Corps officer in charge of the Signal Center being built on the fifth-floor inner ring of the Pentagon. This was to be the largest and most modern military communication facility in the world, with state-of-the-art equipment that would allow for the transmission and reception of five million words a day between the Pentagon and U.S. forces around the globe. It would be the modern equivalent of the War Department telegraph office that Lincoln haunted during the Civil War. French was also determined to make it the fanciest communications facility in the world.
For months, French badgered Renshaw with one special request after another, demanding additional stairways and walkways leading to the Signal Center, all of which threatened to throw off the schedule. In late October, as Renshaw scurried to meet Groves’s looming deadline, French had a new demand:
In the firm belief that not only the morale but also the efficiency, accuracy, and all-around performance of personnel is affected to a very great degree by the character, quality and appropriateness of their immediate surroundings, the Chief Signal Officer and the Director of Army Communications Division desire that special treatment be given the main entrance and the interior of the new Signal Center. Accordingly, the services of the architectural firm of Eggers and Higgins, New York, have been engaged, with Mr. Otto R. Eggers personally planning the design.
French submitted Eggers’s plans for fluorescent lighting, clock outlets, special paneling, and floor tiling to Renshaw. The architect had recommended that the Signal Center entrance space and the code room be “tiled with a random field of Morocco Brown, No. 104, and Quarry Red, No. 106, with a border of Black, No. 102.” The walls of the classified message center were to be painted “lettuce green (Pratt Lambert color card No. 233).”
This was beyond the pale, as far as Renshaw was concerned. They were racing the clock to move the Army’s high command into the Pentagon, American troops were preparing for ground combat against the Axis powers, and Colonel French had hired a fancy-pants New York interior designer to make sure the colors and lighting were properly soothing for the teletype operators?
Renshaw appealed for help from superiors. Major General Thomas M. Robins, the Construction Division chief, informed French that Otto Eggers’s “decorative features,” however desirable, would not be approved, and he directed the colonel to work with Renshaw to figure out “the minimum essential” features needed for the Signal Center.
Renshaw had a measure of revenge with the Signal Corps, though it was purely accidental. The first Signal Corps workers to move into the Pentagon—the Organization and Procedures Branch—found that their third-floor offices on the outer E Ring were deafening due to construction noise outside and above their heads. Signal Corps Second Lieutenant George W. Good, Jr.—a young officer “green as the grass in Kentucky,” in his words—was constantly distracted by the temptation to peer out the window and watch. He need not have looked far.
Good was working at his desk on October 1 when a hunk of plaster suddenly burst from the wall next to him, followed by a cascade of wet concrete. Construction crews above them were pouring the new top deck but had neglected to properly block off a heating duct leading to the floors below. The concrete came pouring down the duct and out the wall. Good’s desk was swept across the room like a small boat in a flood. “All the women started to scream, and very quickly, the whole floor was a huge pool of concrete,” Good recalled.
“We were all sitting at our desks and the wall behind us caved in—the fresh cement poured down like molten lava,” recalled Daphne Webb, a secretary in the office. “We jumped over our desks and ran for our lives.” All escaped, though the office was entirely uninhabitable. Good, Webb, and the rest of the office packed up equipment and belongings that had survived and moved back to Washington.
Renshaw roared with laughter when he heard the n
ews. Amid all the pressure of finishing the building, it was the funniest story he had heard in months. Relating the incident to Groves’s aide, Major Matthias, the following day, Renshaw could barely contain himself describing the Signal Corps employees “minding their own business” when they were inundated by bucket loads of concrete.
“It couldn’t have been Colonel French’s office, could it?” Matthias asked.
Renshaw was wistful. “I wish it had have been,” he said.
This is the War Department
The Pentagon had to be fully functioning before the high command moved in, and, as much as anything else, that meant working telephones. To meet the War Department’s fantastic need for telephone service—likened to providing a system from scratch for a city the size of Trenton, New Jersey—an ambitious plan had been devised to lay a dozen submarine cables one-third of a mile across the bottom of the Potomac River. These would connect the switchboard with the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company’s central office in Washington.
Frank E. Watts, a twenty-six-year-old telephone company employee from Alexandria, reported with other workers to the Arlington bank of the Potomac near the Pentagon on a rainy and chilly morning. Two barges awaited, heavily laden with the cables, along with tugboats and a diver. The cables had been manufactured at Western Electric’s Point Breeze Works near Baltimore on the biggest cable-armoring machine ever constructed. Telephone wire had been sheathed with layers of lead, jute, and steel armoring. The cables, each weighing more than twenty tons and stretching two thousand feet, were rolled up onto twelve huge reels and shipped on the barges from Baltimore down the Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac.