On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  President Roosevelt, who had blessed Somervell’s plan before controversy overtook it, was conspicuously absent from these discussions—for good reason. Just as the appropriations bill reached the Senate that summer, the president had slipped away for a well-earned fishing vacation in Canada; that, at least, was the cover story. In truth, FDR was secretly meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill for the first time, just off the coast of Newfoundland, to discuss war plans.18 Before Roosevelt left Washington, however, he had recognized that the dispute over Arlington was getting out of hand and moved to quell it, urging the Senate to go forward with building on the Lee plantation but to cut the size of the project in half. This compromise offer, dangling over the proceedings as Roosevelt stole off to Canada, did little to calm those opposed to the project. Indeed, it was becoming obvious that for many in Washington, no War Department building, whatever its size, would be acceptable at Arlington, which had achieved an iconic place in the capital landscape and the national conscience.19

  To preserve that status, Clarke suggested an alternative site for the new building. Why not place it on the low-lying parcel of land less than a mile south of the Arlington Farm and adjacent to Hoover National Airport? This eighty-seven-acre property, near Hell’s Bottom, was surrounded by pawn shops, railroads, and shabby housing, and it was already in possession of the army, which had only recently broken ground for a new quartermaster’s depot there. Placed well downriver from Memorial Bridge and the national cemetery, the site would be a far less intrusive venue, in Clarke’s opinion.20

  The Senate rejected this idea. It endorsed the Arlington Farm building site, approving the $35 million Somervell plan as part of the supplemental appropriations bill on August 14, 1941. With the president still abroad, the Senate also ignored Roosevelt’s suggestion for shrinking the size of the project. Somervell made plans to begin construction, not realizing that his battle had just begun.21

  Ickes, disgusted with the lack of congressional foresight, registered his objections with the Senate, the public, and the War Department. The project, he warned, would “spoil the setting of such national symbols as the Arlington Lee Memorial and other monuments.” He complained directly to Henry Stimson. The despoliation of Arlington, Ickes prophesied, “would be a black mark against this Administration and a discredit to the Army. And so I, for one, protest.”22 Finally Ickes dashed off an angry letter to FDR, whom he begged “not to permit this rape of Washington.”23

  Ickes’s appeal was waiting for Roosevelt, along with a sheaf of negative press commentary, upon his return from Canada on August 17. Despite Somervell’s success on Capitol Hill—or maybe because of it—public opinion had turned against the project during FDR’s absence. Moved by the arguments of Arlington’s defenders, annoyed by Somervell’s strong-arm tactics, irked by the Senate’s failure to embrace his compromise suggestion, and suddenly focused on the aesthetic arguments for Arlington, Roosevelt abruptly—and breezily—reversed course on August 19, leaving Somervell stranded.

  “My present inclination is not to accept that action by Congress,” Roosevelt told a White House press conference that day. Part of the reason, he said, was based on his own experience as an assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I. Adopting the mantle of a reformed sinner, the president confessed that he had, in those long-ago days, unthinkingly allowed a gross collection of War Department buildings to be raised on the National Mall, where the unsightly structures intruded on the capital’s design. More than two decades later, the temporary buildings intruded still. “It was a crime,” the president confessed in his most charming tones. “I don’t hesitate to say so. It was a crime for which I should be kept out of heaven, for having desecrated the whole plan of … the loveliest city in the world.” Arlington, he said, was an essential piece of that plan, with its lofty views “known and loved throughout the length and breadth of the land. And here it is—under the name of emergency—it is proposed to put up a permanent building, which will deliberately and definitely, for one hundred years to come, spoil the plan of the national capital … I have had a part in spoiling the national parks and the beautiful waterfront of the District once, and I don’t want to do it again.” Thus spoke the man who had cheerfully endorsed Somervell’s plans barely a month before.24

  But that was then and things had changed. Where would the new building go? The president had a ready answer—the one suggested by Clarke a few weeks earlier: it would go to the eighty-seven-acre quartermaster’s site near Hell’s Bottom. With that question settled, Roosevelt decreed that one corner of the new War Department building would be overlap a tiny section of Arlington—this, to satisfy the letter if not the spirit of the congressional appropriations bill, which said only that the structure should be built on Arlington Farm but did not specify where or to what extent. Roosevelt threaded that loophole with hardly a pause for breath.25

  To make sure there were no further misunderstandings, the president summoned Clarke and Somervell to the White House on August 29, piled with them into his convertible, and with his terrier, Fala, perched on his lap, was driven across the river to inspect the new site. Along the way, Somervell made a final pitch for his plan, reminding Roosevelt that the new location would require millions more in money and months more in construction time, given its site preparation requirements. Arlington was still the best choice, the general insisted.26

  At this point, FDR choked off discussion, firmly and finally asserting civilian control of the military. “My dear general,” he said, leaning across to make the point, “I am still commander in chief of the Army!” The general retreated.

  Gilmore Clarke beamed, and by the time their car arrived at Hell’s Bottom, the president was beaming too.27 “Gilmore,” FDR said, pointing across the dreary landscape, “we are going to put the building over there, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Clarke answered.

  “Did you hear that, General?” Roosevelt asked Somervell. “We’re going to locate the War Department building over there.” Roosevelt taunted, Somervell seethed, and the battle of Arlington Farm was over.28

  Being a good soldier, Somervell saluted and went back to work, plunging into his revised construction project like a man possessed. On September 11, 1941—less than three weeks after his humiliating outing with the president—the general watched crews break ground for the new War Department. A mere seventeen months after that, the Pentagon was finished and occupied on February 15, 1943.29 Although the building was not where Somervell had wanted, his accomplishment must be considered a miracle of sorts, an outsized vision realized with prodigious speed and efficiency, a metaphor for the nation’s ability to mobilize for war.30

  Despite the fireworks over development at Arlington Farm, it soon filled with neat rows of white frame barracks for thousands of soldiers who came into service after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Virtually overnight the bottomlands sprouted new housing, a post exchange, a gym, a theater, drill grounds, and new roads—all part of the South Post of Fort Myer, a military community that would grow through the war years. Each morning, hundreds of soldiers answered reveille, streamed across frosty fields, disappeared into a tunnel under Columbia Pike, and emerged at the Pentagon, where they waged war behind desks, in map rooms, and hunched over typewriters in the cavernous new office building.

  Clarke, Ickes, and other preservationists, happy to see the Pentagon shifted downriver, declared victory. They tolerated the construction at South Post because it was understood to be temporary and because the United States had, since the Japanese attack, been wholeheartedly and irreversibly engaged in war—the biggest, costliest, deadliest, and most far-ranging conflict the world had known.31

  “We are now in this war,” Roosevelt announced in a fireside chat two days after Pearl Harbor. “We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking in American history.”32

  As in the previous war, America had
been slow to take sides, but once forced into the fight, the nation faced the challenge with remarkable alacrity. The Army, consisting of 189,839 soldiers when Adolf Hitler stormed into Poland in 1939, had assembled more than 1.4 million troops by the middle of 1941, enough manpower for eleven divisions. That number grew to 16 million by May 1945, including volunteers and draftees of all services.33 At the same time, the United States cranked up its factories, providing thousands of new planes, tanks, machine guns, and ships for its allies and its own forces. This flow of materièl, produced in quantities the enemy could not match, eventually shifted the war’s momentum and sealed the alliance with Great Britain, where Winston Churchill watched the buildup with admiration. The United States, he declared, was “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate.”34

  Every bit of that power would be needed for World War II, described by historian John Keegan as “different from all wars previously fought, different in scale, intensity, extensiveness and mechanical and human cost.”35 From its beginning in 1939 until its end in 1945, that war unfolded on a global stage, exploding from the skies, churning over two oceans, scorching the landscape of Europe, shaking the deserts of Africa, cutting a bloody swath through Asia, and pounding a string of Pacific islands—Midway, Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, the Marshalls, Mariana, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—on the road to Japan.

  The need for a huge manpower pool, which produced the nation’s first peacetime draft in October 1940, brought millions of recruits into the armed forces from all levels of society, throwing together farm boys and shop keepers, bank clerks and plumber’s assistants, actors and taxi drivers, Baptists and Catholics, and subjecting them to rigorous training toward a common goal. The barriers of class and birthright began to blur under the strain of long marches, abusive drill sergeants, barracks living, cold rations, and combat. Tempered by shared experience, citizen-soldiers discovered that they had much in common despite differences of region, religion, education, and upbringing.

  At the same time, deeply ingrained disparities persisted in the services, which remained segregated throughout the war, with African Americans and citizens of Japanese ancestry isolated in their own units. One of the latter, the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese Americans, proved its mettle in European fighting. Soldiers of the 442nd suffered an extraordinary 30 percent casualty rate, earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, and won more decorations than any unit in Army history—even as 114,490 of their neighbors and loved ones languished in internment camps at home.36 The races remained strictly separated at Arlington, as they had been since the cemetery’s earliest days.

  America’s fighting men—the ordinary dogface soldiers, sailors, and leathernecks celebrated by wartime cartoonist Bill Mauldin and correspondent Ernie Pyle—proved themselves capable of extraordinary valor when occasion required it. From its start, the Second World War abounded with these transformative moments, when an ordinary serviceman was thrust into action, achievedthe impossible, and emerged as a hero—most often without seeking that status. It happened every day: off the coast of the Philippines in 1945, when the U.S.S. Fletcher was hit by enemy fire, a magazine exploded, and a young Navy water tender rushed below decks to douse the flames, saving his ship and sacrificing his life;37 on Engebi, Marshall Islands, in 1944, when a marine corporal fatally threw himself on a Japanese grenade to save two comrades;38 in the skies over Bremen, Germany, in 1943, when an Air Corps sergeant, severely injured and partially blinded by shrapnel, manned a gun, fought off fighter planes, radioed for help, and assisted a wounded crewman to safety when their B-17 was forced down in the ocean.39

  Such deeds—each of which earned the Medal of Honor—were performed by ordinary, unglamorous men“bleeding their way forward,” as C. W. Sulzberger of the New York Times described it. He was following American soldiers up the boot of Italy during the hard-fought winter of 1944. Landing behind enemy lines on the beachhead at Anzio in January of that year, Anglo-American forces ran into determined resistance from Germany’s Tenth Army, which blocked the way to Rome, slowed the Allied advance, and produced a withering stalemate until springtime.40

  Among the soldiers fighting out of Anzio that winter was Army Pfc. Alton W. “Knappie” Knappenberger, a scrawny twenty-year-old pig farmer from Spring Mount, Pennsylvania. Fresh to combat, he seemed the unlikeliest of heroes. The son of a long-dead moonshiner and the last of seven children, he stood all of five feet six inches tall, weighed 118 pounds, and had no ambition except to survive the war. He freely admitted his terror at the prospect of battle, unsure of how he would react to enemy fire. He soon found out. Moving up from the hotly contested beachhead at Anzio, Knappie and comrades from Company C of the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, found themselves confronting battle-hardened German forces near the market town of Cisterna di Littoria on January 31 and February 1. Ordered across a snow-dusted field affording no cover, the regiment came under merciless fire from concealed enemy positions, the barrage tumbling soldiers on either side of Knappie and neatly slicing off the head of his best friend. With bullets whizzing around him, Knappie watched, hugged the cold earth of Italy, and crawled slowly forward. Members of his regiment fell away. By February 1, death and injury had stripped the company of its officers, leaving Knappie alone on the ragged front line.41

  With no superiors to give orders, the Pennsylvania farm boy took the initiative, crawling forward to an exposed knoll where he set up the Browning automatic rifle scrounged from a dead comrade—an upgrade from Knappie’s slow-firing standard-issue M-1. As soon as he appeared on the hill, German machine gunners opened fire. Knappie rose to a kneeling posture, calmly took aim, killed two members of the hostile gun crew, and wounded a third. His marksmanship, honed by years of hunting squirrels, rabbits, and pheasants for food at home, clicked into play. When a pair of Germans popped up to lob grenades toward the knoll, Knappie wheeled on them, killing both; their explosives fell short. Across the field, about a hundred yards away, another enemy machine gun commenced firing; Knappie silenced it, provoking a new barrage from heavy antitank and antiaircraft weapons trained on his position. The shells landed short, kicking up dirt. Knappie coolly continued fighting, wounding and killing every enemy he could see, while miraculously avoiding injury. Someone said later that none of the bullets reached him because he offered such a small target. He held his ground, exhausted his ammunition, and scurried toward German lines to scavenge more bullets from fallen soldiers. Dodging fire, zigging and zagging, he resumed his perch on the knoll, caught an enemy platoon clawing its way uphill, and wiped it out.

  From the rear, six colleagues from C Company suddenly appeared beside Knappie to join the fight. He continued spraying the field with automatic fire while his buddies plunked away with their M-1s. When the little crew finally ran out of ammunition, Knappie and company slid down the hill, backtracked to a field, and began searching for their unit. There was no unit. The 7 soldiers from the knoll were the only survivors from a 200 man company. Bold as their action had been, it failed to dislodge the Germans from Cisterna di Littoria. Nonetheless, Knappie had single-handedly disrupted an enemy attack, saved American lives, and provided a glimmer of hope in an otherwise disastrous offensive. It would take another four months for Allies to break through to Cisterna. When they did, they found the remains of numerous dead Germans around Knappie’s knoll.42

  “A one man army, that’s what you are, a blasted one man army,” Maj. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., 3rd Division commander, told Knappie after word of his performance raced through the ranks. The young Pennsylvanian had escaped the firefight with a single injury—a blistered heel. Whisked away for treatment in Naples, he found himself with a new assignment, baking doughnuts with Red Cross ladies. This kept him out of harm’s way until Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark, commander of the 5th Army, found time to drape the Medal of Honor around Knappie’s neck. Cited for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and
beyond the call of duty,” Knappie was a certified war hero. After just over two hours of fighting his war was ending and he was soon sailing for home.43

  Nobody seemed more surprised—or less comfortable—about his elevated status than Knappie himself, who clammed up or stammered explanations when pressed to speak about his moment of glory. “Look it up in the Medal of Honor book,” he told one interviewer. “I was scared the whole time I was over there,” he told another. “You go in there and just try to get them guys before they get you.”44

  Shunning the spotlight and avoiding speeches, he quietly left the Army, disappeared into the Pennsylvania countryside, raised a family, went hunting, and spent the rest of his life trying to be profligately, unapologetically ordinary. Unlike millions of other veterans returning from the war, Knappie avoided further schooling, even though his education had ended in the fifth grade. He passed up big pay and supervisory positions for honest, menial work—driving trucks, working for paving companies, dabbling at farming. He enjoyed the pleasures of his hard-won peace, living with his wife, Hazel, in a trailer surrounded by woods, orchards, and wild turkeys, with a menagerie of dogs, cats, ponies, a rooster, a horse, a goose, a duck, and numerous grandchildren for company.45

  He died of a heart attack at age eighty-four in 2008. After some debate within the family, Knappie was laid to rest at Arlington on January 31 of that year. It was a long way from Pennsylvania, but his loved ones thought it was time to give this reluctant hero the recognition he had evaded in life. So with his family gathered around the grave, attended by Army officers, a marching platoon, a military band, and a clutch of media, the one-man army was buried in Section 60 with full honors. The weather was suitable—a biting cold day that fell precisely sixty-four years after the morning in Italy when a frightened young private crawled up from the frozen ground to face the Germans alone.46