The Pentagon: A History (21 page)

A Princeton friend helped land him a job at the prestigious firm of Delano & Aldrich. William Delano was quite taken with the young Dutchman, treating him as a surrogate son. At a young age van der Gracht was entrusted with the U.S. Post Office project in Washington, part of a group of prominent government buildings constructed in the 1920s and 1930s known as the Federal Triangle. “He has shown exceptional skill and ability in the way he has handled this building, from the beginning to the end,” Delano wrote. Van der Gracht became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1934 and was thoroughly Americanized by his education and work experience. But he retained a European outlook on the world and a European stake in the war. He toured the old country for more than a year on a beautiful British BSA motorcycle beginning in 1937, visiting his mother’s family estate in Austria and returning to America just before her homeland was absorbed into the Nazi Reich in March 1938. When Somervell called in September 1941, van der Gracht’s parents and sister, living in Roermond in southeastern Holland, were no longer free citizens but living in a Nazi-occupied land. Van der Gracht was eager to sign on.

“Okay, go to work,” Somervell said.

The first priority was to bolster the size of the drafting force, already numbering well over a hundred. Van der Gracht was assigned several assistants who “went all over the United States siphoning off the best talent they could lay their hands on to form this team, which grew like topsy,” van der Gracht recalled many years later.

More architects and draftsmen of all types were brought in from the Quartermaster Corps headquarters in Washington. Larry Lemmon, a dark-haired and thoughtful thirty-six-year-old bored with his work as a $2,600-a-year assistant landscape architect with the Construction Division, was at work one morning in the drafting office at division headquarters in the Railroad Retirement Building on Capitol Hill when the office chief called for everyone’s attention. The supervisor walked down a wide aisle running the length of the room between two parallel rows of drafting tables, tagging every second man on the shoulder, Lemmon among them. Everyone selected was to report the following morning for duty designing the new War Department building. Lemmon’s life was about to get much more interesting.

The drafting team was working from the basement of a Fort Myer warehouse previously used to stable horses that drew the caissons at Arlington National Cemetery. To van der Gracht, the warehouse was more like a sweatshop than an architect’s drafting room. With the heat wave broiling Washington that fall, the place was miserable. Draftsmen were sweating so much they had to cover their drawings with blotting paper to avoid ruining them. “It was hot as the devil,” van der Gracht recalled. “So we sat there, stripped to the waist, some just in their shorts, and with big blotting paper all over the plans with just small holes…where you were actually drawing while the perspiration was dripping off your nose onto the drawings.”

More problematic, the warehouse was far too small for the burgeoning force of architects. The answer was standing before their eyes on the construction site itself, on the grounds of the old Washington-Hoover Airport: the Eastern Airlines hangar. The large metal-frame building was designed to hold airplanes, not people, but it was hurriedly wired with telephones and outfitted with hundreds of drafting tables and a blueprinting plant. The designers moved in on November 3. A big Eastern Airlines logo remained on the hangar’s front, listing the attractive destinations—Miami, Tampa, and New Orleans among them—that the overworked members of the drafting force hadn’t a prayer of visiting. The hangar was hardly plush, but compared to the Fort Myer warehouse it seemed luxurious. The architects had sixteen thousand square feet of unobstructed drafting space. Larry Lemmon was astonished at the size—the hangar had “become a huge design factory,” he said. “[Yet] large as it was, it was still not large enough.”

The design force was approaching its full strength of about 350, including 110 architects, 54 structural engineers, 43 mechanical engineers, 18 electrical engineers, 13 plumbing engineers, various specialists in roads, landscaping, and acoustics, as well as dozens of clerks and messengers. To make room for them all, a large extension was added to the hangar and covered with a shed roof. The expanded hangar had twenty-three thousand square feet, with room for four hundred drafting tables. The draftsmen worked at row after row of the tables, illuminated by lamps hanging from cables strung between the exposed beams of the cavernous hangar.

The drafting force was broken down by specialty—one draftsman might do nothing but detail elements of the façade, another the foundations, another windows, another toilets. They were divided into teams—architectural, structural, highways, mechanical engineering, heating and cooling, and plumbing, among others—each headed by a team chief. Every team in turn was divided into squads, each reporting to a squad leader. Lemmon was assigned to the highway-engineering team and given the job of drawing plans and cross-sections for roads and bridges.

Van der Gracht was a natural organizer—he had a “nit-picking mind,” by his own description—and he brought order and reason to the chaotic process. Van der Gracht would get orders from Bergstrom as to what was needed, and it was up to him to see that the hundreds of architects and engineers produced it. “My job essentially was to keep everyone drawing in the same direction,” he said.

Van der Gracht issued a daily bulletin that kept the entire drafting force up to date on revisions and procedures. He met first thing each morning with the team chiefs, issuing instructions in extremely precise and slightly accented English, liberally sprinkled with corny Americanisms. They tackled the requests that had poured in from the field during the night: The contractor was screaming for foundation plans because a pile driver would be finished by 10:30—where should they move it? Van der Gracht would turn to the section head responsible for the plans—in this case, the structural engineer chief. “It’s your baby,” he was fond of saying. “So please, get it out, get it duplicated, and get it to the field.”

Behind van der Gracht’s desk was a long wall that ran along half the length of the hangar, covered with schedules, diagrams, and color-coded progress reports. Assistants constantly updated them with the latest information from the field. Van der Gracht paced up and down the length of the wall, stopping in his tracks when he spotted any sign that a design team was falling behind schedule. “Jeepers creepers!” he would exclaim. “They’d better get off the seat.” He would immediately shift priorities and feed reinforcements to the faltering team.

Van der Gracht could tell almost instinctively what was fitting and what was not. “That whole building, in a way, took shape in my mind,” he recalled. The thin Dutchman would regularly walk through the aisles between the endless rows of drafting boards, scanning desktops like a proctor monitoring a study hall. His eyes would zero in on anything that looked out of place and he would start asking questions. “Now wait a minute here, this isn’t quite right,” the offending draftsman would be told.

The draftsmen were using tools that would become antiquated in subsequent years: T-squares, pencils, and carbon copies on typewriters. The Pentagon, van der Gracht later said, “was probably the culmination of the T-square and typewriter way of producing architecture.” All drawings were made in pencil on tracing paper; there was no time to ink them.

Drawings were issued nightly in order to record design decisions made during the day and get the information to contractors as fast as possible. At times they were reissued as often as every hour to record near-constant revisions. Two Ozalid machines for copying blueprints ran twenty-four hours a day, operated in three shifts of four men each. The machines, reeking of the ammonia used to produce the blueprints, spit out an average of fifteen thousand yards of print paper per week—at least twelve thousand per week and at times more than thirty thousand. On nights when there was an especially large output, three outside blueprinters would be hired to make copies.

Anywhere from two dozen to five dozen copies of each blueprint were produced, measuring on average three feet by five feet. Some tracings were printed so often that they wore out and had be redrawn two or three times during the night. Every morning a station wagon was loaded with hundreds of prints to be delivered all around the job to Army engineers, contractors, subcontractors, foremen, inspectors, field coordinators, draftsmen, and many others. “The stuff was pushed out by the score,” van der Gracht said.

The builders and Army engineers did not always await delivery. “They went in at night and took their plans while they were finishing them and got going,” Furman said. “It was that fast.” McShain himself would go down to the hangar with Hauck early some mornings to grab the latest plans.

“We were designing just one step ahead of the pile drivers, as it were,” van der Gracht recalled. “Construction was always on the heels of design,” was the way Renshaw put it. Indeed, construction sometimes got ahead of design, often enough that Luther Leisenring, the architect in charge of the specifications group, took to referring to building specs as “historical records” by the time they were written, there was often something else already in the building.

“How big should I make that beam across the third floor?” architect Allen Dickey was asked by a colleague.

“I don’t know,” Dickey replied. “They installed it yesterday.”

To curb the design chaos, a separate field force of 117 architects, engineers, and inspectors worked at the construction site; they were divided into six teams, one for each section of the building and another for the grounds. The field architects were granted unusual authority to make decisions on the spot. They served as advisers and interpreters at the construction site, peering at blueprints, gauging the intent of the designers, and trying to reconcile differences between the plans on paper and the realities on the ground. Construction foremen waited impatiently at their elbows for the verdict, ready to relay it to construction gangs, bulldozer operators, or pile drivers. Revisions made in the field were sometimes memorialized in the plans after the fact, and sometimes not.

The architects soon developed an esprit de corps—“it was a tremendously good working gang,” van der Gracht said. It helped that they had a common enemy. An unnamed draftsman composed and distributed a bit of doggerel aimed at their primary tormenter, Somervell:

Oh the General from the Arkansaw

Has a Jinx for raising H–

And he thinks his Thoughts are the Blooming Law

And Holy Gospel just as well

He swears that Things which can’t be Done

Are the Things you got to do

And cussed be the Sons of Gun

Who hint that they can’t put it through

For the General totes a six inch Jaw

And the air around him Reeks

“Get them Jitters out of your Craw

Gimme them Plans in three more weeks”

If I had my way, if I had my say,

I’d…send that General right way

Straight back to the Arkansaw

Such verse-mongering was one of the few outlets the draftsmen had—with work days that sometimes stretched to eighteen hours, there was almost no time for a social life. Van der Gracht would make it home around eleven at night to a little white wooden shack in the woods on the crest of a hill on North Nash Street in Arlington Heights, overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. The owner, Bessie Christian, rented it to him for almost nothing—the shack was practically bare and there was no heat and little electricity. Before falling asleep, van der Gracht would relax by working on the design of a little house she hoped to build on the site.

A price to pay

Speed was everything, and there was a price to pay. The lowest laborers paid the most. The morning of October 15 finally brought slightly cooler weather and some scattered showers, though not nearly enough to end the monthlong drought. At the construction site around 11
A.M.,
Lloyd Brown, an assistant foreman, assigned six men to load a concrete batch hopper into a truck so it could be moved to a new location on the site. Among the workers was Vernon S. Janney, a twenty-nine-year-old laborer from Appeal, a small town in southern Maryland. Janney was black, like many of the laborers.

The hopper was one of eight scattered around the site for mixing and pouring batches of concrete. It weighed a ton, literally, measuring more than six feet high and six feet square at the top. A Moto-Crane on the site could easily have lifted the heavy hopper and was there for such chores, but it was not immediately available and there was no time to wait. Janney and the five other laborers struggled mightily to lift the hopper to the bed of the truck, and then the weight got to be too much. “Six men had it and it slipped halfway up and fell to the ground and when it rolled over, it caught Janney,” Brown reported. “It only glanced off the other men.”

Janney lay on the ground, grievously hurt. Another man was also injured. An ambulance was called and did not come. A second ambulance was called and both finally arrived at the same time. Janney was taken to Providence Hospital in Washington, where he lingered for a few hours before dying around four that afternoon.

Janney’s death was the first fatality on the project, but the accident was hardly unusual. In October alone there were thirty-five accidents serious enough to take men off the job, eight of them with broken bones. By early November labor leaders were publicly warning of an “alarming accident rate” on the job. The rush nature of the job and the War Department’s failure to enforce its own safety rules were to blame, said John Locher, secretary of the Building Trades Council.