The Pentagon: A History (25 page)

Still, there was no hope for the draftsmen to catch up until there was a final decision over whether or not they should try to protect the building against bombs by taking out the windows. Somervell had given quick approval, but the decision was still getting top-level review. Ides van der Gracht and the drafting force were helpless, watching the debate unfold like a tennis match: “The orders came through from on high: ‘Cut out the windows.’ Then they had second thoughts: ‘No, leave them in, at least some of them.’ And then the orders: ‘Well, no they ought to be out anyway’…Then they decided, ‘Oh to hell with it, let’s have the windows.’”

Renshaw had received word on December 22 that the bomb-protection plan “is going to be approved 100 percent” and that he should “get going on it” immediately. Four days later, the order was revoked—the decision was being reviewed by the secretary of war. On New Year’s Eve, word came that Stimson had given approval, and Renshaw was ordered to “proceed at once with construction.”

Then Stimson, deciding Roosevelt needed to be informed, sent a memo to the president on January 2 seeking approval, calling the protective measures of “vital importance.” But Roosevelt was skeptical, and that was enough to throw the entire matter into doubt again. Renshaw warned a “furious” Bergstrom that he might have to tear up the plans once more.

Each time the order was changed, construction on many parts of the building was suspended. Contracts had to be renegotiated. Materials being fabricated were taken out of production. New architectural, structural, mechanical, and electrical drawings were started. All the while, the clock was ticking and the deadline for occupancy getting closer.

“This indecision has resulted in delay and confusion both to the design forces and to the construction forces and has seriously retarded progress of construction on the building,” Brigadier General Robins, chief of the Construction Division, warned Somervell. Lacking definite instructions from above, Robins unilaterally issued orders “to abandon, effective today, January 9, 1942, any attempts to make plans for the splinter proofing and to proceed with the original program.” Somervell concurred.

In the end, fear of delay trumped fear of bombs. The proposal for the bomb shelter—a $1.3-million three-story underground building that Stimson told Roosevelt would be “designed to withstand bombs heavier than any known to exist”—was likewise scotched. If the War Department had its own bomb shelter, Roosevelt told Stimson, he would be obliged to provide shelters “for other Departments of the government that are equally vulnerable.”

The resolution was a boost to the draftsmen. By January 21, a Corps of Engineers officer reported to Somervell that plans and specifications were no longer delaying construction progress.

Perhaps the biggest measure of progress on the Pentagon project was the money being spent. Construction expenditures in January were $5.1 million, more than three times the roughly $1.5 million that had been spent in December. “If you…think it is an easy task to spend a million dollars in a week,” John McShain later said, “I would suggest that you try it sometime.”

A growing army of workers

Most of the money was being spent on the growing army of workers at the site. More than six thousand men were on the job by mid-January; the number was jumping by the hundreds every week and would reach ten thousand by the beginning of March.

Any skilled laborer who presented himself was hired on the spot. Workers were coming from farther afield to meet the increasing demand. Hundreds of workers with specialty skills—reinforced steel workers in particular—came from around the country, sent by union locals answering the War Department’s call for help. Others were simple laborers, both black and white, many from the rural South, looking for a steady job. Some were recent immigrants from Europe. Many of those descending on Arlington had abandoned their homes and uprooted their families because they could not afford to run two households. T. R. Anderson, a sheet metal worker, arrived from Texas pulling his family in a trailer.

Hank Neighbors, a seventeen-year-old Ohio boy whose family had moved to Arlington in search of work, got a job at the site as a payroll witness. He was fascinated by the stream of workers who lined up for their pay at the McShain office in the old factory building on Columbia Pike. Some were hardened and tough construction workers with years of experience under their belts. Others were marginal workers, men well past their prime or never in it to begin with. As more young men enlisted or were drafted into the military, many of the new workers were older: thirty-five, forty, fifty, or even sixty years of age and beyond. “There were so many jobs, so much need for people, that they were digging pretty deep,” Neighbors said. “It was maybe not the ideal work bunch.”

At the bottom, wielding shovels, were the laborers making eighty-five cents an hour, with an extra nickel an hour if they worked night shifts. Truck drivers made up to a dollar an hour. Cement finishers made $1.50 and bricklayers $1.75, while structural iron workers were fetching $2 an hour. Top workers such as ironworker foremen could make $2.35. “You could almost tell by looking at them, what kind of equipment they had, as to what their job was,” Neighbors said.

The workers were paid in cash. The Corps of Engineers regularly sent a Brinks armored truck packed with greenbacks to the McShain payroll office. Two cashiers sat behind a table handing out money stuffed in pay envelopes. “They were operating on three different eight-hour shifts, so the place was busy night and day,” Neighbors said. Every Friday afternoon, carpenter Joe Allan would pick up his pay envelope, normally with $65 in cash stuffed inside, minus a dollar and some change for Social Security, but increasingly with extra pay for overtime. In support of the war effort, the unions agreed that workers would be paid time and a half instead of double time, but it still meant costs soared.

As a payroll witness, Neighbors’s job was to confirm that the workers received their money. “The key thing I dealt with were the workers who couldn’t sign their names—and there were a lot of them,” Neighbors said. “When the illiterate guy came up to get his pay, he was given cash, and if he couldn’t sign his name, he’d put an X down there on the receipt, and then I would sign for him.”

Thousands of men paid in cash spelled trouble. “We have thefts, we have robberies—you can’t have [that many] men together without having disturbances,” Renshaw complained. Lieutenant Furman was put in charge of a civilian guard force paid for by McShain. Four Arlington police officers who could arrest thieves, drunks, and other lawbreakers were also put on the payroll.

They had their hands full, particularly chasing out liquor salesmen. Men wearing big overcoats prowled the site and discreetly opened up their flaps, revealing fifteen pockets on both sides, each holding a half-pint flask bottle of Calvert’s blended whiskey for sale. The booze salesmen were especially active on the night shifts. “We couldn’t have liquor on the job,” Furman said. “It was the sort of thing you had to beat.” But it was impossible to catch them all.

McShain figured he could boost productivity by providing good, cheap meals, and he built an eighteen-thousand-square-foot wood-frame dining hall. It looked like an Army barracks, big enough to accommodate 750 workers at one seating, or 3,000 over the course of a lunch hour. Dining rooms fanned out on the sides. The kitchen and serving counters ran down the middle, and, like everything else on the job, it was an assembly-line setup, serving ten men a minute from each of four food lines. Sandwiches and pieces of pie sold for a dime apiece and coffee, milk, and soft drinks for a nickel. Seven canteens selling drinks and food were scattered across the site, and another twelve to fifteen were planned, enough to serve ten thousand workers. But at the rate the work force was growing, that would not be enough for long.

Even finding the canteens—or anything else—was getting to be a problem on the sprawling site. As the junior man in his steel gang, Donald Walker was sent every morning to get coffee from the canteen. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “I used to get lost every day.” Reporting for duty one morning, timekeeper Roy B. Pruitt could not find the engineer’s shack where he normally worked. A bulldozer had moved it to a new location during the night.

All signifying chaos

The workers descending on the Pentagon project were landing in the midst of a maelstrom. “Washington in wartime has been variously described in numbers of pungent epigrams, all signifying chaos,” wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fifty-one-year-old Army brigadier general who arrived in the city a week after Pearl Harbor with orders to report to War Department headquarters.

By 1941, the population of the Washington metropolitan area had exceeded one million, up from 621,000 in 1930. During the ten years before the war, Washington grew far more rapidly than any other city in the nation, jumping by 36 percent, compared to an average increase of 4.7 percent for the ten largest cities in the country.

Yet none of this was preparation for the tumultuous changes brought by the onset of war. “A languid Southern town with a pace so slow that much of it simply closed down for the summer grew almost overnight into a crowded, harried, almost frantic metropolis struggling desperately to assume the mantle of global power,” journalist David Brinkley wrote nearly a half-century later.

A war mindset had overtaken life in Washington. Concerned that Washington’s white marble buildings made excellent targets, Representative Frederick Bradley of Michigan proposed on the House floor that they be camouflaged with dark-gray paint. Blackout drills were held regularly, with teams of civilian air-raid marshals browbeating homeowners who did not dim their lights.

The most immediate problem for new arrivals was the housing shortage. Terribly overcrowded before the outbreak of war, Washington and its environs were now completely overrun. New government employees were arriving at the rate of more than five thousand per month, and many of them were coming with families. Landlords who already had three or four occupants crammed into single rooms added new bodies. Hallways and porches were converted into sleeping quarters. Families of eight or ten lived in basement apartments. “Newcomers discover private baths went out with Hitler,” a
Washington Post
headline reported in January.

Writer John Dos Passos, traveling the country to chronicle the state of the nation, described a typical lodging house in Washington, a mansion that had been partitioned into cubicles housing “a pack” of workers: “The house was clean, but it had the feeling of too many people breathing the same air, of strangers stirring behind flimsy walls, of unseen bedsprings creaking and unseen feet shuffling in cramped space.”

Workers turning up for the Pentagon project and hoping to camp out quickly discovered that trailer camps were prohibited in Arlington County. Hundreds of workers and their families, including T. R. Anderson and his family from Texas, had to set up camp miles away in trailer parks along Route 1, south of Alexandria.

The government’s need for housing and office space for workers was insatiable. Roosevelt in January even suggested that those living in Washington who were not contributing to the war effort—the president called them “parasites”—move out of town and make room for essential war workers.

Roosevelt’s dream of presiding over the demolition of the Munitions Building had evaporated. Instead, the president ordered new temporary buildings to be constructed on the Mall to join the old temporary buildings. A long gray line of two-story barrack-like buildings with rain-streaked cement-asbestos board walls sprouted up on the Mall—almost up to the base of the Washington Monument—“before you could say Franklin Roosevelt,” journalist Marquis Childs quipped. The Army and Navy seized buildings, land, and even a college campus in the city to use for military installations and office space. “It was said around town that if the military could seize and occupy enemy lands as quickly as it seized Washington’s, the war would be won in a week,” Brinkley wrote.

For all the dead seriousness of the situation, the most visible manifestation of war in the Construction Division was comical. Years of peacetime duty had left many of officers so out of shape and overweight that the fabric of their Army uniforms strained mightily against the added girth. “And that was the God-awfulest looking sight you ever saw,” recalled Gar Davidson, Groves’s aide. Marshall’s requirement that officers wear civilian clothes in peacetime Washington meant many had never worn their uniforms outside of rare ceremonial events. Some officers simply did not have uniforms, and long lines formed outside military-apparel shops. “And those that had to dig their uniforms out of mothballs were pretty sorry looking sights,” Davidson added.

Somervell, on the other hand, effortlessly made the transition from his seersucker suits and bow ties and looked like “a modern Beau Brummel in uniform,” a newspaper columnist wrote. Somervell believed an officer should always be able to fit in the uniform in which he had graduated from West Point, and he kept himself at a sleek 5' 10? and 150 pounds. Anytime he put on a few pounds, he would drink nothing but water and douse his food with vinegar, a dieting technique he picked up from the Romantic poet Lord Byron.

Renshaw and Furman, both trim, also had no trouble fitting into their uniforms. Groves was another matter altogether; as was often the case, he was on the losing side in his lifelong battle with weight. To disguise his extra pounds, Groves took to wearing a one-size-larger uniform, heavy on the starch. As Groves biographer Robert Norris noted, “Not many were fooled.”

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