The Pentagon: A History (3 page)

Touring Europe on two months’ graduation leave, Somervell wasted no time thrusting himself into great events. In August 1914, the German army crashed across the Belgian frontier near Liège, the beginning of a great, wheeling offensive into France. Somervell immediately reported to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, where he was named assistant military attaché and put to work aiding Americans trying to escape ahead of the advancing Germans. To speed the exodus, the battleship USS
Tennessee
was dispatched to France carrying a million dollars in gold stuffed into ten kegs. Young Somervell hired special trains and ships to rescue stranded Americans and distributed money to panicked tourists clamoring to get home. His handling of the crisis quickly earned him a reputation as a man who could size up a problem, find a solution, and drive it through to completion.

Reporting for duty in the United States, which was still years from entering the war, Somervell was sent to Texas to map the country along the Mexican frontier. It was a somnolent assignment at first, but adventure found him again. “I was hard at work when (Pancho) Villa raided the border and made it unnecessary to finish the maps,” Somervell later said. The Mexican bandit attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916, killing eighteen Americans and leaving the small border town a smoking ruin. A punitive expedition was launched by President Woodrow Wilson under the command of General John “Black Jack” Pershing, and Somervell, to his joy, found a new opportunity.

He wasted no time making a name for himself, displaying what became a lifelong knack for impressing his superiors while infuriating his peers. Reporting to duty at expeditionary headquarters two hundred miles into Mexico, he came bearing a large box of Havana cigars preferred by his commanding officer, Captain Ernest “Pot” Graves. Somervell was placed in charge of building and operating a section of highway for the truck convoys supplying Pershing’s cavalry with rations, grain, and water.

The Pershing expedition marked the first time the Army had used motor transportation of any significant amount in a military operation, and it showed. The Army old guard insisted mule trains were more reliable, and at times it seemed they indeed were. The motorized expedition was hampered by breakdowns in the supply chain. Somervell, assigned to a new job as regimental supply officer, struggled to get the tremendous amounts of gasoline and oil required to keep the trucks running.

Motoring down a rough trail one hot afternoon, Pershing came across one of his trucks stalled by the road. “Black Jack” was outraged to see the crew idling in the shade with no officer in view, and he sprung from his car. “Where is the officer in charge?” Pershing demanded.

“Here, sir,” a voice underneath the truck answered. It was Somervell. Covered with grease from head to foot, he crawled out from under the truck, stood, and saluted. Half-scowling and half-smiling, Pershing silently returned the salute and drove on.

Somervell’s performance in Mexico won him a spot in the first Army engineering detachment sent to France after America entered the Great War in 1917. Assigned to the 15th Engineer Regiment—with Pot Graves again his immediate superior—Somervell landed in France with the unit on July 25. Now a captain and soon to be a major, Somervell constructed a great munitions dump at Mehun-sur-Yèvre, a hundred miles south of Paris, and then was sent to straighten out a mess near Dijon at Is-sur-Tille, where poorly trained engineer troops building an advance depot were floundering. Somervell shook the troops from their lethargy with reveille at dawn and worked them from first light until dark, with barely a break for meals. Somervell’s hurry-up style was evident in all he did. Finding no proper sleeping quarters for the regiment, he bought new tents without waiting for a purchase order. The Army billed him for $17,755 and threatened to deduct the cost from his pay, but Somervell argued his way out.

For over a year Somervell toiled, building dumps, barracks, and a poison-gas depot, and he was awarded with a temporary promotion to lieutenant colonel and the Distinguished Service Medal for his record of “unusual vision [and] initiative.” Somervell was far from satisfied. He begged for transfer to combat duty, but he had made himself too useful to supply commanders, and they refused to spare him. Given leave in the fall of 1918, Somervell spurned the chance to relax in Paris, instead pleading with Pot Graves to lend him his Army sedan, a big Cadillac, so he could make “just a little visit” to the front. It was not merely adventure he was seeking; calculating as always, Somervell was also thinking of his career. “I have yet to hear a hostile shot and I’m not going home with that on my record,” Somervell insistently told Graves.

The gruff but good-natured Graves finally capitulated and did not see his Cadillac again until after the armistice. Somervell’s timing, as usual, was prescient. He arrived at the front October 31, the day before the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne offensive that would break the German army. Somervell worked his way to the headquarters of the 89th Division, which was taking part in the push to the Meuse River. The division’s operations officer had just been captured by the Germans while on reconnaissance, and a replacement was needed.

“What do you know about military tactics?” Somervell was asked.

“Practically nothing,” he admitted.

“An ideal man for the job,” replied a sardonic officer. But the 89th was in a fix, and Somervell got the post.

The division chief of staff, Colonel John C. H. Lee, found his new operations officer to be “truly an answer to prayer. He learned with lightning-like rapidity, was fearless and brilliant.” By November 5, the 89th had reached the Meuse opposite Pouilly in northeast France, where the retreating Germans were thought to have destroyed all bridges in the area. Late in the day, the division learned that the Germans had failed to blow a bridge leading to town. Somervell accompanied Lee on a reconnaissance to the frontline, along a canal that paralleled the river. Reaching the approach to the bridge, they found it had been damaged, but in the darkness could not tell how badly. Shortly before midnight, Somervell went forward with two scouts, moving more than five hundred yards beyond the last American outposts and fording three branches of the Meuse. Across the river, they encountered a German detachment and drove it off with a brief exchange of fire. Somervell considered chasing them but wisely turned back. The bridge was passable, Somervell reported to his superiors. The division crossed the river several days later and was advancing when word came after sun-up on the morning of November 11 that an armistice was to go into effect at 11
A.M.
that day.

For his exploits at Pouilly, Somervell was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest decoration for bravery. Now a certified war hero—one of only nine officers to win both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal during the conflict—Somervell’s reputation was made. Pot Graves’s evaluation of the subordinate who absconded with his car was succinct: “This is the best officer I ever saw, or hope to see.” It was high praise, but Graves’s words hinted at the ambivalence some officers felt about Somervell. His brilliance was darkened—and in part fueled—by an aggressive and opportunistic nature so powerful that his peers, many of them quite aggressive themselves, were taken aback. “He called himself a mean son-of-a-bitch, and he was,” said William Hoge, an engineer officer who would cross swords with him. “Watch Somervell,” it was said around the Army, and not always meant favorably.

Assigned to the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland, Somervell enjoyed life stationed in the ancient city of Koblenz, founded by the Romans at the strategic confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers. His reputation among friends as “a gay blade” suffered after he met Anna Purnell, a young YMCA volunteer from a privileged Chicago background who helped entertain the 89th Division troops. She was lovely, with wavy, Titian hair, a woman of “rare personal charm,” in the judgment of Colonel Lee. Somervell married her on August 28, 1919, in the Kaiser’s private chapel in Koblenz. A year later, Somervell returned to the United States with his wife and the first of three daughters.

Magnitude never seemed to bother him

More than one major controversy in Somervell’s career presaged the splash he would make with the Pentagon, including the tempest that arose while he served as District Engineer for Washington, D.C. In 1929, Somervell pondered a grandiose scheme to make the Potomac River the national waterway by connecting it with the Ohio River. It was a dream first pursued 135 years earlier by George Washington, who began building a canal that would have tied the fledgling country to the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains. The modern project would construct twenty-seven dams to turn 185 miles of the Potomac’s upper reaches between Washington and Cumberland, Maryland, into navigable water; it was an enormous undertaking that Somervell reluctantly concluded would be prohibitively expensive. Instead—perhaps as a consolation—he advocated tackling a portion of the project. Somervell wanted to dam the Potomac at two points upriver from Washington, including at Great Falls, a scene of primeval beauty where the powerful river cascades over a series of jagged boulders, falling seventy-six feet in less than a mile.

Somervell was pitted against a formidable foe: Lieutenant Colonel Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the Union general, who was executive officer of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. He was well-known in Washington, having led what the newspapers dubbed the “war on neckers” during the summer of 1928. Grant demanded that visitors to Washington parks sign a pledge promising to “refrain from any action, posture or public display of amorousness that might be offensive to others or could set a bad example to the children.” Despite his disapproval of park romances, Grant was a lover of nature, and he was appalled by Somervell’s proposal to flood majestic Great Falls. His planning commission came down squarely against the plan.

Somervell was not the least intimidated about taking on a brother officer of the Corps of Engineers, even one who outranked him and bore such a famous name. To the contrary, Somervell publicly ridiculed Grant, issuing a statement to the press calling Grant’s criticism “too far-fetched to claim the attention of any thinking person, much less an engineer who is supposed to know about such matters.” Congress, however, sided with Grant and soon passed a bill that established an extensive park system along the Potomac, including at Great Falls.

The whole affair was vintage Somervell, from the supremely confident case he made for building the dams to his fury at anyone—Grant, in this case—who tried to stop him. Most notably, it laid bare Somervell’s deep, almost megalomaniacal passion for operating on a grand scale. Building huge ammunition depots during the Great War had merely whetted his appetite. He saw himself as a builder, and the bigger the project, the better. “Magnitude never seemed to bother him,” said General John Hardin, a fellow Army engineer. “I think he loved the bigness of things.”

Somervell was bitterly disappointed by the outcome of the Great Falls debate, but before long he had another canal to build, this one even grander. In 1934, President Roosevelt appointed Somervell to a board studying the feasibility of building a canal across northern Florida, connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, an idea that, like Washington’s Potomac canal, had been contemplated for centuries. The board recommended the project, and, a year later, Roosevelt allocated $5 million in relief money as a means of putting men to work. To no one’s surprise, Somervell—now a lieutenant colonel—was placed in charge.

Congress was decidedly dubious about the project because of its high cost and environmental problems. Where the estimated $120 million needed would come from, nobody knew. But Somervell was not to be dissuaded and tried to force congressional approval with a
fait accompli.
In the town of Ocala, Florida, just five days after Roosevelt’s announcement, Somervell presided as a thundering blast sent a geyser of dirt into the air, tearing out the first hole for the canal. Within three weeks, Somervell had three thousand men on the job and was pressing Washington for another $20 million. “He got his orders one morning and before Congress could get around to stopping the project he had that great ditch well along in construction in a matter of a few weeks,” an Army engineer later wrote. “I doubt if there are many equals to that performance.”

Somervell was completely in his element. The canal, running 195 miles across Florida, would be of a suitably Somervellian scale, twice as long as the Suez Canal and four times the length of Panama’s. There was no other job in the world he would rather have, he said.

Attracted by the grand scope of the canal, a roving newspaper columnist for the Scripps-Howard chain visited the project headquarters in Ocala in the spring of 1936 to interview Somervell. Arriving at Camp Roosevelt at 5
P.M.
on a Sunday, Ernie Pyle walked into the administration building and found one person at work. It was Somervell—at forty-four, his hair turning silver—wearing blue trousers with a light-gray pullover. He wasted no time in charming the columnist. “I’m glad you came. I wanted to quit work anyhow,” said Somervell, rising to greet Pyle from behind a desk covered with foot-high piles of charts and reports.

“Somervell surprised me,” Pyle—who became the greatest American reporter of World War II—told his readers. “I had expected to see an old, hard-bitten engineer veteran, tough as a horse-hair lariat and meaner than Pilate. Somervell is tough all right, I guess, but he doesn’t look it…. It would make him sore to say so, but he is a handsome man.”

In full, folksy Will Rogers mode, Somervell regaled Pyle with tales of Arkansas, Pancho Villa, and the copperhead snake one of his daughters had killed, skinned, and made into a bandeau the previous summer. “He’s a fellow you can sit down and talk with,” Pyle wrote. “He’s a tremendous reader, and seems to know something about everything.” Somervell, the columnist predicted, might well take his place among the storied engineers of past great projects. “Panama had its Goethals, the Brooklyn Bridge its Roebling, and the Florida Canal will have, I suppose, its Somervell,” Pyle wrote.