The Pentagon: A History (30 page)

Justifiable pride

Joe Allan knew he could forget about going home. The foreman had given orders that everybody would work straight through. The first employees were due to report to the Pentagon early the next day, April 30, 1942, and that meant Allan and the other carpenters in his crew would work all through the day and night. The building was not quite ready.

Crews had worked frantic overtime hours through April trying to get 600,000 square feet of Sections A and B ready for occupancy. Teams of workers raced to lath and plaster the interior walls and put up suspended ceilings of acoustic tile. Plumbers hooked up water and sewage lines to the washrooms and electricians installed power outlets in offices. Asphalt tile was laid in office bays and corridors. Painters slapped thousands of gallons of alkaline, flat oil, and lead paint on interior walls, corridors, and stairways. A joke later told was that if a carpenter was moving too slowly, he got his hammer painted. With a few days to go, there was nothing but scaffolding and building material scattered around a large section of the ground floor in Section A where a temporary cafeteria with seating for 1,800 was to go. “Bingo, and it was done,” the
Star
reported. “They were setting up tables as fast as the floor was laid.”

Finishing work was a misnomer—there was always more to be done. All through the last night Allan and the others worked, hanging doors, finishing trim work, and putting up partitions. When the sun came up, they were still at it, operating mainly on adrenaline. “Excitement was in the air,” Allan recalled. “We were all in the spirit of the thing.” Finally, at 8
A.M.
the foreman told them to stop, pick up their tools, and go home. It was over. It was for Allan. After seven months on the job, he had saved enough money to begin summer school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His final twenty-four-hour shift had left him exhausted, but giddy with enthusiasm about what the crews had accomplished.

Walking outside into a warm spring morning, Allan saw Army officers and secretaries lined up outside the south entrance, waiting to move in. “They were excited and ready to get to work,” Allan recalled.

More were arriving from Washington. Military police directed cars coming across the 14th Street Bridge onto Columbia Pike and into the south parking lot, still mostly dirt but with spaces paved for eight hundred cars. “The MPs did such a good job that all the cars that came across the bridge went into the parking lot, including lots of people heading to Richmond,” Bob Furman recalled. Furman—newly promoted to captain—had to redirect the southbound vehicles, including at least one bus on its way to the Virginia state capital, a hundred miles to the south.

Several hundred employees from the Army’s Ordnance Department had been chosen as guinea pigs to move in over the first few days. Marjorie Hanshaw, a twenty-three-year-old secretary from Iowa assigned to the supply section for the Chief of Ordnance, rode a bus from her home in Arlington with two other young women who worked in the office. Dropped off at a temporary bus-and-taxi terminal in the south parking lot, they entered the building without a clue where their office was.

Hanshaw and her friends wandered down long corridors, looking fruitlessly for a familiar face. They roamed about enormous office bays, amid scattered piles of desks, boxes, file cabinets, and building materials. “These things were just stacked up sky-high,” she recalled. “It took us about an hour to wind our way through that to find anybody we knew.” Finally, in the midst of a vast, largely empty office bay on the outermost E Ring, they saw their section chief, known to them only as Mrs. Wright, an eccentric Kansan who was trying to regain the red hair of her youth by popping a daily dose of alfalfa pills.

Hanshaw and the other Ordnance workers were moving from the Social Security Building at 4th Street and Independence Avenue on Capitol Hill, an elegant building with escalators, marble halls, and a fine cafeteria. Their new home was something altogether different. Water and sawdust were collected on the floor, and telephone wires dangled like seaweed from the ceiling. From her desk, Hanshaw could see the bright-blue sky a short distance away, but not through a window—it was an unfinished, open section of the building leading outside. Hanshaw and her companions could only laugh. “We couldn’t imagine why they’d move anybody in there, but at that age we weren’t too upset about it,” she recalled. “We found it rather amusing…. We were the pioneers. It was an adventure.”

The two dozen workers in Hanshaw’s section—under the direction of Wright, who kept her overcoat on despite the warm May weather—set up an island of desks within their big bay, trying to make order out of chaos. “You couldn’t really tell where the office started and where it finished,” Hanshaw said. “We were all just in there.” By the weekend, about three hundred workers from Ordnance had moved into the building, but it was a mere drop in the bucket. The employees “rattle about in the immensity like a small sewing circle in Madison Square Garden,” an observer wrote.

Yet the building was officially open for business. Renshaw, McShain, and Hauck took reporters and photographers on a tour May 2 to see the completed section of the building and watch new employees at work. McShain, wearing a double-breasted suit and a fedora, glowed with pride. Even the normally dowdy Hauck was turned out for the event.

The newspapers exhausted themselves with superlatives. “The pentagonal nest of buildings…dwarfs the great pyramid of Cheops,” the
Times-Herald
enthused. Its construction, the paper added, “was a story-making achievement without parallel outside the pages of the Arabian Nights’ tales or the annals of Paul Bunyan.”
The Washington Post
called it “a breathtaking study in immensity.”

A War Department press release trumpeted the event as being “six months ahead of the schedule originally planned for the occupancy of the New War Department Office Building.” All the newspapers highlighted the claim, and it has entered the litany of standard facts recited about the Pentagon. Yet it is entirely untrue. From the day he proposed his building, Somervell had promised that half a million square feet would be ready six months after construction began; the contract signed by McShain in September stipulated that at least 500,000 square feet of the building was to be “ready for occupancy” no later than May 1, 1942, which was under eight months. They had met that deadline—indeed, with 100,000 square feet to spare—and were opening the building right on time.

Ahead of schedule or not, the opening of the Pentagon for business on April 30, 1942, was an extraordinary achievement. It needed no embellishment. Barely more than nine months from the July evening when Somervell launched his idea, and seven and a half months after ground was broken, employees were moving into the world’s largest office building. Somervell’s promise had been fantastic, but its fulfillment was even more so. “It is almost inconceivable that any part of such a colossal structure…should now be occupied,” the
Post
noted in an editorial saluting the “remarkable feat.”

Somervell was exhilarated, sending rare words of praise to Renshaw’s office the day occupancy began. “This is, I believe, a record-breaking accomplishment in which all concerned can take justifiable pride,” Somervell said.

Somervell also sent a note on April 30 to Harry Hopkins, his old friend at the White House. Hopkins had made a bet—more than likely with Roosevelt—that the general would succeed in getting employees into the building by May 1. “This is merely to advise you that the Ordnance Department began moving into the new Army Building today,” Somervell wrote. “I believe this information will make it possible for you to collect a two-bit bet which I understand you have with a certain distinguished person.”

Roosevelt and Hopkins came over to see the building for themselves on Saturday, May 2. The president told Renshaw he was delighted with the progress. Touring the interior, however, Roosevelt and Hopkins were puzzled to find four large washrooms on each of the main hallways leading from the outer ring of the building to the inner, according to an account related by historian Constance M. Green in
Washington, A History of the Capital, 1800–1950.
The president, “upon inquiring the reason for such prodigality of lavatory space,” was informed that this was to comply with Virginia segregation laws requiring separate facilities. But signs marking “colored” or “white” were never painted on the doors, possibly at the insistence of Roosevelt, who had signed the executive order banning discrimination in the federal government the previous summer. A War Department employee used chalk to mark the women’s restroom doors on one corridor as “white” and “colored,” but the markings were erased after complaints.

Another confusing matter needed to be cleared up—the building’s name. The Army was still officially calling it the “New War Department Building in Arlington,” which was a mouthful. The situation was confounding, considering that another “New War Department Building” had opened a year earlier at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue in Washington. People would ask, “Which New War Department Building? The one on Virginia Avenue or the one in Virginia?” Some had taken to calling the first one the “Old New War Department Building” and the second the “New New War Department Building.”

Nine days after occupation began, the Army threw in the towel and decided to call the building by the name many workers and officers had been using informally for months. On May 9, 1942, Major General James A. Ulio, who as adjutant general was in charge of all administrative matters for the Army and reported to Somervell, issued a curt one-paragraph memorandum: “For the information of all concerned, the building at 21st and Va. Ave. NW., is correctly designated as the ‘War Department Building’ the building in Arlington, now under construction for the War Department, is the ‘Pentagon Building.’”

Preserving the War Department name for the building in Foggy Bottom was in keeping with Roosevelt’s insistence that, after the war, the Army headquarters would move back to Washington. The building in Arlington was somewhat second-class, an aberration of war. But it was now official: It was the Pentagon.

The plank walkers

Even as the Pentagon’s first occupants moved in, piles for the building’s foundation were being pounded into the ground in the final section. The last of 41,492 concrete piles—which if lined up would stretch two hundred miles—were still being driven well into May. The new employees were vastly outnumbered by the army of construction workers, whose strength had dropped temporarily from thirteen to eleven thousand with the completion of the first part but would soon rise again as a new push began to finish the building.

Indeed, as much construction remained to be done as had been accomplished. When occupation began, the building was 50 percent finished, by Renshaw’s estimate. Marjorie Hanshaw and her co-workers certainly needed no reminder. On top of the pile driving, they coped with the hammering and sawing of carpenters and the rumbling of concrete trucks. Officers shouted on telephones to be heard over the thunderous percussion of jackhammers. The tapping of typewriter keys and clicking of calculating machines were drowned out by the continuous clamor of construction.

Groves ordered Renshaw to make sure the higher-ups in the Ordnance Department were treated well. “I want them to have a good taste in their mouth towards the Engineers,” he told Renshaw.

The overriding taste anybody in the building had was of dirt. Bulldozers grading the earth for roads raised enormous clouds of dust, which floated freely into the building and coated everything: water fountains, typewriters, the food in the cafeteria. It was thick enough to write with on any desk in the building.

When there wasn’t dust, there was mud. “You just had to work your way through this muck, mud, water, and everything,” recalled payroll witness Hank Neighbors. “It was just a combination between a marsh and a moor.” Boards of lumber snaked around the grounds as walkways through the mud and puddles. In the Navy, the original crew members of a newly commissioned ship are called the “plank holders.” The first occupants of the Pentagon came up with a variation—they were the “plank walkers.”

Reporting to the building for a job interview, Lucille Ramale, a nineteen-year-old newly arrived in Washington from Brick Church in western Pennsylvania, was instructed to follow a rifle-toting soldier into the building. “It was a mess,” she recalled. “The front entrance, it was so muddy, they had a plank down. You walked it. If anybody came towards you, they had to swing around you, or else put one foot in the mud.”

Hanshaw and her office mates soon learned to keep lumber under their desks as well. “Oftentimes when it rained, we had our feet up on two-by-fours to keep them out of the water,” she recalled. Other times streams of water from restrooms flowed down corridors. Field mice and occasionally frogs roamed the building.

“You know, today, environmentally, they wouldn’t let anybody in a place like that,” Marjorie Hanshaw Downey reflected more than sixty years later. “First of all, it was a hazard just walking among that stuff. We just worked in that condition and accepted it.”

The ranks of War Department employees were growing steadily, about two hundred moving in every day. The entire Ordnance Department was soon in the building, followed quickly by other portions of Somervell’s Services of Supply (the general stayed in the Munitions Building for the time being with Stimson and Marshall). By June 7, more than seven thousand War Department employees were working in the building, with thousands more from the Signal Corps and Adjutant General’s office due to move in shortly. Already, the exodus of war workers from Washington to Arlington was noticeably relieving pressure on office space in the capital.