Brehon Somervell, Pharaoh of the Pentagon
In mid 1941, the War Department faced a vexing problem: where to house the thousands of officers, enlisted men, secretaries, clerks, and other workers streaming into Washington to prepare for war.
The D.C. area had grown by more than one-third in the past decade, straining the region’s infrastructure to the breaking point. The military was in especially dire straits, dispersed across countless offices and makeshift structures dating back to the First World War. A new War Department building in Foggy Bottom barely put a dent in the problem.
The man who solved this problem was Brehon Somervell, a genteel Southerner who began the war a brigadier general in the Army Corps of Engineers and ended with four stars, in charge of supplying practically all the Allied forces around the world. Friend and foe alike acknowledged Somervell as a man of immense drive and capability, with eyes that could pierce concrete as swiftly as the jackhammers on his construction sites. When America needed a pharaoh, Somervell answered the call. He is this week’s Heretic and Hero.
Somervell swiftly established a reputation as a breaker of bureaucracies and builder of monuments. During the First World War, then-Captain Somervell was in charge of preparing munitions depots in advance of the American Expeditionary Force. His regiment had no sleeping quarters, so he purchased tents off the shelf without waiting for approval, prompting the Army to threaten to dock the $17,000 from his pay. In retrospect, this would be his least expensive transgression in a long career.
During the Depression, Somervell again distinguished himself as head of the Works Progress Administration for New York City. It was a thankless role, bogged down by labor strife and corruption. But Somervell broke the logjam where previous leaders had failed. LaGuardia Airport doesn’t bear Somervell’s name, but he was the builder who made it happen. His hard-charging demeanor earned the respect even of union leaders who had plenty of reason to resent Somervell. The journalist Steve Vogel, who wrote the indispensable book on the Pentagon’s construction, quotes one such grudging leader: “I suppose the fellow that built the Pyramids was efficient, too.”
Somervell’s reputation as a fast mover and New Deal man brought him to the attention of higher-ups in Washington. Military construction had emerged as the bottleneck in the Army’s mobilization effort. Somervell was brought in to shake up the Construction Division. “I will not talk,” he told his boss upon assuming the position. “I will just move.”
He made good on the promise, cleaning house of slow-moving officers and other relics of the peacetime Army. In a period known as the “Somervell Blitz,” the Construction Corps threw up 50 camps and a host of other facilities—enough to house a million-man Army. Somervell referred to the Construction Division as the “shock troops of preparedness.” Few in the division were prepared for his next coup: the biggest office building in the world.
One Friday in July of 1941, Somervell convened a group of officers and announced they would build a new permanent home for the War Department. He envisioned an office building, more than four million feet square, with 500,000 feet available for use within six months. In typical style, he concluded the meeting by telling his architects to have the general schematics done by Monday morning.
In normal times, approving such a project—much less designing it—might take years. Somervell bulled it through in a week, expertly working political connections and the press to get the green light from the War Department, Congress, and the President. The groundbreaking in southern Arlington, Virginia took place with a minimum of fanfare in September, less than two months after Somervell launched his biggest blitz to date.
Somervell was able to move with such relentless speed in part because he surrounded himself with likeminded talent. His deputies included Leslie Groves, of Manhattan Project fame, and a sparkplug of a general contractor named John McShain, who became known as “The Man Who Built Washington.” Somervell assembled a team that felt the need for speed, and the attitude trickled down to the rest of the workforce.
The building’s design was odd but powerful, a low building with five equal sides in the shape of a pentagon. The shape had originally been chosen to fit an earlier construction site, but it was retained when the site changed because it had a number of advantages. A pentagon was faster to navigate than a rectangle, but easier to build than a circle (which required curved walls). A low building required less structural steel than a skyscraper, saving that precious resource for the naval construction already underway in the nation’s rapidly expanding shipyards. Ultimately the Pentagon was built with enough concrete for six Empire State Buildings; it saved enough steel to build a battleship.
Despite Somervell’s manufactured sense of urgency, construction was slow to start. Bottlenecks emerged in a hundred places. Designers couldn’t put pen to paper fast enough for the growing army of builders. Massive traffic jams developed on Arlington’s underbuilt road network. A November audit found that, at the pace things were moving, the building would take eight years to complete.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the next month provided a goad to action. Unnecessary regulations were swept aside, such as limitations on how much concrete could be poured at one time to avoid cracks as the concrete set. Cracks were unsightly, but they were a small price to pay—and the Pentagon wasn’t winning any beauty contests, anyway.
Creative methods were soon found to overcome other bottlenecks, as well. Supply constraints were solved, in many cases, by commandeering resources from other projects—or stealing them outright. Design bottlenecks were eased by assigning large teams of designers to stand on site next to the hammer-swingers, serving, essentially, as “forward-deployed engineers” on the world’s biggest construction project. Eventually, blueprints went out the window altogether as foremen who had built previous wings of the building exercised their judgement about how subsequent wings ought to be built. The Pentagon’s 15,000-strong construction workforce “learned by doing.” Soon, the project was back on track.
The first office workers moved into the Pentagon on May 1, 1942, less than a year after the project had been conceived. It was a huge morale boost for the War Department and the nation, despite abysmal working conditions. Air conditioning and heating were virtually nonexistent (many workers didn’t even have walls). Dust choked the air and mud covered the ground. The traffic situation was likened to “a retreat from Singapore.” It didn’t matter. The War Department had a new home.
By that time, Somervell had been promoted and placed in charge of the Army’s Services of Supply—an innocuous-sounding position that essentially meant he was in charge of logistics for the entire Army. The Pentagon would remain his biggest priority, as well as his legacy.
The completion of the Pentagon less than a year later, in February 1943, was a tremendous feat. That fact didn’t stop critics from sniping at it. German propaganda referred to the building as “Somervell’s madhouse.” Closer to home, the Pentagon was subject to not one but several congressional inquiries, including one by Senator Harry Truman’s special committee on war profiteering.
The domestic critics had plenty of ammunition. The Pentagon ended up costing double what Somervell had insisted it would cost—and what Congress had given him to spend. The building also ended up much larger than originally planned, thanks in part to creative definitions of what constituted a basement (the supposed “basement” was really the building’s ground floor). Somervell justified these discrepancies as wartime requirements. “We’re buying time, and time is the most expensive commodity in the world,” he said. But his cavalier attitude created enemies.
When Senator Truman ascended to the presidency, it all but ended Somervell’s chances for higher command. He retired months after VJ Day. As Vogel put it, “War had a way of bringing his like to the fore.” Peace had a way of ushering his like out the door.
However, even Somervell’s harshest critics qualified their assessments with praise for his capabilities. Said Truman: “I will say this for General Somervell, he will get the stuff, but it is going to be hell on the taxpayer.”
Hell or no, General Somervell’s five-sided madhouse stands to this day. It is a testament to what this country can build, when the leadership, the willpower, and the resources mobilize to build it.
Further Reading
• The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel