The Pentagon in Peace and War

THE PENTAGON IN PEACE AND WAR

By Craig Collins

Even today, 75 years later, the numbers are staggering: The massive building, constructed to bring the U.S. Department of War under a single roof in the lead-up to World War II, sprawls over 29 acres, an area larger than the footprint of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and is still the largest of any office building in the world, capable of containing five U.S. Capitol Buildings. The Pentagon sits atop 41,492 piles driven into the bottomlands of the Potomac River, from which 680,000 tons of sand and gravel were dredged to make concrete for the project. The building’s interior contains 6.5 million square feet, about half of which is used as office space. Its lawns total 200 acres and its 67-acre parking lot can accommodate 8,770 vehicles. The total length of its corridors is more than 17 miles. 23,000 military and civilian employees of the Department of Defense work there, along with about 3,000 support personnel – a population roughly equal to that of New London, Connecticut. Six ZIP codes are assigned to it.

It was designed and built with great speed and pragmatism, about 17 months from conception to dedication – slightly longer than it takes some contractors today to finish a new house. In spite of – or maybe because of – its designers’ prosaic avoidance of embellishment, the Pentagon hasn’t suffered the ignominy directed at other hastily conceived government buildings. To the rest of the world, it’s more than a building: It’s a symbol of immovable might, of the dominance of the U.S. military. “The Pentagon” is today a metonym, a name that stands in for the entire military and all of its service branches.

In July 1941, just after Nazi Germany had expanded its aggression beyond Europe and invaded the Soviet Union, the U.S. War Department was a bureaucracy of 24,000 people scattered among 23 buildings in and around Washington, D.C. The War Department was in the midst of an unprecedented peacetime mobilization; the draft bill, approved months earlier, had already increased the ranks of the Army to about a million-and-a-half soldiers, and it was estimated that the number of people needed to administer and support this Army would swell to 30,000 by the end of the year.

The government had already approved and begun construction of a new War Department headquarters, at 21st and C Streets in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, but the War Department already had outgrown it even before it was completed. It was briefly known as the “War Department Building,” but never became department headquarters. A few years later, the State Department moved in, and today still occupies the 1.4 millionsquare-foot complex now known as the Harry S. Truman Building.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson knew the man in charge of accommodating the growing Army – building the dozens of camps where new soldiers would be trained and housed, as well as the new administrative spaces – was the right person for the job. The chief of the Army’s Construction Division, then a small bureau within the Quartermaster Corps, was Gen. Brehon B. Somervell. He’d come to Stimson’s attention during his leadership of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration in New York City. Somervell, contending with hot-tempered Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the city’s 200,000 workers, and the intractable labor unions that represented them, had brought them all to heel and built the $45 million, 558-acre New York Municipal Airport (later renamed LaGuardia Airport) in less than two years.

President Harry S Truman with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gen. Omar Bradley, after the swearing-in of Bradley as chief of staff of the U.S. Army at the Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia, Feb. 7, 1948.

National Archives Photo

In hindsight, it seems unlikely the Pentagon would have been built without someone as forceful as Somervell leading the charge. He was ambitious and audacious, to an extent that rubbed some people the wrong way, and once he’d made a determination, he did everything he could to avoid debating it. Within six months of taking charge of the Construction Division, Somervell had overseen the building of 229 troop facilities, and within days of achieving that, he’d talked Stimson and President Franklin Roosevelt out of their plan to build more temporary structures for War Department employees. Instead, Somervell said, the department should erect a single building that would bring department personnel under a single roof.

Truman, at his desk in the Oval Office, signs H.R. 5632, the National Security Act Amendments of 1949, which converted the National Military Establishment into a new Department of Defense and made other changes in the national security system, as various dignitaries look on.

National Archives Photo

The Pentagon

National Archives

A PERMANENT HOME

Within days of first mentioning the idea, Somervell had plans sketched out by a designer. In order to accommodate more than 20,000 employees, the building would need to be huge, but it couldn’t be tall. Local building codes, public opinion, and a government warning about possible material shortages – including the steel necessary to frame tall buildings – conspired to keep the new War Department headquarters a low-rise.

There wasn’t room for such a building in the capital. Somervell’s team briefly considered the site of the former Washington-Hoover Airport, across the river in Arlington, Virginia, which was being shut down after the June opening of Washington National Airport. But the location, a low-lying swampy floodplain known as Hell’s Bottom, was considered too unstable, so Somervell proposed a site higher up: a 67-acre parcel of Arlington Farm, the former estate of Gen. Robert E. Lee, on a hill directly across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial and adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery. A corner of the rectangular plot was cut off by a road, so Somervell’s architect, George Edwin Bergstrom, optimized the available area by designing a roughly shaped pentagon, three stories tall, that would cover most of it.

Somervell didn’t think three stories would be enough, but he wanted to avoid public criticism, which came anyway, from every angle: The building was too big. It was too ugly. It ruined the sightlines from Arlington Cemetery to the capital. It was a huge, expensive solution to the temporary problem of accommodating a military buildup. So many different objections arose that a unified opposition never materialized, and Congress approved construction of the building in August. Roosevelt and other administration officials were certain such a huge building would have to be converted to another purpose after the war – most likely the storage of records. Somervell obliged, incorporating floors designed to support filing cabinets, loads of up to 150 pounds per square foot.

The plan’s critics wouldn’t be silenced, however, and Roosevelt ordered Somervell back down to Hell’s Bottom, a parcel including the old airport and a seedy assortment of taverns, tarpaper shacks, industrial warehouses, and pawn shops. Reluctantly, Somervell’s crew began preparing the site, though it meant elevating the building’s eastern grade by 18 feet, borrowing fill that had been trucked in to raise the airport above flood stage.

On the same day that Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer (U.S. Army) was sworn in as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also met the three previous holders of the position: Gen. Omar Bradley, Gen. Nathan Twining (USAF), and Adm. Arthur Radford.

National Archives

The bigger Hell’s Bottom parcel didn’t require a pentagonal building, but there wasn’t time for substantial revision, and Somervell and Bergstrom were beginning to see the wisdom and efficiency of the shape, which would minimize the time required to walk from one side to another. The design was tweaked to make the pentagon symmetrical. The building would have to sit on tens of thousands of piles, made of concrete rather than steel, driven into the bottomland soil. It would consist of five concentric “rings” of offices, connected by transverse corridors. To save steel and avoid the expense of elevators, wide concrete ramps would allow people to move up and down between levels.

Today it’s difficult to grasp how quickly all of this happened. Somervell’s crews worked while legislators, accustomed to a more deliberate pace, continued to debate the idea and offer suggestions and revisions. In his book The Pentagon: A History, author Steve Vogel describes the wrecking of the Hell’s Bottom slums as happening so quickly, few people were aware of it; as the buildings fell, dumbfounded patrons arrived on buses from the capital, clutching pawn tickets they hoped to redeem at shops that no longer existed.

The Pentagon was literally built faster than it could be designed. As Vogel’s books relates, the drafting team assembled by lead designer Ides van der Gracht was put to work in the basement of a Fort Myer warehouse, a former horse stable, so stuffy and hot that draftsmen sat shirtless at their work tables, covering their drawings with blotting paper to avoid ruining them with their sweat. Eventually a design force numbering about 350 was moved to a former airplane hangar on the old airport grounds.

Though the blueprint machines in the hangar produced an average of 15,000 yards of print paper a day, it wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the demands of site supervisors. Some simply based their work on what had already been built and hoped for the best. Decades later, when designers for the massive Pentagon Renovation Project looked for original drawings and materials specifications to use as references, they discovered that for many parts of the building, there weren’t any.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff pose for a photograph while standing around a large globe. Pictured are CMC Randolph McPate, CNO Arleigh Burke, CJCS Nathan Twining, CSA Maxwell Taylor, and CSAF Thomas White.

Library of Congress

Somervell, to minimize his interactions with Congress and the public, remained cagey about what was actually going on in Hell’s Bottom, but in October 1941, after crews had made substantial progress, he released some details to the press. Projections of the War Department’s size had already increased, but Somervell had promised a three-story building, so the plan he revealed in October was described as a three-story building with a “basement” that observers couldn’t help noticing was above ground.

By July 1942, months after the Pearl Harbor attack and America’s entry into the war, the Pentagon was about two-thirds complete – but every square inch of it had already been assigned, and more room was needed to accommodate War Department employees. Somervell’s team, without consulting Congress, added a fifth floor to squeeze in another 300,000 square feet of office space. By now the project was already $14 million over its estimated cost, and budget hawks were outraged when the War Department released a new plan including a “fourth floor intermediate.” Today’s Pentagon is a five-story building with a mezzanine and basement.

At its peak in the spring of 1942, the Pentagon construction project employed about 15,000 workers. Somervell’s team had dredged its own lagoon in a Potomac channel to build its own concrete batching plant next to the site. Vogel’s book describes barges delivering sand, gravel, and cement 24 hours a day at the plant, which used around 115,000 gallons of water daily to produce as much as 3,500 cubic yards of concrete. Over a 17-week period beginning in September 1942, utility workers installed more than 68,000 miles of telephone cabling throughout the building to connect 27,000 telephones.

Such was the urgency of the war effort that there was no dedication ceremony when the building was finally completed in January 1943; the first War Department employees, in fact, had moved in to the partially completed building – contending with drafts, dust, mud, and field mice – the preceding May.

Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates poses with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including CJCS Nathan Twining, CSA Lyman Lemnitzer, CNO Arleigh Burke, and CMC Randolph McPate.

Photo by K.L. Vantran

In February, the Army’s chief of public relations sent a memorandum to the office of Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, in which he described the building as the “permanent home of the War Department,” and recommended the building officially be designated by the name it had been called informally, almost since its inception: The Pentagon. Marshall signed the general order to do this on Feb. 19, 1943.

The memo was the first time the Pentagon had been mentioned in official correspondence as a “permanent” home for the War Department; many, including Roosevelt, still considered it temporary. As late as January 1945, a month before he traveled to Yalta for his final conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, the president sent a memo to his budget director telling him he thought all the armed forces’ personnel records ought to be moved into the building after the war. The War Department,

Roosevelt thought, could return to an expanded headquarters in Foggy Bottom.

Roosevelt, who died four months later, wouldn’t see what was to become of the Pentagon. As much as the world had changed while he was in office, it seems unlikely he could have imagined the changes yet to come: In just over two years, there would be no U.S. War Department, and the nation and its allies would be locked in a mortal struggle against an adversary determined to dominate the globe.

A COMMAND CENTER

World War II promptly morphed into the Cold War as the alliance with the Soviet Union quickly disintegrated into a rivalry fueled by the nuclear arms race. The United States suddenly had numerous security commitments around the world. The National Security Act of 1947 overhauled the American military, combining all the armed forces – the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps – into a single National Military Establishment (NME) led by a civilian secretary of defense. The act was amended in 1949 to change the NME’s name to the Department of Defense (DOD).

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara shows President John F. Kennedy around the Pentagon. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. George Anderson and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric are also present.

Library of Congress

The Pentagon soon became identified not only with the Army, but with the entire U.S. military. The first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, moved into the Pentagon in September 1947. The Navy, which had tried and failed to negotiate a move to the Pentagon in 1941, moved in a year later. The Marine Corps, clinging stubbornly to its reputation for independence, did not move its headquarters to the Pentagon until 1995.

The National Security Act acknowledged the importance of shared planning and communication among the service branches, and the Pentagon’s internal configuration conformed, over the next half-century, to become the nation’s Cold War command post. The Joint Chiefs Area, including the conference room informally known as “The Tank,” was built near the secretary’s office. Over time, the “war rooms” evolved into the National Military Command System (NMCS), created by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1962 and consisting of the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the

Pentagon and the National Emergency Airborne Command Post. While command and control organization within the Department of Defense has evolved and adapted over time, the Pentagon’s NMCC has remained its centerpiece. In the mid- 1980s, a 5,200-square-foot Crisis Coordination Center was built near the Office of the Secretary of Defense and adjacent to the NMCC, equipped with a computer network and communications equipment for rapid and informed decision-making within the National Command Authority.

The Pentagon’s population declined after World War II, but not in proportion to the postwar demobilization. At full occupancy in 1944, it had a working population of up to 33,000. Unlike the military’s active-duty strength – which peaked at more than 12 million in 1945, spiked at around 3.5 million during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and has hovered below 1.5 million since 1990 – the number of workers in the Pentagon, aside from surges during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, has tended to remain near its originally intended occupancy, between 23,000 and 26,000. Despite early predictions, the Pentagon has never accommodated the entire staff of the U.S. military.

The building has, nevertheless, from its very inception, become an avatar, embodying the nation’s transformation into a global power. In 1992, the National Park Service declared the building a National Historic Landmark. This was, strictly speaking, a breach of the minimum eligibility requirements, which required a landmark to be at least 50 years old. “The Pentagon, however,” wrote the nominating committee, “is of an exceptional level of historical significance . . . Its configuration, role, and location have combined to make the Pentagon an essential and important physical and symbolic element of the Monumental Core of the Nation’s Capital.”

A CULTURAL TOUCHSTONE

Long before it had been completed, the Pentagon had become an object of intense popular fascination; the construction itself spawned urban legends and apocryphal tales repeated as fact to this day. The enormity and speed of the concrete pours required to build its walls gave rise to stories of men who’d fallen in and been discovered only after the forms were removed to reveal their corpses. There were many of these stories, each so peculiarly detailed that they seemed impossible to have been made up – in fact, as Vogel recounts in his book, one was recycled and printed as gospel in the Pentagon’s official newsletter in 1984.

Other stories involved people getting lost in its vast corridors – which needn’t have been exaggerated; within months of its completion, The New York Times called it “the great, concrete doughnut of a building where the War Department now lives . . . a maze of corridors, ramps and roads.” In 1992, in an article commemorating the building’s 50th anniversary, American Heritage magazine included this anecdote:

Another tale told of a woman who rushed up to a guard and exclaimed, “Quick! You have got to get me out of here. I’m about to have a baby.” The guard remonstrated, “You never should have come in here in that condition.” “I wasn’t when I came in,” she snapped back.

The denotation of a single office number was a difficult code for newcomers to crack, as the Army deputy chief of staff spelled out for new employees in an orientation pamphlet:

… Thus office number 3E210 is on the third floor, in the E Ring, about two tenths of the way around the E Ring in the clockwise direction, starting from the middle of the concourse … Here is your first quiz: find Room BG634A in the Pentagon and report back here. You have ten minutes. (Hint: to make sure you can find your way to turn in your paper, use a ball of string.) Life magazine reported that a typical new Pentagon arrival was “as confused as a fresh rat in a psychologist’s maze.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II hero and former Army chief of staff, later wrote: “One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it.”

During the 1950s, another myth sprang up concerning the hot dog stand in the center of the building’s inner courtyard: Every day around noon, the story went, Soviet satellites captured images of top military brass entering the building in the courtyard, and so, assuming it was the entrance to an important command-and-control bunker, kept at least two nuclear warheads aimed at it. The “world’s most dangerous hot dog stand,” also nicknamed “Café Ground Zero,” was replaced by a new eatery, the Center Court Café, in 2008.

The Pentagon’s massive physical, psychological, and geopolitical presence has given rise to more serious cultural debates. Architecturally, it’s the world’s largest example of the austere “Stripped Classical” style, manifested in an outer façade of Indiana limestone, simple columns, and minimal finishes and ornamentation, a look Newsweek magazine derided as “penitentiary-like.” Other observers have admired its simple style and its low elevation; it’s both imposing and subdued. “Large as the Pentagon was,” Vogel observed, “it barely made a ripple on the landscape.”

Members of the military police keep back protesters during their sit-in at the Mall Entrance to the Pentagon.

Library of Congress

The Pentagon’s most significant architectural legacy isn’t aesthetic, however. It’s so large that it’s more than a building; it’s a micro-society, incorporating offices, maintenance facilities, an indoor shopping mall, and facilities for handling food service, mail, communications, fitness, recreation, medical care, and other services. Upon the building’s completion in 1943, the magazine Architectural Forum observed that the integration of these facilities under a single roof offered “a real foretaste of the future . . . as building approaches the scale technically feasible, the distinction between architecture and city planning vanishes.”

Because of this, the Pentagon has often resembled a microcosm of the greater American society it serves, roiled by the issues of the day. In May 1942, as the first employees were moving in, Roosevelt toured the building and observed that there appeared to be twice as many bathrooms as necessary. At the time, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Jim Crow laws mandated that new buildings be constructed with separate bathrooms for black and white people, and the officer overseeing the construction, then-Col. Leslie Groves, had complied.

Roosevelt had, nearly a year earlier, issued an executive order ending racial segregation in federal agencies and contractors involved in the war effort, and the restroom segregation was never enforced. The often-written claim that the Pentagon was never segregated, however, isn’t quite true: Vogel recounts an ugly incident, just a couple of weeks after Roosevelt’s visit, in which black workers from the Ordnance Department were turned away from the cafeteria line and directed to a “colored” dining room. The workers’ principled refusal to do so, nearly two decades before the Greensboro sit-ins, resulted in a security guard clubbing one on the skull and drawing his gun. Somervell, furious, ordered Groves to discontinue any enforced segregation in the Pentagon’s dining facilities. Until 1965, in contradiction of Virginia law, the Pentagon was the only non-segregated public building in the state.

As the symbol of America’s military, the Pentagon has, not surprisingly, been a target of anti-war protests. The first was staged in 1965 by a single Baltimore Quaker, Norman Morrison, who committed suicide on the lawn below Secretary of Defense Robert Mc- Namara’s window to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The largest-ever Pentagon protest was staged two years later, in October 1967, when tens of thousands of demonstrators, a loose association of groups marching under the umbrella of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“the Mobe”), descended on the building for a 48-hour anti-war rally. Because some of the protestors had publicly announced their intention to gain entrance to the building and disrupt the work going on there, more than 1,200 military police and guard units were brought in, along with 200 federal marshals, to cordon off the area where the protestors were assembled.

The next 48 hours were by turns violent – in their struggle to breach the lines of defense, protestors threw rocks and bottles, smashed windows, and scuffled with guards, resulting in about 45 injuries – and absurd. Abbie Hoffman, co-founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies), threatened guards with a water pistol filled with LSD. At one point, Hoffman and beatnik poet Allen Ginsburg led a crowd of about 100 in a chant aimed at “levitating” the Pentagon. One of the protestors, the novelist Norman Mailer, chronicled the rally in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Armies of the Night, in which he described the Pentagon as “the true and high church of the military-industrial complex . . . Every aspect of the building was anonymous, monotonous, massive, interchangeable.”

The 1967 protests worsened the climate between the government and anti-war protestors, to the point where the Pentagon was attacked. On May 19, 1972, a day chosen to honor the birthday of the late Ho Chi Minh, the anti-war group the Weathermen placed a bomb in a women’s restroom at the Pentagon. Nobody was hurt, but the bomb caused $75,000 in damage.

As Mailer’s words attest, the Pentagon is one of the rarest of icons, symbolizing different things to different observers – or different things to the same observer, depending on changed circumstances. One can see whatever he or she is determined to see in it.

In the remarks he delivered at the May 12, 1993 ceremony celebrating the Pentagon’s 50th anniversary, Gen. Colin Powell, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, eloquently described what he saw in the building:

The Pentagon has stood … for more than half a century as a powerful and renowned symbol of America’s convictions, America’s power, and of America’s willingly accepted obligation to the world. In its somber and unpretentious way, it has weathered time, it has weathered wars, it has weathered innumerable crises, and it has weathered the storm of politics. Less than a decade later, the Pentagon weathered far worse. On Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists, determined to destroy precisely what the Pentagon represented to Powell, hijacked a passenger airliner and flew it into the western façade of the building. The attackers died along with 59 other people aboard American Airlines

A photograph of the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2011, after the building was hit by a commercial airplane in a terrorist attack is merged with a photograph of the Pentagon on Sept. 8, 2015.

Photo by Paul Haring for Washingtonpost.com & Joint Base Myer- Henderson Hall Pao Photo by Neil King