The Pentagon: A History (17 page)

An army is marshaled

Word was getting around fast at the union hall for the International Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Union, Local 40, in Washington in early September 1941. Hiring was starting for a new project across the river in Arlington. It was no ordinary job—it would be the biggest building in the world.

Stanley “Joe” Nance Allan, an energetic and slender nineteen-year-old carpenter, was interested. His job building an annex at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue had wrapped up in August. Smart and ambitious, Allan had graduated from Western High School in Washington in 1939 but wanted to earn money before going to college. Despite the excitement about the new building, Allan was interested in one thing: the pay. “I knew what the building was and what it was for, but it didn’t dawn on me the crisis we were in,” he recalled.

Allan promptly drove to the job site and walked into a makeshift office. There was no need for an interview—all he had to do was show his union card. A foreman for John McShain, Inc., hired him on the spot at the standard union wage for carpenters—$1.62
¹
/2 an hour, or $65 a week. Allan was given badge number six, one of the first of 4,600 carpenters who would eventually be put to work on the project. “There were very few when I started, then the numbers started increasing very, very fast,” Allan said. “The word went around that they’re hiring, and people just started arriving immediately.”

The Great Depression was not yet over in many communities. The pay was good—all union wages. Hundreds, soon thousands, of workers were needed: surveyors, laborers, excavator operators, truck drivers, drilling-rig operators, water boys, cement finishers, and, as time went on, steam fitters, plasterers, electricians, painters, plumbers, and special technicians of all kinds.

Allan had been trained as a carpenter by his father, a builder by trade; the boy had grown up on construction sites and had been working jobs since before high school. But he had never seen anything like the army of construction workers who poured in from all over the region—a mix of men from the rural communities of Virginia and Maryland, hills and valleys of West Virginia, small towns and big cities in southern Pennsylvania, farms of North Carolina, and neighborhoods, black and white, all over Washington. One carpenter from the Eastern Shore of Maryland showed up carrying his tools in a lobster basket.

The man marshaling the growing army of workers was Paul Hauck, McShain’s job superintendent. Allan recognized his short and stout figure at the job site. Allan’s father was an acquaintance of Hauck’s, and the young worker knew his reputation: a veteran construction man, very able and highly respected, and a thoroughly warm and decent man. Hauck had a face as open as a prairie with bright blue eyes behind his wire glasses; he had a tendency to wear fat ties that went halfway down his shirt. He was forty-two but looked older, with thinning gray hair; yet his tremendous will for work remained undiminished.

McShain had developed a stable of first-rate superintendents, men he relied on and kept on the payroll even in slow times. None was better than J. Paul Hauck. As head of McShain’s Washington operations, Hauck had overseen many of McShain’s most important jobs—the Jefferson Memorial, the Bethesda Naval hospital, and National Airport. When McShain got the contract to build the FDR Library in Hyde Park, Hauck was the man he entrusted with the project.

Hauck was a Pennsylvania-born engineer who moved to Washington in the mid-1930s to join the city’s booming construction business. He met John McShain atop a pile of bricks at the builder’s first project in Washington, the Internal Revenue Service building. Hauck was soon McShain’s indispensable man. He and his wife, Beulah, lived in a modest home in Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of the District border. They had no children, and Hauck was devoted to two things: Beulah and John McShain.

Hauck was different from the effervescent and dynamic McShain. “Paul Hauck was just the opposite,” McShain’s daughter Polly recalled. “He was quiet, gentle. He was always very sweet in every way. In some ways, he must have suffered more under the pressure than my father, because he was a driver also, but he didn’t have the outlets my father had through his personality.”

McShain’s treatment of Hauck was often rough; he would administer public tongue-lashings at job sites and chide the homey superintendent for looking like a hick. “Why don’t you buy a new hat?” McShain once told him. “Certainly I’m paying you enough.” Yet McShain could not abide anyone else criticizing Hauck; a new superintendent who followed McShain’s lead and was disrespectful to Hauck was nearly fired. Perhaps the fullest measure of the regard McShain held for him is that Hauck was apparently the only employee the builder ever tried to convert to Catholicism. McShain took him to a retreat, but Hauck politely stuck to his Episcopalian faith.

Hauck was a proud man, yet he would absorb McShain’s wrath uncomplainingly, even bending down with rags to clean the boss’s shoes at job sites. Hauck’s respect for McShain boiled down to trust. In all the years he worked for him, Hauck once said, McShain never asked him to do anything dishonest.

The biggest white elephant in creation

Roosevelt, after three weeks of almost daily involvement with the War Department project since his return from the summit at sea with Churchill, was suddenly if temporarily out of the picture, unconcerned with the details of the building or almost anything else. On Friday, September 5, three days after approving the pentagonal shape, Roosevelt traveled to Hyde Park to visit his ailing mother. Sara Roosevelt, eighty-six, a woman of great patrician bearing, brightened at the appearance of Franklin. He spent all Saturday at her side, but that night she fell into a coma. To the great sorrow of the president, she died the next day, in the same bed in which she had given birth to her only child fifty-nine years earlier. “The President, deeply affected by the passing of his mother at noon on Sunday, withdrew at his family home on the Hudson into the deepest seclusion which the demands and responsibilities of his high office would allow, and shut himself off from the world more completely than at any time since he assumed his present post,”
The New York Times
reported.

Back in Washington, the first ten days of September passed in a headlong rush. Somervell had ordered work to start the moment the new construction contract was signed and the War Department issued its authorization, which Hauck knew could come any day. The plans and designs were not ready, but that did not matter. They would go with what they had.

In ordinary times, by one estimate made during the war, a year and a half should have been allowed for designing a building the size of the Pentagon. The draftsmen and engineers under Bergstrom’s direction—now numbering over a hundred—had had a total of thirty-four days since full-scale work on the design of concentric pentagons had begun on August 8. Drafting at a furious speed in a warehouse basement at nearby Fort Myer, they had produced only a fraction of the necessary plans.

The key to building efficiently, Hauck believed, was timing. It meant getting workers, materials, and plans to the same place at the same time, so not even a minute was wasted. “To build economically and to build fast, you have to know where you’re going—just like the quarterback on a football team,” Hauck once said. If plans were not ready, Hauck would be quarterbacking the team blindfolded.

As the drafting work continued, McShain and Hauck made a critical decision about how they would organize the labor and construction. It was a way to start the building even in the absence of most of the plans, and it gave them the best—maybe the only—chance of constructing the building in fourteen months, as the contract required, with at least 500,000 square feet ready for occupancy no later than May 1, 1942, less than eight months away.

The pentagonal design of the building lent itself to a division of the construction. On paper, McShain and Hauck split the building into five trapezoid-shaped sections, as if cutting a pentagonal pie. The five sections were labeled A through E. Work would start on the south face of the building, Section A, proceed to Section B to the west, and continue clockwise to the other sections. Construction would soon be under way concurrently in all five sections, but each section would be one stage ahead of the next. This would allow the sequencing of material delivery and scheduling of work crews with specialized skills. The draftsmen could focus their efforts on producing detailed drawings of Section A, and design subsequent sections later.

The assembly-line strategy was simple yet brilliant. “It was broken into five equal pieces, whose main elements were repeatable,” one of the Pentagon architects said a half-century later. In effect, McShain would construct five separate buildings. Each would be “erected as though it was a separate and distinct structure independent of any one of the other four,” McShain later said. Each section would be occupied as it was completed.

Hauck would have overall charge, but each of the five sections would be built by its own team, each with its own superintendent, assistant superintendents, foremen, labor and carpenter crews, material checkers, clerks, bookkeepers, and so on down the line. It might mean duplication of jobs and higher administrative costs, but McShain knew something else: The five superintendents and their teams would compete, and that could speed the work and ultimately save money.

One danger of such a scheme was that the five buildings might not set together correctly. Mistakes of even inches could have serious consequences. A force of a hundred civil engineers, overseen by Hauck, would be responsible for the overall dimensions of the building and ensure that the different sections were aligned and elevated correctly.

At the site, Hauck oversaw last-minute preparations of the ground. Work had stopped on the quartermaster depot just before the foundation had been poured, but forms laid for the concrete and the beginnings of a long brick wall had to be yanked out. The grading work that had been done was helpful, though, giving them a head start on leveling the ground.

With groundbreaking looming, McShain called a meeting of the contractors’ top supervisors. Representatives from all the major subcontractors attended, including those from Potts & Callahan, the Baltimore company that would handle the excavation and grading. McShain addressed the group: There was no time for turf battles or petty disagreements on this job site, either among themselves or with the Army. The watchword for this project, McShain declared, was to be “above and beyond all personalities.”

On the eve of construction, the skepticism about the project was palpable. Somervell was an officer “whose judgment is usually right,” the
Architectural Forum
wrote in September 1941. “But, there are plenty of planners who think he is wrong this time, that the War Department is about to beget the biggest white elephant in creation.”

September 11, 1941

The heat finally broke on September 11, 1941. The mercury had reached a miserable, sultry ninety-six degrees the day before, marking “the hottest September 10 in Washington weather annals,”
The Washington Post
noted. Seven cases of heat prostration and one drowning were reported. During the night a wedge of cold air from the Great Lakes reached the region, scattering the tropical front that had broiled Washington. The temperature dropped twenty degrees overnight, and Thursday, September 11, dawned as the sort of perfect late-summer day that sometimes blesses Washington, with a crystal-clear blue sky and a hint of fall in the air.

The cool air sweeping over the dusty job site in Arlington was accompanied by news from the War Department: The new construction contract had been signed and approved by all parties, and a notice to proceed had been granted by letter that day from the secretary of war’s office. At 9:45 that morning, Renshaw, McShain, Hauck, and Bergstrom met at Groves’s office at Construction Division headquarters. They had approval to begin.

There was no ceremony, no digging of a first spadeful, no recording of the moment. They simply got to work. Steam shovels operated by men from Potts & Callahan dug into the heavy clay and began leveling the ground for Section A, on the south. It was the side farthest away from the river, away from the low airport land, on more or less flat ground—the best part of the site with the least potential of causing problems.

Somervell had eight pile drivers ready to go, but neither the Commission of Fine Arts nor the National Capital Park and Planning Commission had given final approval to the layout of the building. Moreover, foundation plans showing where the piles were to be driven were ready for only twenty of the five thousand pile caps the building would need. “We…found ourselves in the sad predicament of starting construction with practically no plans whatever,” McShain later said.

Regardless, the general gave orders for workers to start driving piles the following day. “We are starting three pile drivers to work tomorrow on those parts of the building where we feel we can do so without any lost motion,” Somervell wrote on September 11 to planning commissioner Frederic Delano. The general wanted quick approval by the commissions “so that we can put all eight of our pile drivers on the job.”

Alexander Surles, the Army chief of public relations, had asked permission to issue a press release about the new contract. Somervell approved only on condition that no real information be included, in keeping with his earlier instructions. “The amount of the contract should not be given to the press in view of the fact that plans are not yet developed to the point where the cost of this building can be determined,” Somervell told Surles.