The Pentagon: A History (20 page)

Lieutenant Furman’s blimp ride

Lieutenant Bob Furman waited for a rare quiet moment to slip away from the job site. As executive officer for the construction of the new War Department building, he spent his days and often his nights responding to one crisis after another. But on a clear October morning, Furman walked down to the grounds of the old Washington-Hoover Airport and headed to the field where the Goodyear blimp
Enterprise
was tied to a portable mooring mast.

The blimp was the only aircraft still flying from the old airport, at least legally. Even in mid-October planes were still buzzing into the airport, piloted mostly by out-of-towners unaware that the airfield had closed down and somehow oblivious to the heavy equipment tearing up the place. Constructing Quartermaster Clarence Renshaw—newly promoted to major—publicly appealed for pilots to stop, warning that someone was bound to be killed soon.

Enterprise,
a 148-foot long helium blimp, had been a fixture in Washington skies since 1935, promoting the tire company, carrying thousands of tourists on sight-seeing tours, and once delivering food and medical supplies to icebound residents of Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. The War Department granted the ship special dispensation to stay at Washington-Hoover while its enormous hangar was moved, piece by piece, to National Airport. Renshaw soon had cause to regret the benevolence. Every time
Enterprise
launched, a thousand men at the construction site would drop whatever they were doing and turn their heads skyward to watch.

Furman knew time was short to sneak a ride on the blimp. “Nobody knew I was doing it,” he said. “I had miscellaneous duties, and I just fit that one in.” He plunked down his $3 and boarded the cabin. He had it all to himself.

Tall, bright, and affable, with a pompadour of reddish-brown hair above his angular face and smiling eyes, the twenty-six-year-old Furman had not expected to find his life interrupted by this great construction endeavor. He was the son of the assistant cashier at a small Quaker bank in Trenton, New Jersey. His father, William Amies Furman, had been raised a Quaker in Trenton but was thrown out of the church when he married a Congregationalist. His mother, Lelia Ficht, was the daughter of a Colorado man who built railroad lines through Indian country to copper mines in New Mexico. Bob, born in Trenton in 1915, was raised an Episcopalian along with his two brothers and two sisters. The middle son, Bob was industrious from the start, working for—and soon taking over—a network of neighborhood kids who sold seven hundred
Saturday Evening Post
s around town for a nickel apiece, clearing a penny-and-a-half profit per copy.

He earned enough to pay his first year’s tuition at Princeton, where he entered the school of engineering. “I always wanted to build, so civil engineering was naturally the place for training,” he said. Furman also joined the ROTC program at the insistence of his older brother, who wanted him to be an officer instead of a draftee if war came. Graduating in 1937, Furman went to work for the Turner Construction Company in New York City.

Furman did not pay much mind to the great mobilization of the Army in 1940 and was quite surprised to find himself called to active duty just before Christmas. With his engineering background, Furman was ordered to report to the Quartermaster Corps Construction Division headquarters in the Railroad Retirement Building in Washington. He was assigned to Renshaw’s staff and given a desk next to Colonel Groves’s office, the center of the whirling frenzy that was Army construction in 1941.

Groves and Renshaw were impressed with the Princeton boy’s smarts and calm competence. When Renshaw was chosen to build the new War Department headquarters in August 1941, he took Furman with him. As executive officer for the construction of what would become the Pentagon, Furman was seeing his dream of building come true on an unsurpassed scale. All the debate about whether the building would be needed after the emergency struck him as irrelevant. “Whether it was useful after the war didn’t matter,” he later said. “We needed it to win the war.”

Now, as
Enterprise
lifted skyward, Furman got his first bird’s-eye view of the construction. The blimp’s motion had him feeling a tad seasick, but he ignored the queasiness and peered out the window at the ground. Familiar as he was with the project, the scope of what he saw still astonished him. “It was a big site—a hell of a big site,” Furman said. “The magnitude of the project was so evident.”

Workers swarmed everywhere. Nearly three thousand men were now working three shifts around the clock, the bulk of them during the day. Two sides of the pentagon were clearly visible, joined together like a giant arrow pointing to the southwest. The southern portion, Section A, was further along, the concrete slab for its foundation—some ten thousand cubic yards—already poured. Forms could be seen for part of the second-floor slab. Hundreds of pile cap forms had been placed in Section B, to the west. From the air it looked like a vast punch card riddled with holes. Pile drivers were hammering around the clock, and almost nine thousand piles had been sunk.

The land 1,500 feet below Furman was being reshaped. Steam shovels were excavating earth and bulldozers had already graded a hundred acres of land. Dirt construction roads crisscrossed the site, and dump trucks lumbered along them, raising plumes of dust. In the lagoon adjacent to the site, barges bearing heaps of sand and gravel from the Potomac delivered the aggregate to the concrete batching plant. On the old airport grounds, construction had started on the basement for the new building’s power plant. Along the eastern side of the building, workers were nearly finished relocating a mile-long stretch of the Pennsylvania Railroad running north up to Rosslyn.

The blimp ride was short—perhaps ten minutes—but it left a tremendous impression on Furman. Floating down to earth, he marveled that the nation could construct such a great building at the same time it was mobilizing and arming an enormous military. It was a formidable sight. “The size and magnitude and strength of the country was pretty evident,” Furman said.

McShain and Bergstrom go to war

Back on the ground, progress was not so evident. The pace of the work was anemic, as far as the builder, John McShain, was concerned. The architects could not supply design plans fast enough. McShain was in a fine fettle: He could have two, three, even ten times as many men on the site constructing the building—if he only knew what he was supposed to build.

McShain had laid down the law that there were to be no personalities and no friction at the job site, but there were personalities—McShain’s prominent among them—and there was friction, particularly with Edwin Bergstrom, the chief architect. Though his headquarters and home were in Philadelphia, McShain spent many days in Washington monitoring the work, keeping an apartment at the Hay-Adams House, a luxurious Italian Renaissance-style apartment-hotel on Lafayette Square across from the White House. This project was too important and too big—too magnificent a challenge—to stay away from. He needed to do battle with the architects.

At a meeting the night of October 13 with David Witmer, Bergstrom’s deputy, McShain angrily warned he might shut down work on the job if the designers could not provide more plans for the floor slabs. “We’re pushing that job frantically to help you and save you any embarrassment rather than close down, which we really should,” he told the architect. It was a bluff—McShain would sooner die in anonymity than stop work even temporarily on this project—but the problem was real.

The following morning, a clear and warm fall day more than a month after ground was broken, McShain called Groves to complain. “We haven’t got what we really need and what we should have to drive that job the way it’s necessary to finish,” McShain said. “Now we’re losing perfect weather. Look at a day like today—and, well, we’ve got about one-tenth of the men we should have out on that job.”

By October 28, McShain had only part of the plans for the second floor on Section A, and the situation got worse in each section around the building. He was still waiting for some of the plans for the first floor of Section B, and there were no plans for the piles and foundation in Section C. Bulldozers were ready to start grading Section D but sat idle, waiting for plans. No structural information for the power plant was available save for the basement.

Every day Hauck clamored for more plans from the designers: “What do you have for us to do today, because we finished everything you gave us yesterday.”

Further complicating the problem, the project had lost the services of Lieutenant Colonel Pat Casey, the energetic Construction Division design chief who had played a critical role in the early planning for the building. In September Casey received a cable from General Douglas MacArthur, with whom he had previously served in the Philippines, asking Casey to return to Manila as chief engineer with the U.S. Army Forces Far East Command. Casey went to see General Somervell. “Well, you’re not going to accept that, are you?” Somervell asked incredulously.

“I definitely am,” Casey replied.

Somervell was shocked that Casey would jilt him for a has-been like MacArthur. “Now look, Pat…if you do that, you’re going to somebody who’s reached the top and won’t go any further, whereas you should stick with me…I’m on the way to the top.”

But Casey was not to be dissuaded, even by Somervell, and he departed for Manila in October.

Worried about the growing design crisis, Groves assigned one of his top men, Colonel Thomas F. Farrell, to investigate. Farrell was a widely experienced engineer who had worked on the Panama Canal and served as New York State Commissioner of Canals and Waterways. Farrell knew a mess when he saw one. After he attended a weekly progress meeting on the evening of October 27 with McShain, Bergstrom, and Renshaw, Farrell’s assessment was gloomy. “It is apparent that there is no immediate prospect of the Architect-Engineer getting sufficiently ahead of the Contractor as to permit full steam ahead,” Farrell reported to Groves the next day. “It would be entirely practicable for the Contractor to employ two or three times his present forces if design information was available.”

The design team must be reinforced as rapidly as possible, Farrell concluded. The most pressing need was for first-class concrete structural engineers familiar with modern techniques of calculating how to safely design large reinforced-concrete buildings. It was a specialized and critical skill, especially in a building with miles of concrete walls planned; miscalculations could cause the structure to fail.

Groves telephoned private engineering firms and Army quartermaster depots around the country, desperately trying to find concrete specialists. Price was no object, Groves made plain—he was offering salaries of $125 a week to designers who would normally earn $75. “We’re going to pay them twice what they’re worth,” Groves promised. The colonel was livid when a highly regarded concrete structural engineer who reported from Philadelphia turned around and left when he was mistakenly told his salary would only be $90. “He just laughed at it and came home,” Groves was told. A chagrined Renshaw rushed to square things away, but concrete structural engineers remained scarce.

The design bottleneck was not Bergstrom’s fault. Yet something had to be done. “It must be recognized that in a construction operation of this character, the Architect would normally have a start of many months on the Contractor,” Farrell pointed out to Groves. “Since this start was not available, there will be continuous pressure on the Architect by the Contractor for many months to come. The Architect’s present forces are apparently working ‘all out’ trying to keep ahead.”

In the hangar

“All out” was not fast enough. It would be up to Ides van Waterschoot van der Gracht to figure out a way to produce more drawings. Van der Gracht had joined the project soon after ground was broken in September. Somervell had asked William Delano—Frederic’s distant cousin—to suggest an architect who could organize the enormous job of producing drawings for the building and oversee the huge force of draftsmen: “Somebody to help operate this mob.” Delano, a well-known New York architect, recommended van der Gracht, one of his protégés. As architect for LaGuardia Airport, Delano had formed a lifelong friendship with Somervell during the WPA days, and his recommendation carried great weight with the general. Somervell immediately telephoned van der Gracht in New York; the following day, the thirty-nine-year-old architect, a Dutch man with tousled brown hair, found himself in the general’s office in Washington.

“Mr. Delano said you were reasonably competent in those things, and what do you think?” Somervell asked. “Do you think that you can handle it?”

“General, I never even thought of anything as big as this,” van der Gracht said.

Somervell was dismissive. “Oh, don’t let that worry you, neither have we,” he replied.

Ides van der Gracht was thus recruited to be chief of production for the project. He stood a shade under six feet tall and was thin as a rail, with blue eyes that shone like headlamps above his prominent nose and perpetual smile. Van der Gracht had an engaging personality and a cordial, forthright manner that won him friends easily. He was born in Graz, Austria, in 1902 and grew up in Katwijk, Holland, a fishing village on the North Sea; his father was a Dutch businessman and his mother came from a wealthy Austrian family. During World War I, at the age of thirteen, Ides came with his parents to the United States and studied at Jesuit schools. His parents returned to Holland after the war but Ides stayed in America, attending Princeton University. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1923 and stayed on to earn a master’s degree at Princeton’s School of Architecture, where his professors considered him unusually gifted.