The Pentagon: A History (41 page)

Stimson set to writing a letter to Roosevelt informing him that the plan had collapsed—“a rather difficult letter to write because I did not wish to have it sound provocative and yet I wished the President to know the justifying facts,” he noted. After conferring with Somervell on the wording and reading a draft to Marshall, Stimson sent it by courier to Roosevelt at Hyde Park on Saturday, November 28.

Stimson’s word’s to the president were restrained but left no doubt that he and Marshall blamed the Navy for making unreasonable demands. “We believe that the harmonious cooperation which we have sought to obtain by this union of the two services might be entirely frustrated by such an unequal division,” Stimson wrote. He asked Roosevelt’s permission to start moving War Department units into the space reserved for the Navy. They had lost nearly four weeks waiting, noted Stimson, adding, “we must begin at once with the work of getting our people moved in the building.”

Roosevelt sent his regrets to Stimson and approved of the Army taking the space. The president did not seem particularly surprised at the breakdown; indeed, he probably had been well aware of the admirals’ protests against the move. Knox announced to the press November 30 that the Navy had abandoned plans to move into the Pentagon, explaining that “careful investigation” had revealed the building was not big enough for both the Army and Navy.

The Navy had legitimate concerns about moving into the Pentagon. Without more space, some bureaus would have to be split up. The Navy’s sophisticated communications system needed considerable space, and the time needed to get it up and running in the Pentagon might upset ongoing military operations. But the benefits—the sharing of resources and intelligence, consolidating work, the close working proximity of the high command, not only of Marshall and King but also of their staffs, creating greater cooperation—would have outweighed the inconveniences. Less than a year into the war, a great opportunity had been lost. Unity of command would have to wait.

Lost perpendicularly and horizontally

Few tears were shed among Navy workers over the news they would not move across the Potomac. It seemed particularly fortuitous on the afternoon of December 1, the day Knox’s announcement hit the newspapers, when dozens of Army officers and civilian personnel at the Pentagon began collapsing shortly after eating at one of the cafeterias. More than seventy Army workers were felled, victims of food poisoning. Ambulances descended on the building. “The halls of the Pentagon Building resembled a base hospital as workers who had collapsed were carried to the emergency infirmary on stretchers,” the
Star
reported. Employees blamed the corned beef hash, but an investigation supervised by the ubiquitous McCloy quickly pinpointed the salad dressing. No one died, but the incident certainly confirmed the suspicions of relieved Navy workers that the Pentagon was a hellhole.

Accounts from war workers—some twenty thousand were in the building now—further cemented the image. Dorothy Potter Benedict, an author of children’s books who worked as a translator for the Army Air Forces, sent a letter to
The Washington Post
in November describing her experiences in the building:

We are in the Pentagon now, that maze across the river, surrounded by noise, dust, the debris of hastened construction and overcrowded, precipitant buses. But these minor hazards are as nothing as compared to the obstacles to be overcome between the entrance and the office to which one may be assigned.

Since the Army’s Dream Building is made in a series of pentagonal rings, like misshapen doughnuts placed one inside the other, one loses one’s sense of direction the moment one leaves the outer ring. In answer to the question, “Where am I?” The guard will answer cheerily: “Can’t say, Madam. This is my first day,” or, “Couldn’t tell you. I’ve just been transferred from the other side of the building.”

This is discouraging news for a worker due in the outer ring at a certain hour and vaguely aware that she is somewhere in the inner ring—lost. But not alone. Far from it. Weary colonels, bleak-faced majors, haggard captains and lieutenants pass and repass trying to find their respective destinations. They get lost perpendicularly as well as horizontally.

Newspapers reported that a hundred people a day were getting lost. New arrivals to the Pentagon were described by
Life
magazine as being “as confused as a fresh rat in a psychologist’s maze.” Even Under Secretary of War Patterson admitted to getting lost “every time I get three doors away from my own office.”

Psychologists debated whether Pentagon employees were suffering from a fear of being shut in or a fear of being in the midst of open spaces. “I suspect that an overpowering delusion that the building is dangerously different is the basic cause of complaint—but time will cure that in the case of permanent employees,” a doctor told
Newsweek.
“They will get to love the Pentagon.”

One letter-writer saw a bright side to the Pentagon’s working conditions. “The generals are right—there is not yet enough hate in this war,” G. Dorrance of Washington wrote the
Post.
War workers, he said, “may feel a growing dislike for the Fuehrer when they arise each morning an hour or two before daylight, swallow breakfast without chewing, join the battle of transportation outside, and work in the Pentagon all day without benefit of sunlight or fresh air….”

The press made much of Stimson’s luxurious accommodations in comparison with the rest of the building.
Life
followed this theme with particular zest, running a two-page photo spread showing Stimson’s spacious suite: “Looming across the Potomac like a Cecil B. DeMille backdrop, the War Department’s new $85,000,000 Pentagon Building is just a colossal pain-in-the-neck to thousands of bewildered Washington visitors and harassed employees. They resent the…miles of barren corridors, the jammed ramps, the pile-up at entrances and exits, the parking and transportation problems, the six overcrowded cafeterias, the staggered working hours. The only really happy person in the War Department’s whopping new reinforced-concrete ‘home’ is the Army’s civilian chief, Henry L. Stimson.”

Somervell was impervious to the constant stream of complaints and jabs directed his way—indeed, he was quite proud of the Pentagon. “The building is very dear to my heart,” he wrote Ides van der Gracht in September. The general assured the press in November that all the problems would soon be ironed out. “I think it’s a magnificent building,” Somervell said.

Those least impressed with life in the Pentagon included the black Americans assigned to the building and given continued treatment as second-class citizens in it. The cafeterias had been integrated; now much of the trouble centered on the buses. At the end of a wearisome day at work in the Aircraft Radio Branch of the Signal Corps, Masie Ashby and Florence Cole boarded a bus in front of the Pentagon at 5:15 on the evening of October 27 to begin their journey home to Washington. They sat together in the third seat from the front. Several military policemen were standing near the bus and one of them, a Sergeant Clark, tapped the window next to the women with his baton and motioned for them to move to the back of the bus. The women ignored him. Clark boarded the bus and when the women refused to go to the rear, he ordered them off.

It was not an isolated incident. Judge William Hastie, Stimson’s civilian aide, pressed each time for an investigation. Every time, Army officials would respond that they could not confirm the details, or that the bus company was at fault and the Army was not responsible, or that the black employee had somehow provoked the incident, or that the problem had been corrected and would not happen again. But it would happen again, and it was not just the buses. The Pentagon cafeteria manager advertised for “competent white female help” in the dining rooms; black employees were targets of racial epithets. Hastie was frustrated. In January, he would resign from the War Department in protest of the Army’s plans to establish a separate Officer Candidate School for blacks. The betrayal black employees felt was reflected in a letter that Dorothy J. Williams, an Ordnance employee, wrote to her superior after she was forced to the back of her bus: “It is ironic that our Nation will wage war to guarantee an end to human persecution of individuals, based solely on race, color, or creed, and remain impervious to a similar plight of approximately one-tenth of its citizens.”

The glorious chords of free men singing

By Christmas Eve, there were 22,000 war workers in the Pentagon, and all were invited to gather in the interior courtyard late that afternoon for a holiday celebration. Stimson spent quite a bit of time during the day “fussing over the speech” he was to deliver at the ceremony. Initially the secretary of war had given the matter little thought and intended to simply read remarks drafted by the Public Relations Bureau. “I had not taken it very much to heart at first…,” he wrote on his diary, “but the closer I got to it the more important I felt it was to make the thing more in my own language and personal to myself.” At 4
P.M.
Stimson, accompanied by his wife, took his place at a pavilion set by the north face of the courtyard wall, where he was joined by Somervell and several other top Army commanders. The stage was brightened by a large Christmas tree decorated with bells and evergreen garlands wrapped around the railings.

A vast crowd of Pentagon employees had gathered in the five-acre courtyard on the gray and chilly afternoon—fifteen thousand, by one estimate. Many others looked on from the five floors of windows surrounding the courtyard. Renshaw had succeeded in cleaning out all the debris, but it was hardly a garden spot, with a few scraggly trees, none of them Japanese cherries. The courtyard was surrounded by towering five-story concrete walls, with bastion-like landings at each corner, reminiscent of a medieval castle. Most employees stood on the walkways that crisscrossed the courtyard, trying to avoid the puddles and mud, like the veteran plank walkers they were. Yet the scene had an air of grace and beauty. Looking down from a window, one observer noted, the thousands of Army officers and civilian employees standing on the intersecting walks “unconsciously formed a huge star.”

The audience—whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks—sang as the Army Air Forces Band played “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World,” and a choir made up of some two hundred black War Department employees sang spirituals. An NBC microphone was on the stage to broadcast the event by radio around the country. “It was a very impressive and pleasant occasion,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “A very large crowd was there, filling up all the standing room that there was in the courtyard and the speeches went off very well and the music was very good.”

Somervell spoke first, addressing the throng in the place he had dreamed up seventeen months before. He was hatless but bundled against the cold in a heavy gray Army overcoat with three stars on the shoulders. The general was gracious in his praise of the work being done in the Pentagon, but, of course, he asked for more. “Much of the blackness is back of us,” Somervell said. “A year ago we were a stunned people. We had not asked for war. It was thrust upon us. We faced what seemed an impossible task. Today it is different. We have done the impossible. Now we must perform the miraculous.”

The choir sang more spirituals and the audience joined in carols, and then Stimson spoke, addressing his words to his fellow Pentagon workers in the most personal terms his austere Eastern establishment makeup would allow. “[Y]ou and I have been obliged under the pressure of our work to hurry past each other in crowded corridors without any full realization of our real comradeship,” he said. “Today we are able to celebrate our Christmas face to face and all together, and it is very fitting that we should do so.”

Stimson was relieved to find his voice in good shape and carrying well over the loudspeakers. (“I felt that it was reaching the people that I spoke to although the audience covered an enormous piece of ground,” he later wrote.) Stimson continued, telling the employees that every worker in the building had a vital, “personal share in the task before us.” During the past year, the War Department had taken no holidays, even working through the Fourth of July. “But Christmas we could not ignore,” Stimson said. “Although all necessary operations of the War Department must continue as usual, those of you who can be spared will have tomorrow to spend with your families in customary enjoyment of the most important holiday in the Christian world. In the midst of total war, Christmas has a very special significance to us all.”

There had been no ceremony when ground was broken for the Pentagon in September 1941, nor when the plaque was installed at the mall entrance a year later, nor would any note be taken when construction was finished in early 1943. The Christmas Eve 1942 gathering was the dedication ceremony the Pentagon never had. As darkness approached following Stimson’s speech, the music continued and everyone sang “Silent Night,” and then to close the evening, “The Star Spangled Banner.” A newspaper account described it this way: “The huge court, bounded by the five interior faces of the world’s largest building, echoed again and again the glorious chords of free men singing.”