The Pentagon: A History (46 page)

Two weeks after Roosevelt’s death, newspaper columnist Drew Pearson wrote that Somervell was among the public figures who had lost the most standing when Truman became president; others included Winston Churchill and Harry Hopkins. “Somervell will never become Chief of Staff, or rise any higher in the Army,” Pearson wrote.

It was obvious by then that when Marshall retired, he would be replaced as Army chief of staff by Eisenhower. Ike was feted as a conquering hero when he returned to Washington on June 18, 1945, a little over a month after Germany’s surrender. A crowd of close to a million—bigger than those for presidential inaugurations—turned out to greet Eisenhower on a hot and humid morning. It was described in the newspapers as “the greatest welcome in Washington’s history,” and it was at least on a par with the ones that greeted Grant and Sherman in 1865 and Pershing in 1919. Arriving at National Airport aboard the
Sacred Cow,
the presidential airplane, Eisenhower rode directly to the Pentagon standing in a three-quarter-ton command car, trailed by an entourage of jeeps. They took the interior road into the Pentagon’s courtyard, which was packed with thousands of cheering Army officers and war workers. The train of vehicles took a victory lap around the courtyard—Ike charming all with flashes of his huge grin—before reaching the pavilion stage, where Stimson stood, waiting to greet him. Somervell was part of the welcoming committee.

It was no great surprise to him. “So strategist and tactician get into today’s headline and tomorrow’s history books,” Somervell dryly remarked in 1944, “and the logistician gets into a congressional investigation.”

We can only leave with the greatest feeling of pride

On September 20, 1945, the War Department announced that Marshall and Somervell would retire shortly and simultaneously. “With their departure, the Army’s Washington wartime high command will be about wiped out,”
The Washington Post
noted.

Henry Stimson was leaving too. Two days after Hiroshima, he felt sharp pains in his chest; doctors offered assurances, but soon after Japan’s surrender Stimson informed Truman that he intended to resign. His departure was set for September 21, and though it was an affirmation that the war was over, it was a bittersweet moment at the Pentagon. Stimson had never spent much time roaming the corridors, shaking hands or chatting with war workers, but nonetheless he had left a firm imprint on the building, one of integrity and selfless service. “He gave it tone which all who worked there could sense,” John McCloy later said.

On his final morning at the Pentagon, Stimson met for an hour with George Marshall in his office. “The termination of our more than five years of service together was a very deep emotional experience for me and I think also for him,” Stimson wrote in his diary. When he left the Pentagon the last time that afternoon and arrived at National Airport for his flight home, he found every general officer in Washington lined in two rows, waiting to bid him farewell. A nineteen-gun salute was fired. The day, Stimson later wrote, “was full of tension and emotion and, though I did not feel it, I was on the eve of an emotional and coronary breakdown.” Stimson, now in his fourth decade of high office and serving his fourth president, had very nearly given the last full measure of himself to his country. A month after returning to Highhold, Stimson suffered a serious heart attack and was confined to bed for months.

The Pentagon bade farewell to Marshall at noon on November 27, 1945, and his departure was even more momentous. Some twenty thousand people packed the inner courtyard and lined hundreds of windows. Truman presented the general with the Oak Leaf Cluster, equivalent to a second Distinguished Service Medal. It was the only American military decoration he received for the war—Marshall had refused all previous ones, saying it would be improper while his soldiers were dying overseas. “To him, as much to any individual, the United States owes its future,” Truman told the Pentagon audience. “He takes his place at the head of the great commanders of history.” The Army band played “Auld Lang Syne” as Marshall—no emotion betrayed on his stern face or in his piercing blue eyes—walked off the platform.

The chief of staff was the most trusted American military man since George Washington,
Time
magazine wrote. Command of the invasion of Europe—and the glory that fell on Eisenhower’s shoulders—could have been his for the asking, but Marshall was of too superb and self-sacrificing character to put his wishes above the country’s needs. “I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington,” Roosevelt told Marshall. Churchill called him “the true organizer of victory.” To Stimson, Marshall was simply “the finest soldier I have ever known.”

Somervell’s departure was delayed until December while he recovered from surgery on his hernia. Back on duty, he testified before Congress one last time to support a War Department proposal for unification of the armed services.

Marshall was disappointed by Somervell’s decision to retire, believing that, at fifty-three, Somervell could still do much for the Army. Demobilization was itself going to be an enormous job. Yet Marshall did not try to change Somervell’s mind, or, if he did, he did not succeed. His faith in the man who had put a roof over his Army and then supplied it around the globe was undiminished by Canol or anything else. Somervell “shook the cobwebs out of their pants,” Marshall later said. “What he did was a miracle,” he added. “I depended on him very, very heavily.”

From Highhold, still recuperating from his heart attack, Stimson wrote Somervell a personal letter in November. “I send to you not only my warmest thanks but my congratulations on your magnificent accomplishments during the war,” Stimson wrote. “You know without my trying to put it now in words how much I depended on you in every big problem which has come up.”

Patterson, who had succeeded Stimson as secretary of war, presented Somervell with a second Oak Leaf Cluster, following the Distinguished Service Medal he had been awarded in World War I and the first Oak Leaf Cluster he had received in 1942 for his performance directing Army construction. “In organizing and directing the world-wide supply lines on which our troops depended for their offensive power, General Somervell performed a service without parallel in military history,” Patterson said.

There were rumors that he would seek political office, perhaps even run for president, but Somervell quashed them. “I have ambitions, but none is political,” he told reporters. Private industry beckoned, but that could wait.

“I’m going to rest,” Somervell told a friend. “For six weeks, I’m going to just sit on the porch. After that, I’m going to start rocking—slowly.”

After they were all gone, Katherine King, Somervell’s longtime secretary, still at the Pentagon, wrote him a letter. “[N]ow that the play is over and all of the actors have left the stage and the curtain is about to fall on the most gigantic performance in the history of the world, we can only leave with the greatest feeling of pride….”

Hell in a handbasket

It was well into October before Major Bob Furman returned from overseas. After Germany’s surrender, Furman, now thirty, had been sent by Groves to escort uranium components of “Little Boy”—the first atomic bomb to be dropped on Japan—from Los Alamos to the B-29 base at Tinian, a speck of land in the northern Marianas. Furman had taken grim satisfaction in watching the
Enola Gay
take off from Tinian and disappear from view, destination Hiroshima. “I was pretty much fed up with the war,” he said. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had been sent to Japan to tour universities and corporations with a Manhattan Project scientist, trying to discover what progress the Japanese had made toward building an atomic bomb. Back in Washington, he found no one cared where he had been or what he had been doing. “Everybody had quit and gone home,” he said.

Furman was eager to do the same—he wanted to start his own construction business—and he put in his papers to get out of the Army. “The war was just an interruption for most of us,” Furman recalled nearly sixty years later. “We all went to war. We all went back to our dreams and ambitions. We lived through the war to get life going again.”

The Pentagon was put on what was called a “partial peacetime basis” in September. The number of guards was cut in half, and visitors no longer needed escorts. “Instructions will be given visitors on how to find offices with the hope they do not get lost,” the
Star
reported. Soon even the requirement for building passes was dropped.

Before long, Lieutenant General Thomas T. Handy, Eisenhower’s deputy chief of staff, was complaining of the “slovenly appearance” of military personnel in the building. “During the war days, stenographers clicked along the corridors bearing trays of coffee and sandwiches for officers who had neither the time nor the inclination to walk the distance of several city blocks,” the
Star
reported. “Now it is rather a common sight to see a colonel in shirtsleeves marching down the corridor bearing his own tray, and even an occasional coatless general has been seen outside his office.” Handy ordered inspectors to patrol Pentagon corridors, beverage bars, and cafeterias to look for dress-code violators.

The population of the building was about 25,000, considerably less than its wartime peaks. The Pentagon had never been able to accommodate forty thousand people, as planned, a projection based on allowing about eighty square feet per worker. The big offices given to senior War Department officials and the many general officers in the Pentagon far exceeded that average; even many junior officers grabbed extra space. Areas meant for workers were used as storage or meeting rooms; in some offices, partitions divided the big bays into smaller fiefdoms, further decreasing the amount of usable space. Still, the number of workers in the building had been generally well over 30,000 and may at times have reached 35,000, including building maintenance workers, guards, and janitors.

Navigating the Pentagon remained a puzzle; a favored nickname now was “the concrete cobweb.” Even Eisenhower was disoriented the first time he tried to return to his office by himself from the general officers’ mess. “So, hands in pockets and trying to look as if I were out for a carefree stroll around the building, I walked,” Eisenhower later wrote. “I walked and walked, encountering neither landmarks nor people who looked familiar. One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it.”

Eisenhower finally approached a group of female stenographers and quietly asked one, “Can you tell me where the office of the Chief of Staff is?”

“You just passed it about a hundred feet back, General Eisenhower,” she replied.

As Eisenhower noted with chagrin, “By grapevine, the Army’s astoundingly efficient bush telegraph, the word got around the Pentagon quickly.”

What to do with the Pentagon

The question now was what to do with the Pentagon. The belief was still common in many quarters that, once the war ended, the War Department would have no possible need for a building so large. There had been no shortage of suggestions, most of them sardonic, of what to do with the place. The Pentagon could shelter a second bonus army; the government could rent out the space to all the generals who wanted to write their wartime memoirs; six-day bicycle races could be staged in the building’s outer ring.
Life
magazine reported, tongue in cheek, that the Pentagon might host peace talks after the war because it was “the only building in the world large enough to hold all the factions that will have a say-so on the treaty.”

Other suggestions were more serious. A Maryland congressman proposed that the Pentagon be converted into the world’s largest hospital—with a projected capacity of fifteen thousand beds—serving both disabled veterans and the general population. The ramps connecting the different floors made the building well-suited to be a hospital, proponents argued. Truman considered a proposal to move the Veterans Administration into the Pentagon. Others envisioned the Pentagon as an enormous university. A congressman from Massachusetts introduced a bill to convert the Pentagon into a national college for war veterans, arguing that the building was a white elephant and that the cost to the government “will assume fantastic proportions unless we find some good use for it.”

As far as the Army was concerned, it was keeping the Pentagon. Postwar plans were being made on this assumption. Whatever the price had been—the $63.6 million the War Department insisted was a fair figure for the whole project, including roads; the $86 million Albert Engel claimed was the true cost; or the $75.2 million that the War Department actually spent on construction and is probably the best estimate—the value of the building was obvious, at least to the Army.

“It is probable that when the history of the present war is written and the full value of the Pentagon in the prosecution of the war is disclosed, those who had even the smallest responsibility for its construction will be prouder than ever of their part in this work,” the Office of the Chief of Engineers wrote in an internal forty-one-page rebuttal to Engel, refuting the congressman’s accusations line by line.

However, notes compiled in preparing the report admitted that the Army had not been above board in revealing the Pentagon’s cost. The notes, written by an unknown War Department official, listed a series of “Problems Related to Pentagon Project,” among them:

Failure to tell Congress true extent of exceeding original appropriation in summer of 1942.

Original plan of building was conceived too hurriedly (July 17–22, 1941); hence original estimate of $35 million was too low even for the first site….

The juggling of figures around to show a desired cost figure instead of listing true cost of each main item separately and giving true total…