The Pentagon: A History (40 page)

At a press conference the next day, Knox announced the Navy would move into the Pentagon. It was shocking news, coming as a surprise to most ranking Army and Navy officers. As many as ten thousand Navy employees would move into the Army building by December 1, occupying one entire floor and parts of two others. “It gives the two departments the closest possible contact physically and lends itself to the closest possible liaison and cooperation and coordination between the two,” Knox told reporters. As Stimson had predicted, the press hailed the decision as an important step toward a unified command.

The admirals were less pleased, seeing their independent fiefdoms threatened by the move; Navy workers themselves were absolutely distressed at the news. Why would they not be? Everything they had read in the newspapers or heard from war workers about the Pentagon told of horrific transportation problems, crowded cafeterias, dusty offices, and utter confusion in the vast, unfathomable network of corridors. “On the other hand it’s a swell break for several thousand War Department employes,” a columnist for the
Washington Daily News
wrote. “Most of them have taken it for granted they would have to move to the unpopular Pentagon sooner or later. Now they get a reprieve. Lucky people!”

Some Navy employees distributed a impeccably official-looking memorandum addressed to all personnel of the Navy Department moving to the Pentagon. According to paragraph 2, subsection b,

All personnel being moved will provide themselves with a sleeping bag, food and water for one week, clothing for one week, iron rations, three extra pairs of shoes, a compass, a scout knife, a pistol and roller skates or a scooter. No motorized equipment or collapsible boats will be permitted…. Cow bells will also be issued as emergency equipment.

A Navy officer wrote a parody based on the Virginia state song and sent it to the newspapers:

Carry me back to Old Virginny

That’s where the Army and Navy have to go;

That’s where the roads are a mess in springtime,

That’s where the tombstones are heavy with the snow.

Carry me back to the Pentagon Building,

Five sides instead of the four that make a square;

Carry me back to Old Virginny

’Cause that’s the only way

You’ll ever get me there.

The real opening of the Pentagon

The convoys started rolling from the Munitions Building on the morning of Saturday, November 14, 1942. All classified papers had been locked in safes and placed on Army trucks, along with the desks and furniture. Armed soldiers were positioned along the route leading from Constitution Avenue across Memorial Bridge and down to the Pentagon. The secretary of war was moving in.

The invasion of North Africa had begun exactly a week earlier, on the morning of Sunday, November 8—Saturday evening in Washington. Stimson had awaited reports on the landings at Woodley, his estate in Northwest Washington, together with his wife, Mabel, and Beatrice Patton, the wife of General George Patton, commanding the western assault force that was to land in French Morocco. Around 9
P.M.
they received word that all three landings were under way. “This was a great relief in the case of Patton’s force because we had been troubled by prophesies of bad weather which might prevent the landing and disjoint the whole performance and, as Patton is impulsive and brave, I was very much afraid he might take off in an impossible sea and suffer great losses,” Stimson wrote in his diary.

Once the troops were reported ashore, Stimson’s fears were hardly assuaged. He had not shaken his “very grave misgivings” about the wisdom of the whole North African excursion, and in the coming days he fretted about the Germans moving through Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar and cutting off the American forces. “But now when we get it out on maps, the hazard of it seems to be more dangerous than ever,” he wrote. By the end of the week, Stimson was exhausted and for a change he felt like the seventy-five-year-old man he was. He flew north with Mabel to relax over the weekend at Highhold, his country estate on Long Island, riding his horse while his office was relocated.

The move to the Pentagon, personally overseen by Major General John T. Lewis, commander of the Military District of Washington, went without a hitch. Unlike the desks of many hapless Pentagon employees, the secretary’s elegant furniture was carried gingerly into the building. Marshall’s office came in on the heels of Stimson’s.

At 4
P.M.
Saturday afternoon, the secretary of war’s office was declared established in the Pentagon. The Army chief of staff’s office was ready on Sunday. The move of Stimson and Marshall’s offices, Marshall biographer Forrest C. Pogue noted, “marked the real opening of the Pentagon.” It was no longer merely a very large, very curious office for war workers. It was now the Army’s command post for the global war.

Inspecting his new headquarters, Marshall found his dark mahogany desk with carved lion heads and brass ring drawer pulls in place. Unlike Stimson, Marshall dispensed with the elaborate map alcove, contenting himself with a large globe and a few simple relief maps. Behind his desk was a tall grandfather clock and an oil painting of Pershing, whom Marshall revered. But the chief of staff raised Cain when he discovered his telephones were not working correctly.

Marshall already had a crisis to manage. Washington was in an uproar over the deal that General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander in North Africa, had struck with the reptilian Admiral Jean-François Darlan, commander of Vichy French military forces, allowing Darlan to retain power in exchange for the surrender of all French forces.

Stimson arrived the next day from Long Island, coming straight from National Airport with his wife. “Mabel and I drove to the Pentagon Building where I found my new office all beautifully prepared and ready for me and Mabel inspected it,” he wrote in his diary. Stimson—probably oblivious to all the blood, sweat, and toil that had gone into making his office just so—seemed pleased with his new surroundings in Room 3E-884.

Stimson sat behind the massive carved mahogany desk used by every secretary of war since Robert Todd Lincoln in 1883. At his right was a telephone with a direct, secure line to the White House. An electronic squawk box—which Stimson would never learn to operate properly—could be used to summon McCloy or other key aides. To his left was a small oval table used by Jefferson Davis when he was secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. Hanging on the wall behind his desk, flanked by the flags of the United States and the secretary of war, was a portrait of former secretary of war Elihu Root, Stimson’s hero. The windows, framed with Venetian blinds and drapes, overlooked the river; most of the construction debris was out of his immediate sight. It was a spacious office, more than twice the size of his office in the Munitions Building. Overstuffed leather chairs in green-and-tan tones were positioned about the suite. Across the hall was the private dining room, walls paneled with solid light oak and four mahogany dining tables covered with white linen. The serving pantry was equipped with Army cooks, a refrigerator, and an electric steam table. Stimson was most pleased with the map alcove in his office, upon which Army cartographers had prepared maps with positions of American troops in all theaters around the world, including the latest updates from North Africa.

As soon as his wife left, Stimson called in Marshall and Hap Arnold to discuss his thoughts on how to defend the North African landing force against the attack he feared the Germans might launch from Gibraltar. Then McCloy came in to update Stimson on the uproar over the Darlan affair, which was only intensifying. There was moral outrage in what Stimson called “starry-eyed circles” about dealing with the Nazi collaborator in North Africa. It was all mystifying to Stimson, who considered the arrangement a necessary evil that had saved American lives, but he went to work trying to calm the furor.

The high command settled quickly into the Pentagon. Two days after Marshall’s arrival, Colonel William T. Sexton, an aide to the chief of staff, heard a commotion in the hallway and instinctively reached for his pistol. Hap Arnold had commandeered a bicycle, and, accompanied by an aide on roller skates, rolled into Marshall’s office, where the chief of staff was in the midst of a conference. Marshall looked up to see his tall, white-haired air forces chief perched on a bicycle. Arnold saluted. “New carrier service, sir,” he announced, and then pedaled out. Marshall “roared with laughter,” Sexton recalled.

The chief of staff was satisfied with the Pentagon, once his phone was fixed. He and Stimson found it an effective command post, particularly as the rest of the high command moved in. It would be even more effective once the Navy arrived.

These damned admirals

Stimson was hoping to make an early escape from work on the afternoon of November 19 and get some rest. He was still fatigued from overseeing North Africa operations and had been unable to sleep for several nights, lying awake with worry. But Somervell caught the secretary as he was heading home with some bad news: The admirals were agitating for more space in the Pentagon and threatening to sabotage the whole deal.

The Army had already increased the amount of office space offered to the Navy from 800,000 to one million square feet, roughly 40 percent of the building. Stimson had reluctantly agreed to kick the chief of ordnance office out of the Pentagon to give the Navy extra room. If the Army lost any further space, half the intelligence section would have to go elsewhere. But Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard, who was “violently against” the deal agreed to by his chief, insisted the Navy needed more space. All eight Navy bureau chiefs were objecting to the move. “Incidentally these admirals are trying to use their power over Knox to extort a good deal of further space from us,” Stimson fumed in his diary. “We have already given them 200,000 feet more than we originally offered and I shall set my face against any further concession.”

Stimson telephoned Knox and complained “pretty freely” about the Navy’s behavior. Knox told Stimson he was trying to work it out with the admirals, but he wanted to do so “without a row.”

Stimson knew what that meant—the genial secretary of the Navy lacked the steel to break the admirals’ blockade. Knox was no Elihu Root. “The Bureau admirals are holding Knox up and he is as helpless as a child in their hands,” Stimson wrote. “As a result, it seems as if this really important improvement of having the Navy come into our building and share it with us in such a way as to assist united command will break down simply from the crusty selfishness of some Bureau officers which their chief has not force enough to command.”

The press was starting to wonder what was going on. The Navy was supposed to be in the Pentagon by December 1, and on November 20 Knox was forced to publicly admit the move would be delayed until at least Christmas. At the White House later that day, Knox gingerly approached Stimson at the end of the Cabinet meeting and asked for another 200,000 square feet of space.

Stimson responded icily. Conferring afterward with McCloy and Marshall, Stimson found them equally adamant that the Army make no further concession. The Army now had 63,000 workers in Washington, and the Navy 27,000. As it stood now, each service would be able to fit about one-third of its Washington workforce into the Pentagon. If the Army conceded another 200,000 feet, the Navy would have 40 percent of its Washington force in the Pentagon, and the Army less than 30 percent—and this in a building the Army had moved heaven and earth to build.

The beleaguered Renshaw—his dreams of soon completing the command section dashed by the decision to move in the Navy—had been working since November 3 to prepare the suites for Knox, King, and other top Navy officials. Renshaw warned Groves that the construction crews were in dark moods about ripping out much of their finished work to accommodate the Navy. It was going to be expensive—Renshaw estimated it would cost $8.3 million. Navy representatives insisted that the offices of every Navy officer with the rank of captain or above be fitted with private bathrooms, leather chairs, and wainscoted walls. Marshall turned visibly angry when he heard the demand. “They’ll get exactly what the Army gets—nothing more, and nothing less,” he ordered. Meanwhile, while the Navy dithered for more space, large sections of the Army’s Ordnance, Signal, Intelligence, and Air Forces that were supposed to move into the Pentagon were in limbo.

Marshall told Stimson he was so disgusted with the Navy’s actions he would rather withdraw the whole offer. At a tense meeting on Tuesday, November 24, Stimson told Knox that one million square feet was his final offer; otherwise, the Army would occupy the entire building.

Knox promised to get back to Stimson within an hour. The day passed, and two more, with no word from the secretary of the Navy. After a thoroughly unrelaxing Thanksgiving Day—much of it spent in the Pentagon working with Marshall on the Darlan affair—Stimson called Knox on Friday, November 27, and found the secretary of the Navy “still in the same helpless condition.” Knox explained that Rear Admiral Samuel Robinson, chief of the Bureau of Ships, insisted he needed more space.

That was it, Stimson decided. “I told him then that I was afraid that we would have to withdraw the offer and call the thing off,” Stimson wrote. “He said he was afraid that was so.”

The whole matter left Stimson depressed. “It seems to me a frightful condemnation of the ability of men that we can’t settle a matter which had so much good in it because of such a trivial objection by one bureau head,” he wrote in his diary.