On May 27, 1941, alarmed by the advance of Nazi troops, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, declared a state of alarm in his country. Hitler, in control of most of Europe, had launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, and German soldiers were already halfway to Moscow.
The atmosphere was tense. America, and especially the policy makers in its capital, Washington, D.C., was seized with anxiety about the winds of war that were blowing from the Old Continent.
The powerful War Department was also experiencing its particular state of alarm. This entity, responsible for the US army, was going to play a fundamental role in the vicissitudes that were coming. However, it had a problem to be able to fulfill it well: it lacked an appropriate headquarters for its operation.
Since its founding in 1790, during George Washington’s presidency, the department (also known as the War Office) had had several headquarters, which were always too small. In the spring of 1941, its offices were spread over seventeen buildings. Employees already numbered 24,000 people, a number that was increasing rapidly.
That dispersion was unacceptable in times of confrontation. The Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson decided that it was urgent to build a headquarters that would bring together all those scattered in record time.
That task fell on the shoulders of Colonel, and later General, Brehon B. Somervell. Described after his death as “one of the ablest officers” in the US Army, he was known for his efficiency in organizing equipment for soldiers recruited in those months.
A pharaonic project, with a pentagonal shape, was going to be the feat for which Brehon B. Somervell would go down to posterity. However, “the building Somervell had in mind was too big to fit in Washington,” Steve Vogel writes in his book The Pentagon, a History. The new War Department headquarters “was to be, by far, the largest structure in the city, including the Capitol. It was going to outperform any office building in the world.”
Even for the country that invented skyscrapers, the dimensions that were considered were enormous: more than three million square meters of surface area, to be able to house the forty thousand people that, they calculated, the department would need in times of war.
These meters would have to be deployed widthwise, not heightwise, since the headquarters could not be more than four stories high. “In order not to cause an impact on the landscape of Washington and not require too much steel, material necessary then for the manufacture of warships and weapons”, explains Vogel.
At a secret meeting on a steamy Thursday afternoon in late July 1941, attended by the War Department’s chief architects and engineers, Somervell asked to have the first sketches on his desk by 9 a.m. the following Monday. .
Its pentagonal shape was designed during that weekend by the architect Edwin Bergstron. The idea of ??that contour arose from the topography of the plot where, at first, it was going to be built. The site, known as Arlington Farm, had been part of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s large ranch on the Potomac River. It was adjacent to the historic Arlington Cemetery, where the remains of thousands of veterans of all the wars in which the United States has participated since Independence rest.
Work on the building, which even then began to be called informally the Pentagon, began on September 11, 1941, just over two months after the first secret meeting called by Somervell. The US would finally enter the war in December of that year, after the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor base.
The speed with which the procedures to carry out the project were carried out is surprising, which does not mean that there were no difficulties. Among others, the intervention of Roosevelt himself. Although he initially gave the project virtually carte blanche, he soon backed off.
The president did not want to leave a horrendous mark on an area as historically significant as Arlington. Advised by a series of Washington notables, he forced the site chosen for the headquarters to be changed: even if the building only had four stories, the impact on the views from the cemetery would have been too great.
The work was moved one kilometer downriver, to a degraded area known as Hell’s Bottom (the bottom of hell). The president also wanted a smaller building, housing only twenty thousand workers. But, in this case, the cunning Somervell did not comply with his wishes: although he agreed to the new demanded figure, he hardly changed his initial plans.
In those first weeks, the project tried to keep secret. However, his execution required congressional approval, so some sensational information was soon picked up in the press. Among them, the budget: 35 million dollars.
Many media considered the figure scandalous, but it was approved by Congress and the Senate in a context of war emergency. Its processing deserved timid voices against it, which warned that concentrating all those responsible for the Army under one roof was risky. What would happen if the headquarters were attacked?
It was not reported by the media that, during the planning, Roosevelt, who considered himself an architectural connoisseur, suggested that the Pentagon be windowless. The president alleged reasons of security and modernity. “I have no intention of working in a banana warehouse,” War Secretary Stimson said after the meeting. In this way, a compromise was reached: one of the five wings of the building would be made with blind walls.
The works were executed with impressive efficiency. In addition to Somervell, they were commanded by the architect Edwin Bergstrom, the builder John McShain and Colonel Leslie Richard Groves, head of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Shortly after, Groves would be responsible for the construction of the Los Alamos laboratory, headquarters of the Manhattan Project that would develop the atomic bomb for his government.
The building was completed in record time: sixteen months, although the first of its wings was opened in May 1942.
In January 1943, the Pentagon was officially finished. Its name was also made official, becoming the largest office building in the world: a total of twelve hectares. Its five-sided façade contained almost 350,000 square meters of useful area, divided into five pentagons or concentric “rings”.
They were connected by 28 kilometers of corridors, but thanks to his planning, it was possible to cross the building from one end to the other in about seven minutes. Still, the vastness of the spaces made it easy to get lost: when, in 1946, General Eisenhower went to work there as Chief of Staff, he got lost trying to get back to his office.
The total cost of the building amounted to 83 million dollars. During the height of the war, the Pentagon accommodated 33,000 workers.
It was said that, once the conflict was over, there would not be a need for as much space for administrative use, but the Pentagon continued to be the headquarters of the General Staff and house thousands of employees. Today, the Secretary of Defense (the former Department of War) and the highest officials of the Air, Sea and Land forces of the Army coexist within it. The building did not take long to become an icon.
In 1992, the Pentagon was designated a National Historic Landmark. It was also during this time that intense restoration work began, which would last for years. These works prevented more people from dying during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
The Pentagon was the object of an attack with a commercial plane, hijacked mid-flight by Al Qaeda terrorists, which crashed into the building. The plane impacted the west wing and went through three of the five rings. Fortunately, that area had already been redeveloped or was in the process of being redeveloped, which meant that only 800 of its 4,500 workers were there that morning.
Many of the offices that were destroyed by the impact were empty; others had been reinforced to protect them, precisely, from a terrorist attack. That reinforcement prevented that part of the building from collapsing immediately, so most of those who were there were able to get out in time.
However, in the attack on the Pentagon, 184 people died: 59 of them were on board the plane and 128 were working in the Pentagon. Today a memorial remembers the victims of that tragic day.
This text is part of an article published in number 646 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
