The Pentagon: A History (27 page)

The Pentagon was being built out of the Potomac—some 680,000 tons of river sand and gravel when all was said and done. “It is interesting that more than one-half the weight of the building…came out of the bottom of the Potomac River,” Renshaw later observed.

Though the supply of sand and gravel was inexhaustible, the amount dredged was not. The Smoot Sand & Gravel Company, the main supplier, struggled to meet the demand, particularly in January, when two of its river dredges broke down and some of the company’s most experienced dredge operators were drafted by the Army. Many area construction jobs suffered, yet Smoot managed to supply enough for the Pentagon project, which had priority.

Floating dredges scooped up sand and gravel from various beds in the river. The stones were sand-colored, rounded and smooth from the force of water, their coarseness varying with which river bar was being worked. The dredges loaded the sand and gravel onto barges—including the ones delivered by the unnamed and unwilling captain. Shipping the aggregate directly to the construction site saved not only time but also money—about thirty-five cents per cubic yard of concrete.

On the bank of the expanded lagoon, the concrete batching plant run by the Howat Concrete Company of Maryland received barges twenty-four hours a day. Two stiff-legged derricks, equipped with big clamshell buckets, scooped the aggregate off the barges and swung it over into an enormous receiving hopper. The aggregate was dropped from the hopper onto a radial stacker, a 185-foot-long conveyor belt that carried the material to the top of a mountainous stockpile. From there it was drawn as needed through a buried timber tunnel to more conveyor belts that carried the aggregate to one of two batchers, where it was weighed and measured to reach a proportion of roughly two parts sand to three parts gravel. Portland cement, brought to the plant via a rail spur, was added to the mix, along with precise amounts of water.

The massive operation produced as much as 3,500 cubic yards of concrete daily, requiring about 5,500 tons of sand and gravel, 937 tons of cement, and 115,000 gallons of water every day. When concrete was being poured, which was most of the time, mixing trucks lined up beneath the batchers to fill up. Each truck carried four cubic yards of concrete, mixing it as they hauled to save time. Often twenty or thirty trucks made runs back and forth, along dirt roadways laid out to speed passage directly to the foot of tower hoists next to the building and other locations where concrete was needed.

Steam-powered hoists lifted it in one-cubic-yard buckets. Reaching the proper level, the concrete was dumped into chutes that carried it into small hoppers. With cries of “Concrete!” workers rushed it in wheelbarrows and concrete buggies over planks to its final destination. To speed up the pouring, Renshaw tried using concrete pumps, a new technology. Pumps were set up in the courtyard with pipes attached to carry the concrete up into the building. “When the pumps worked they could really put a hell of a lot of concrete in the building,” Bob Furman recalled. But they sometimes broke down, creating an unholy mess and slowing the work. “Then the pipe would be full of concrete setting up—it’d be a bitch,” he said. Most of the concrete ended up being hoisted to the deck hoppers and distributed in buggies.

It was a freewheeling operation, so much so that other military projects lacking the same priority were filching concrete from the site. “Apparently we didn’t supervise them too carefully,” Furman said. “Later we learned that the Army bases that were being built or renovated in the area were sending trucks over and lining up with our trucks.”

The pouring continued nonstop in good weather and bad, many times simultaneously in different sections of the building. Big pours were scheduled every Friday, often lasting well into the night, giving the concrete time to cure relatively undisturbed over the weekend, when smaller crews were at work. “We built so damn quickly, I remember one column wasn’t even poured,” Furman said. “We stripped the [forms], and there wasn’t any column there.”

The constant pouring of concrete meant the carpenters, Joe Allan among them, had to race to keep up. “There was always concrete going in,” Allan said. “Every morning some of the forms were ready to be poured. There were concrete trucks all over the place every morning, pouring, and then in the afternoon and the evening too. They didn’t waste any time.”

The carpenters set up assembly-line operations to build the forms. Each of the building’s five sections had its own mill, manned by large crews of carpenters with power saws who cut and assembled lumber into modular forms for the columns, beams, slabs, and walls. Allan was assigned to the mill for Section D, where he used an electric skill saw to cut the lumber to the proper lengths—three-quarter-inch-thick boards, a foot wide and six to eight feet long. The forms were assembled using tongue-and-groove joints and secured with battens.

“It was like a mimeograph,” Allan said. “It was designed so it could be done easily.”

The mass-production techniques, rough at the start of construction, were constantly refined by Paul Hauck and his foremen, and by spring the pace of work was rapidly accelerating. New workers quickly picked up the simple and repetitive assignments. “Coming from different backgrounds and different unions and different experiences, they were able to comprehend immediately what to do and how to do it,” Allan said.

So much wood was being cut that several carpenters at each mill did nothing all day but sharpen and set the teeth on saws. A sudden and unexpected lumber shortage in the spring left the Army scrambling to get enough. The forms were broken up and the boards reused, but the job still required enormous amounts of lumber—more than twenty-three million board-feet in the end.

After a spectacular fire at a hotel under construction in Washington in February, it suddenly dawned on Groves that the War Department site might erupt into the world’s largest construction fire. He ordered Renshaw to immediately rid the site of fire hazards. Renshaw decided that an officer on his staff must be at the site at all times to respond to any emergency. In the middle of a huge office bay in Section A, McShain’s men walled off a small bedroom, which was outfitted with three beds, a bathroom, shower, and telephone. Furman, rotating duty with four other officers, spent every fifth night there. He would get up every three or four hours and walk around the entire site, looking for trouble. “I can tell you right now there are 921 and a half feet to a side,” Furman recalled more than sixty years later.

Their emergency preparedness was soon tested when a large toolshed used by construction workers caught fire one night. The next day, the construction site security chief presented Furman with a report proudly listing how quickly firefighters responded to the blaze. “His report read to that point as the most efficient call to put out a fire you could ever imagine,” Furman recalled. “Then the bottom line read, ‘The building burnt to the ground.’”

Are there really guys buried down there?

Given the vast size and fast pace of the concrete pours, it did not take long for rumors to start spreading about workers who had fallen into wet concrete and perished. Sometimes the worker disappeared without a trace, the story went; other times the body had to be removed with jackhammers. “That was the scuttlebutt,” recalled Donald Walker. In the version he and his steel crew heard, workers had stripped the forms off a beam and found a body embedded in the concrete. Walker had no trouble believing it. “Oh, yeah, it was very feasible,” he said.

Working as usual on a weekend, Clarence Renshaw brought along his eight-year-old son, Alan, to see the work one morning. They went to the top of the building, where from up high the boy marveled at the sights: cranes swinging about with supplies, fleets of trucks moving on the roads below, and mountains of material. As his father conferred with McShain, Alan walked over to watch concrete being poured. A rough-looking worker stopped him. “Hey, kid, don’t get too close,” the worker barked. “We lost two guys down one of these holes last week.”

Such stories spread around town. John Brockwell’s parents, like many families in the area, opened their house in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria to war workers needing room and board. One of the boarders was a worker on the Pentagon project, a mixing truck driver nicknamed “Concrete.” He would come home covered in it. Concrete told a story about a worker who fell into a deep pool of freshly poured concrete when the long pole he was using to stir the mix snapped. “He said they started to stop the concrete pour, but the foreman told them to keep going because the worker would be dead before they could get to him, and the effort wasn’t worth stopping the concrete job,” Brockwell recalled years later. “So on they went, leaving the worker’s body inside the concrete foundation. Whether that actually happened, I don’t know, but it made a good story for ‘Concrete’ at the time and was a great story for a kid like me.”

The stories only multiplied with time. An unnamed construction supervisor told the
Army-Navy-Air Force Register
in 1961 about a worker who failed to show up for work the day after he had been assigned to oversee the pouring of a column. “The construction section boss ordered the molding to be stripped from the pillar and, as was feared, workers found a body embedded in the drying cement,” the
Register
reported. “Jack-hammers were needed to release the deceased from his concrete tomb.”

The tales have never stopped; a recycled version was reported as fact by the Pentagon’s official newspaper in 1984. Marian Bailey, who started working in the Pentagon as a telephone operator in 1942 and stayed six decades, relished taking visitors on building tours and speaking mysteriously of workers buried in the concrete. Sometimes she would dramatically point to spots in walls or floors where some unfortunate was said to be entombed.

The stories, as Bob Furman put it, are “myths.” There is no evidence in any records that anyone died in such a manner. The most definitive answer came from Clarence Renshaw himself. Many years after Alan Renshaw’s visit to the Pentagon roof—after he himself had attended West Point and been commissioned as an officer in the Air Force—the son asked his father about the stories. “Are there really guys buried down there under that concrete?” Alan Renshaw asked.

Clarence Renshaw had to laugh. Nobody had been lost that way, he told his son. He would have known.

Don’t slip on it

Workers were dying in plenty of other ways, though, and not necessarily in more pleasant manners. Two workers were killed in early February operating a mechanical hoist, including one who stuck his head into a hoist shaft to see if the hoist was coming. It was, and he was decapitated. A few days later, on February 13, Guy R. Milliken, an electrician who came down from New York for the job, was fetching his lunch when he walked into the path of a concrete truck. His death brought the number of fatalities on the job to four.

Inspecting the site before the spate of deaths, Lloyd Blanchard, chief of the safety section, was dismayed to find that none of the urgent safety improvements he had recommended after Vernon Janney was crushed in October had been implemented. “It is still necessary for the general contractor to show a radical change in attitude toward providing safe working conditions,” Blanchard wrote.

Renshaw was unapologetic when queried by a reporter about the deaths. “We are lucky that we have not had 20 deaths,” he said. “We cannot have 13,000 men together on one job working at the rate we are going and not have some accidents. Considering that a normal job would take two years, our accident rate is very low.” Renshaw put the blame for the deaths on “human failure,” which was another way of saying it was the workers’ fault. “Real safety actually only comes from the men themselves,” he said. “At times, we have had trouble impressing that on them, particularly those who are new on the job.”

Labor leaders thought otherwise, and, given the cavalier attitude toward safety at the site, they had good reason to. At the demand of the unions, McShain and Army representatives met with labor leaders to review safety procedures. “They have been promising to institute proper methods, but we are very doubtful that they will,” C. F. Preller, president of the Washington Building and Construction Trades Council, told
The Washington Post.
The Virginia labor commissioner, John Hopkins Hall, Jr., wrote a letter to Stimson later in the spring expressing concern about the accidents. Stimson promised that “every effort is being made to keep preventable accidents at a minimum.” Some improvements were made and the accident rate fell as the months passed. After the two hoist deaths, a signal system was installed and an additional watcher was placed at the shaft. But the job site remained dangerous.

Further aggrieved by a wage dispute with the government, union leaders in March threatened to pull thousands of workers from the Pentagon job site to testify at a Department of Labor hearing. The threat was not carried out, but the labor-government truce that had ruled since Pearl Harbor was fraying.

There were racial tensions as well among the construction workers. About 40 percent of the work force was black; many of them worked as laborers, but because of wartime manpower shortages, others were given jobs as skilled workers. The prominent role of black workers bred resentment among some whites. The construction cafeterias had separate sections for black and white workers in accordance with the “Virginia Separation of Races” law. Out on the construction site, brawls broke out several times between groups of white and black workers; on one occasion, Furman arrived at the scene to find a large group of black and white workers facing off, hurling angry words at each other. “They were drawing lines, and I walked between the lines,” Furman said. “Whether it did any good or not I don’t know.” The standoff broke up but the tensions remained.