Pentagon The Untold Story Behind the Creation of the Symbol of American Might

CHAPTER 1 DYNAMITE IN A TIFFANY BOX Stimson looks for the right man Henry Stimson was agitated. At age seventy-three, the secretary of war was the elder statesman of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet in both age and demeanor, known for his dignity, wisdom, and Yankee reserve. To his staff at the War Department, Stimson seemed "like the Rock of Ages." But he also was imbued with a deep streak of Old Testament temper, and an agitated Stimson was a fearsome thing. "Everybody always seemed to think of Stimson as a wonderful old gentleman," one officer later said. "He was old all right, but he was a tough guy. If he had to, he knew how and when to use profanity." Stimson was swearing regularly in the fall of 1940. The largest peacetime military mobilization in American history had begun that spring, and it was bogged down. France had fallen in May, the Low Countries were overrun, and Britain was in grave danger. Roosevelt responded with a call to dramatically build the armed forces, and Congress answered with legislation raising the authorized strength of the Army eightfold, from 174,000 to 1.4 million. But before this great Army could be raised, it needed a roof. Dozens of military camps had to be built immediately around the country to house and train hundreds of thousands of draftees. Work was flowing into the Army Quartermaster Corps's once-sleepy Construction Division at unprecedented levels; the division's monthly budget of less than $10 million soared to a figure eventually seventy times that amount. Orders to construct camps, munitions plants, housing projects, airfields, and ports were piling up. Construction headquarters took on the air of a Middle East bazaar, with some offices so crowded that workers had to hop over desks to move around. "The halls teemed with visitors, as contractors, materialmen, equipment dealers and a good many others beat a path to the men with a billion dollars to spend," the Army's official account of World War II construction in the United States notes. The men with a billion dollars struggled and spent mightily, but soon fell on their faces. "They had gotten into desperate confusion," in Stimson's view. The mobilization of the entire Army was dangerously delayed by the construction mess. Almost nothing could be done until the facilities were built. General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, had set ninety-day deadlines to build the camps, an order that proved hopelessly unrealistic. By November 1940, good weather for construction was vanishing, and the pressure was increasing. With few camps finished, Marshall's ambitious schedule had to be drastically revised, and only token numbers of draftees called up. Guardsmen had quit jobs, vacated apartments, and left families to find they had no place to report. The Army was being portrayed by the press as an organization of dunces. "Even sadder than the delays were some of Mr. Stimson's excuses," scolded Time magazine, which laid the blame on "the bumbling quartermasters." Stimson was on his second stint as secretary of war, having served in the same job almost three decades earlier for President William Taft during the years leading up to World War I. Back then, he had seemingly endless time to get the Army ready for war, but no money. Now, Congress had appropriated fantastic streams of money, but there was no time. "I am not satisfied [the Construction Division] is doing as rapid work as I think should be done," Stimson noted in his diary. As the delays stretched on, the secretary grew "more and more agitated," observed John J. McCloy, the "gnomelike" assistant secretary of war often at the old man's sVogel, Steve is the author of 'Pentagon The Untold Story Behind the Creation of the Symbol of American Might', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400063031 and ISBN 1400063035.