Fort Fumble

Timothy James here, your timeline tossed correspondent - and today the Re-Watch sends me straight into 1941 Arlington Virginia where the U.S. War Department is panicking like a medieval army that just realized it can’t fit through a door. The Re-Watch is vibrating so hard it might achieve flight. Why? Because the Pentagon - yes THAT Pentagon - is about to be born. And - oh boy - this construction saga is messier than a baron trying to write his own charter with his feet! The War Department is bursting at the seams: 17 separate buildings scattered across Washington D.C., each one hoarding paperwork like dragons hoard gold. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wants a new headquarters but he’s terrified of air raids. At first, he suggest a building with no windows - basically a concrete bunker shaped like a bureaucratic panic attack. Engineers politely tell him it’s ridiculous. Enter architect George Edwin Bergstrom, who proposes a five sided design that fits the awkward plot of land available. Roosevelt approves of it, even though the chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts grumbles like your empty stomach. The site? A swampy wasteland near the old Washington Airport - so soggy it could swallow a horse whole. To stabilize it, workers truck in 5.5 million cubic yards of dirt and drive a staggering 41,492 concrete piles on the ground JUST FOR THE FOUNDATION! (Just so you know, a pile is 27 and 45 feet) And because the Pentagon is going up right beside Arlington National Cemetery, there’s another problem: it can’t simply rise to the heavens like a gigantic stone fortress. Its height is strictly limited to 77 feet and 3.5 inches. So instead of building upwards, the designers have to spread this bureaucratic beast outward. Then history hits the accelerator. Construction begins September 1941, but just three months later, the United States enters World War II in December. Suddenly this isn’t your normal construction project: it’s a national priority. Apparently, the construction crews take that personally. More than 13,000 workers laboured for tiresome hours, toiling and moiling to groundbreaking the stubborn land. Finally, after eight months of effort, Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, moved in to the new facility. Two years later, the Pentagon’s construction was completed. 83,000,000 dollars into a structure that is the world’s largest office building and is shaped like a donut. That’s a lot of money. Then they planned to turn it into a hospital, or a peactime facility. Welp, those ideas were crushed by the steamroller of the Cold War. Military preparedness was key to this conflict, and what could be more important than a military buliding? And so was the Pentagon made, with gallons of cash, swampy terrain, and several tons of concrete. ¹