America in WWII - (Page 67) Allies, Mihailovic´ never swerved from his fervent pro-American policy. He continued to appeal to the West to come to the aid of its own downed airmen. At long last, someone listened. Freeman’s book recounts the unlikely series of events that finally resulted in an official OSS operation to rescue the downed aircrew men. It is not only the story of an incredible mission behind enemy lines, but a three-dimensional portrait of many of the key players who made it happen. They include a dedicated OSS officer and his courageous wife and an OSS field operative whose fierce identification with the Serbian people made it possible to execute the largest rescue mission of World War II, an operation never exceeded in daring, scope, or success since. It is also the story of American warriors, trapped in enemy territory, who assisted their hosts in gaining their own freedom. Together, Yugoslav soldiers and peasants, working alongside Americans, moved heaven and earth to make the rescue happen. In the process they built a clandestine runway for C-47 transports on the side of a mountain, without any tools save primitive hoes and rakes. The reader will be propelled from scene to fascinating scene in The Forgotten 500. Along the way, he’ll meet real American heroes and a selfless people prepared to sacrifice all in the cause of freedom. This untold story of World War II has finally been told with skill and grace. —Brian Murphy Fairfield, Connecticut The Pentagon: A History—The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon, and Restore It Sixty Years Later, by Steve Vogel, Random House, 656 pages, $32.95. POST reporter Steve Vogel has written a biography, but his subject is a building, not a person. The building is the five-sided behemoth that began rising in 1941 to house the US War Department across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. But The Pentagon: A History is also the story of the many people whose lives intertwined with the 66-year-old structure—the people who ASHINGTON W built it and worked in it—and the people who were inside on September 11, 2001, when a hijacked airliner crashed into it. Dominating the book is Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell, the guiding force behind the Pentagon’s creation. Somervell, handsome, capable, and extremely ambitious, had graduated from West Point and performed near miracles as the head of New York City’s Works Progress Administration programs. Described by one journalist as “all lace and velvet and courtliness outside, fury and purposefulness within,” Somervell quickly proved he was the right man for the job. “In exactly one week, Somervell had proposed constructing a building of unprecedented size and scale, produced preliminary plans out of thin air, won the strong support of the War Department leadership including a skeptical secretary of war, sold it to key Congressional leaders, and received a green light from the president of the United States. Nothing, it seemed, could stop him.” Well, it wasn’t quite as easy as that. Somervell had to battle resistance to the project and to its selected site near Arlington Cemetery. Despite Somervell’s dig-in-his-heels resistance to any alterations in his plans, the site was moved further south. Planners retained the odd Pentagon shape, a necessity because of the roads at the original location, but in a more regularized form. Somervell’s subordinates took their cues from their boss. One of them was Colonel Leslie R. Groves, himself a taskmaster who began supervising the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb while still working on finishing the Pentagon. A typical Groves pronouncement was, “I am not interested in excuses or explanations, only in the accomplishment of the desired results.” Such draconian management was necessary to keep the project on track. Work was so fast-paced that architect George Edwin Bergstrom’s draftsmen couldn’t draw plans quickly enough to keep the men under chief builder John McShain busy. More draftsman were recruited, many of them working in a steaming-hot warehouse, forced to keep blotting paper over their plans so their dripping sweat wouldn’t ruin them. It was September 11, 1941, when the first spades hit the dirt for a building estimated at 4.4 million square feet and with a price tag of $33.5 million. Some wondered if such a colossus would be necessary once the present “emergency” was over. President Franklin Roosevelt suggested the building could serve as a postwar archives, so the builders reinforced it so it could support huge storage cabinets. By the time the Pentagon was finished in February 1943, its statistics were even more astonishing than originally planned: 6.24 million gross square feet and a cost of at least $75 million. As Vogel says, the building itself was “the Pentagon’s first cost overrun,” and Somervell had no compunctions about covering up its true costs. If there’s one weakness in Vogel’s wellwritten and -researched account, it’s his subject matter. It may be the biggest office building in the world, but the Pentagon is still an office building. The project lacked the epic grandeur of something like Hoover Dam, a staggering engineering achievement but also a near-mythic, promethean attempt to tame nature. (Hoover Dam and the Pentagon did have one thing in common—both created legends that workers fell into wet concrete and were permanently entombed inside.) Building the Pentagon required hard and sometimes dangerous work, but there’s still something almost prosaic about the nuts and bolts of its construction. Fortunately, Vogel has a knack for exposing the human stories—Somervell’s unbridled ambition, the politicians circling to get their pieces of the pie, the subordinates chafing under their superiors’ demands, the president who couldn’t resist meddling, the warring turfs and bureaucracies. Human nature is always more interesting than concrete. Vogel’s tale takes on a new intensity when he discusses the events of September 11, 2001—60 years to the day after work on the Pentagon began. On that beautiful Tuesday morning, hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The plane hit the first section that had been completed, which happened to be the only section to have undergone a thorough restoration. Improvements built into the structure undoubtedly saved many lives, as did Roosevelt’s insistence on strengthening the structure for use as an archives. Vogel’s OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 67
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