Untitled Document

10 February 2007

Main Navy and Munitions

Last night was an affair at Big Pink. The Admiral was coming to dinner. He is the senior flag officer of my acquaintance, the Last Man Standing from his generation.

I bustled around in the afternoon in preparation. I had matching plates set out, and the silver setting that I bartered for at the Courthouse Flea Market. The table didn't look to bad. The homemade lasagna bubbled in the oven, and the odor of roasted garlic wafted through the suite.

Right on schedule, there was a knocking at the door. The Admiral was there, on the arm of a lovely escort, who clutched two bottles of wine and expressed regrets. One of the invited guests, a distinguished figure, had been laid low, possibly a complication of Boston shellfood consumed in the line of business.

We wasted a moment trying to figure out if there was an “R” in this month, and having determined that it did, what it signified. In the end, we expressed our joint regret that there was far too much food, but exactly the right amount of wine. We almost didn't get beyond the hors d'eourves.

We yakked for about three hours, In real time, the narrative of the Admiral's life broke into two parts- the War Years, and the immediate aftermath, and the strange times after his retirement, when he drifted into the shadow world of the Intelligence Community Staff, and pouches that went from the Headquarters on F Street, to the White House and Langley and back again.

In the one narrative, we were up to his augmentation into the regular Navy in May of 1946, and his dealings with a Sultan from Malaysia who lived most of the time in London and hated the Brits. The Admiral was working out of Eisenhower's old Headquarters building then, the great pile on North Audley Street that the British had leased us for a dollar a year.

We gave it up last year, damn the Navy's impecunious eyes, and we sighed over another grand old building that has passed out of our hands.

We talked of other buildings, too. Alrington Hall is just across the street from Big Pink, and the Army Security Agency had occupied it in World War Two, and many of the little houses around the soaring salmon-colored towers had been occupied by working Spooks who walked to their desks.

Most of the Admiral's immediate post-war career was in Washington, amid the great transformation of the defense and intelligence establishments. In those days, that did not mean the Pentagon. In the post-war era, that meant Main Navy and the Munitions Buildings, and the temporary buildings that surrounded the reflecting pool and straggled up to Navy Hill and Foggy Bottom.

It is all gone now, but for five decades, Main Navy and Munitions anchored the National Mall, and you can trace the progress of the Executive Branch from the isolation of 1916 to the zenith of empire in the scars on the soil.

It started more than a century ago, with the construction of the marvelous wedding-cake fantasy of the Executive Office Building adjacent to the West Wing of the White House. It's shiny marble floors and glittering brass fixtures were sufficient to hold the departments of War, State and the Navy. It was adequate, in its time, but in 1917, the Nation was drifting into foreign entanglements, and to War.

President Wilson had kept us out of the worst of it at first, but it seemed there was nothing for it. The Huns continued to menace the Western Front; the German had delivered the bacillus of Communism to Czarist Russian in a sealed boxcar.

Space was required for the Departments of War and the Navy to mobilize for participation in the carnage.

Two large and substantial structures were thrown up on public parkland on the western end of the long mall that stretched from the monument under construction to the memory of President Lincoln.

The fronts stretched for nearly a third of a mile down Constitution Avenue's south side, from 17th to 21st Streets. There was office space for 14,000 government workers, and there being a war on, the term was not yet the oxymoron of modern times.

A vehicle entryway separated the buildings at 19th Street.

Over the pedestrian entrance at the foot of 18th Street were affixed the letters spelling the words “Navy Department.”

The Munitions Building, purview of the Army and the War Department, had its entrance at the foot of 20th Street.

My Grandfather saw those imposing structures when the Bonus Army came to town to demand reparations for their sacrifices in the Great War, and camped where the reflecting pool stretches today.

Although they were designated as “temporary” structures, the street facades of Main Navy and Munitions were three stories high, constructed of the same ubiquitous concrete that later formed the Navy Annex on the Virginia bluffs above the Potomac, and the Suitland Federal Complex in Maryland, and the Pentagon itself.

Long east-west main corridors branched at regular intervals into north-south wings: eight for the Munitions Building, and nine for Main Navy. The buildings stood the test of the Roaring Twenties, and of the Depression, and the grim years of stagnation as the realization began to penetrate that the lights were going out all over Europe, and the horror was going to come again.

A mammoth building was planned to house the Department of War across the river, in a unique geometric style. At Main Navy, an architecturally similar tenth wing constructed at its eastern end, and rough-built fourth floors were grafted to the tops of all the wings.

A fifth floor was hurriedly pasted to the top of the rising Pentagon Building. Other "wood and beaverboard" temporary buildings were erected on the south side of the of the reflecting pool, and footbridges were thrown across the water to connect them.

A “Splinterville” of barracks and office buildings ran from the north shore of the Tidal Basin all the way up to Navy Hill and Foggy Bottom.

The Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA, began its life on Navy Hill and in the wooden buildings that reached down to Main Navy. Between the Army and Navy and the OSS, the place was a nest of Spooks.

The solid concrete of Main Navy outlasted nearly all of the City's once-vast number of wartime "temporaries." It's remains still scarred the ground next to the reflecting pool when I came to see the great anti-war demonstration in 1971 that was going to shut down the capital of the free world

Whatever else you might say about President Nixon, he acted in the public good to expunge the presence of the Army and the Navy from the public park.

Perhaps the bureaucrats who were left in Main Navy and Munitions no longer had the power, or the ability to enforce their fondness for a particular parking place, not that the seniors had to drive their own cars in those days. At the end of their long careers the two buildings were home to most of the Navy's material systems commands, BuAir and BuShips.

The forced evacuation caused a demand for office space the caused the rise of the towers in a new development by the Potomac called Crystal City. The development was named for the glittering towers of glass, famed for their lack of parking.

The Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations and their intelligence staffs had long decamped for the wide corridors of the Pentagon, which had been purposefully constructed with the intent to convert it to a hospital when the war was won. It would be like Napoleon's Les Invalides in Paris, a facility to serve the needs of the wounded of the Grand Army in the days of peace, when the tools of war could be put down once and for all. That accounts for the wide ramps that connect the floors, though the bones of that grand old structure are being covered over in the renovation that is happening as I write.

The footprint of Main Navy and Munitions are now occupied by Constitution Gardens park, with a nice pool, and the Vietnam Memorial anchors the western end of what had been the Munitions Building.

The low black “Vee” of the monument to the dead of the Asian war parallels the main corridor. The statue of the nurse, one arm embracing the fallen warrior and the other summoning a helicopter, or an angel, was added to honor the service of women in the conflict.

The eyes of her statue look off into the middle distance, toward where the Main Navy cafeteria once was, just off the busy street.

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