Brehon B. Somervell

Brehon Burke Somervell was born on 9 May 1892 in Little Rock, Arkansas, the only child of William Taylor Somervell, a physician, and wife Mary née Burke, a schoolteacher. The two of them opened Belcourt Seminary, a girls' finishing school in Washington, D.C., in 1906. Somervell was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York by Congressman Charles C. Reid of Arkansas. Fellow graduates included men such as William H. Holcombe, James B. Cress, Charles P. Gross, Robert W. Crawford, Dabney O. Elliott, Arthur R. Harris, LaRhett L. Stuart, John B. Anderson, Harry C. Ingles, James L. Bradley, John H. Woodberry, Harold F. Loomis, Carl Spaatz, Harold R. Bull, Charles M. Milliken, Joseph W. Byron, Paul C. Paschal, Francis R. Kerr, Vicente Lim, Sylvester D. Downs Jr., Orlando Ward, Benjamin G. Weir, Ralph Royce, William O. Ryan, Frank W. Milburn, John B. Thompson and Jens A. Doe. All of them would later rise to the rank of brigadier general or higher in their later military careers. ==World War I==

Somervell traveled to Europe for his two months' graduation leave and was in Paris when World War I broke out. , Meuse, France, November 12, 1918. Pictured on the extreme right is Lieutenant Colonel Brehon B. Somervell On return to the United States, he was posted to an engineer battalion at Washington Barracks, DC. Scoring high marks in his Garrison Officers' School examinations, he was promoted to first lieutenant on 28 February 1915. During the Punitive Expedition into Mexico in 1916, he was for a time depot manager at Columbus, New Mexico, the main logistical base of the expedition. Later, he joined the expedition in Mexico, working on roads and as a supply officer. at Nattenheim, Germany, December 1918 Somervell returned to Washington Barracks to attend the Engineer School but his course was interrupted by the declaration of war by the United States on Germany on 6 April 1917. The course was abruptly terminated and Somervell, along with hundreds of other junior officers, was ordered to appear before an examination board that would determine his fitness for promotion. Following a favorable report from the board, Somervell was promoted to captain on 15 May 1917. He helped organize the 15th Engineers, a rail transport unit, at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In July 1917 this became the first engineer regiment to be sent overseas, arriving in England in July 1917 and France later that month. The 15th Engineers worked on several construction projects, including a munitions dump at Mehun-sur-Yèvre and an advanced depot and regulating station at Is-sur-Tille. in charge of operations, who had been captured a few days before. For leading a three-man patrol to inspect damage to a bridge some in front of American lines, Somervell was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. A few days later Lee arranged for Somervell to be permanently assigned to the 89th Division as the G-4 Supply Officer. ==Between the wars==

The 89th Division returned to the United States in May 1919 but Somervell remained behind as Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4, While in Germany, Somervell also met Walker Hines, a prominent New York corporate lawyer, whom he assisted with a survey of shipping and navigation on the Rhine River. Somervell reverted to the permanent rank of major on 1 July 1920. From 1926 to 1930 he was District Engineer, Washington, D.C. Engineer District. As such he became involved in a conflict between proponents of the development of hydroelectric power through damming the Great Falls of the Potomac River and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Despite his advocacy, the falls remain undammed to this day. On 1 September 1930, Somervell was transferred to the Lower Mississippi Valley Division as Assistant Chief Engineer. The next year he became assistant to, and then the District Engineer of the Memphis District. In 1933, he teamed up with Hines again, for an economic survey of Turkey, which culminated in a seven-volume report. Named as District Engineer for Ocala, Florida, Somervell got behind a project to build the Cross Florida Barge Canal. Somervell was chosen to head the project but although President Franklin D. Roosevelt allocated emergency funds for the canal in 1935, opponents of the canal protested that it would cause seawater to seep into the groundwater, and work was stopped a year later. In the meantime, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel on 1 August 1935. In 1935, Somervell was appointed as head of the Works Progress Administration in New York City. Over the next three and a half years he spent $10,000,000 a month on Great Depression relief works. The biggest project was the construction of what became LaGuardia Airport. Somervell established a reputation as a man who could handle projects involving hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars. Early in his administration he worked to repair relations with labor unions and left-wing groups that had suffered under his strongly anti-Communist predecessor Victor F. Ridder. He stated he had no objection to picketing of WPA headquarters. He also downplayed talk of a “Red menace” in the New York WPA, once declaring that "I wouldn't know a Red if I saw one, and wouldn't do anything about it if I did." Somervell's relations with WPA's arts program were particularly difficult. When Congress in 1940 required all WPA workers to sign a loyalty oath an increasingly anti-Communist Somervell ordered a deeper investigation of even those arts project workers who had signed the oath. He also began a program of censoring the content of WPA-financed murals and other art, giving instructions to “guard against anything in which the main idea is social content, rather than artistic value, and eliminate anything that may savor of propaganda, and to see that the project devotes itself to art and not politics.” In his most controversial decision, in July 1940 he ordered the burning of three out of four murals on the history of aviation at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn because of the inclusion of supposed Communist symbols. ==World War II==

Construction Division In 1940, the rapid expansion of the Army's strength from an authorized 174,000 to 1,400,000 strained the capacity of the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps. Headed by Brigadier General Charles D. Hartman and primarily concerned with peacetime maintenance, the organization floundered to meet the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General George C. Marshall's deadline to have camps for arriving draftees completed within ninety days and was charged with "incompetence, ineptitude, and stupidity" by the press and Congress. In December 1940, Somervell became head of the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps, and was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier general on 29 January 1941. Based on his experience as a district engineer and with the WPA, Somervell rapidly reorganized the Construction Division. He reduced its eleven branches to five, and added two sections, a Public Relations Section and Control Section, the latter responsible for preparing statistics for reports and coordinating the work of other branches. By December, he had decentralized operations into nine territorial construction zones, each supervised by a constructing quatermaster responsible for all local problems. Reasoning that time was more important than money, Somervell pushed the camp construction project through to completion. By February, with a workforce of 485,000 people employed on military construction projects, the job was completed on time but over $100 million over budget. He was also responsible for constructing new facilities to hold stores and munitions, for which $700 million was allocated by December 1940. By December 1941, 375 projects had been completed and 320 were still under way, with a total value of $1.8 billion. He accepted promotion to brigadier general in the Army of the United States on 14 February 1941 with the date of rank of 29 January 1941. The best known of these projects was the Pentagon, an enormous office complex to house the War Department's 40,000-person staff together in one building. On the afternoon of Thursday, 17 July 1941, Somervell summoned George Bergstrom and Major Hugh Casey. Bergstrom was a former president of the American Institute of Architects; Casey a Corps of Engineers officer seconded to the Construction Division. The two had previously worked together closely on the design of cantonments. Somervell gave them until 9 a.m. on Monday morning to design the building, which he envisaged as a modern, four-story structure with no elevators on the site of the old Washington Hoover Airport. Over that "very busy weekend", Casey, Bergstrom and their staff roughed out the design for a four-story, five-sided structure with a floor area of —twice that of the Empire State Building. The estimated cost was $35 million. President Roosevelt subsequently moved the site of the building, over Somervell's objections, in order to prevent it being constructed in front of Arlington National Cemetery. (USASOS) headquarters in June 1942. Major General Brehon B. Somervell is sat at the head of the table Somervell still pursued his own designs, making important changes, including the addition of a fifth story. The outbreak of war led to a new urgency, and by May 1942, some 13,000 workers were working around the clock on the building, which was completed in early 1943 at a cost of $63 million, the overrun being caused by the emphasis on speed and the addition of the extra floor. For his work with the Construction Division, Somervell was awarded an oak leaf cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal. Somervell hoped to become Chief of Engineers but was "not really in the running", being too junior in rank. Instead, the job went to Brigadier General Eugene Reybold, the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4 on the War Department General Staff. As Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4, Somervell pressed for the adoption of a comprehensive Army Supply Program that would set targets and priorities for all Army production. Such a program could be used as the basis for requests for appropriations, for expenditures, and for allocating scarce materials. Army Service Forces awards Somervell his third Distinguished Service Medal in October 1945 Within weeks, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall implemented sweeping changes to the War Department designed to reduce the number of people reporting to him so as to free his time for planning and conducting a global war. Three huge new commands were created by Executive Order Number 9082 of 28 February 1942, "Reorganizing the Army and the War Department": the Army Air Forces under Lieutenant General Henry H. Arnold, the Army Ground Forces under Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair and the Services of Supply, under Somervell. As such, he was not only promoted to the rank of lieutenant general over the heads of many more senior officers, but some of them, including Reybold, now found themselves his subordinates. He was answerable to two men: Marshall, and Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson. and also of Life in an article written by Charles J. V. Murphy titled "Somervell of the S.O.S", in the 8 May 1943 issue. According to military historian John D. Millett, who served on Somervell's Army Service Forces staff, Somervell was "impatient, tense, and decisive". Some saw him as an "empire-builder". Millett noted the opinion of an observer that: A 1943 attempt by Somervell to abolish the Technical Services failed amid the furor and panic created by false rumors that he was being considered for the post of chief of staff if Marshall was sent to Europe to command the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. Somervell sometimes pushed extravagant white elephant projects, such as the Canol Road, which he continued long after the strategic imperative behind it had faded. When Somervell's retirement was announced in December 1945, Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson issued a press release that read: ==Later life and legacy==

Somervell retired from the Army on 30 April 1946 and moved to Ocala, Florida. His wife Anna had died in January 1942, and he had married Mrs. Louise Hampton Wartmann, a former student at Belcourt, in March 1943. Somervell accepted an offer to become president of Koppers, a Pittsburgh-based company that mined coal and manufactured and sold coal-based products. Applying the same managerial techniques that he had employed in the Army, he thoroughly reorganized the company, and doubled revenues and tripled profits over the next five years. Somervell suffered a series of health problems in the 1950s. He had an appendectomy in 1953 and a hernia operation in 1954. He suffered a severe heart attack in September 1954 and returned to his home in Ocala to recuperate. In early 1955 he decided to resign as president and withdraw from day-to-day operations. He had a second, fatal heart attack at his home on 13 February 1955. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, not far from his "brain child", the Pentagon. His other great creation, the Army Service Forces, did not survive, being abolished in May 1946. The Washington Post lauded him as "one of the ablest officers the United States Army has produced". General Marshall, speaking in later years, said of him:"“He was one of the most efficient officers I have ever seen ... [he] got things done in Calcutta as fast as he did in the meadows around the Pentagon. Whenever I asked him for something he did it and got it.” Marshall went on to say, “if I went into control in another war, I would start looking for another General Somervell the very first thing I did and so would anybody else who went through that struggle on this side.” The , a US Army Logistics Support Vessel based in Yokohama, Japan that can carry up to of cargo, is named in his honor. ==Orders, decorations and medals==

Below is the ribbon bar of General Brehon B. Somervell: ==Dates of rank==

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