Brehon Burke Somervell (9 May 1892 – 13 February 1955) was a general in the United States Army and Commanding General of the Army Service Forces in World War II. As such he was responsible for the U.S. Army's logistics. Following his death, The Washington Post lauded him as "one of the ablest officers the United States Army has produced".
Somervell graduated near the top of his United States Military Academy class of 1914 and was commissioned in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. During World War I he served with the Pancho Villa Expedition in Mexico and the American Expeditionary Force in France in logistical posts. He was also decorated for gallantry in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.
After the war he served in various engineering assignments. From 1936 to 1940 Somervell was head of the Works Progress Administration in New York City, where he was responsible for a series of Great Depression relief works, including the construction of LaGuardia Airport.
As head of the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps in 1941, Somervell took charge of the construction of a series of camps to house the large numbers of draftees entering the Army. Once again, Somervell was able to deliver vital projects on time. The most enduring of these projects was the Pentagon, which is today one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. From 1942 to 1945, Somervell commanded the Army Service Forces, the logistical arm of the United States Army.
Early life
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. He entered West Point in 1910 and graduated sixth out of the 107 cadets in the class of 1914. Like other high-ranking cadets of the period, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. 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. Reporting to the U.S. Embassy in Paris for volunteer duty, he became an assistant to the military attaché. He took charge of refugee funds and dispensed $1,000,000 to help American citizens to get back home.
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.
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. Somervell got his projects completed by working his men around the clock and deploying every available resource regardless of the cost. For his role, Somervell was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal (DSM), the citation for which reads:
He was promoted to major on 15 August 1917 and lieutenant colonel on 1 October 1918. While visiting some friends at the 89th Division, he volunteered his services to its chief of staff, Colonel John C. H. Lee, who accepted him as a temporary replacement for his Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3,Under the continental staff system adopted by the US Army during World War I, staff functions were numbered: G-1 for personnel; G-2 for intelligence; G-3 for operations; and G-4 for logistics. The Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4 headed the G-4 section of the headquarters. The term G-4 was used to designate both that officer and the section that he headed. See Staff (military) for more details. 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. The citation for the medal reads:
He was one of only nine American officers, including Douglas MacArthur, Barnwell R. Legge, Sereno E. Brett or William J. Donovan, to have been awarded both the DSC and the Army DSM in the First World War. 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, in charge of supply, of the Third Army, and the American Forces in Germany, as it was re-designated on 2 July 1919. There, he met Anna Purnell, the daughter of a Chicago businessman, who was there as a YMCA volunteer. The two were married in August 1919. They had three children together, all daughters. 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.
Returning to the United States in July 1920, Somervell was posted to the Office of the Chief of Engineers in Washington, D.C. His war record earned him a place at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, reserved for the Army's best and most promising officers, from August 1922 to June 1923. He once again ranked near the top of his class. After graduation he was posted to the 1st New York Engineer District but soon obtained leave to assist Hines with a special study of navigation on the Rhine and Danube Rivers on behalf of the League of Nations, essentially a continuation of the work that the two men had done in 1920. He then attended the Army War College from 1925 to 1926.
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 quartermaster responsible for all local problems.