40 Fun Facts About The Pentagon

After overseeing the Pentagon's construction, Leslie Groves took charge of which secret wartime program in 1942?

Manhattan Project command came to him that September, and to avoid suspicion he kept supervising the building while secretly running the effort to make the atomic bomb.

The Pentagon has Washington ZIP Codes, yet the building stands across the river from the capital in which state?

Virginia is its home, in Arlington County, yet the building has six ZIP Codes that all belong to the capital.

The sand used to build the Pentagon, hundreds of thousands of tons of it, was dredged from which nearby river?

Potomac sand went into the building's reinforced frame, and the dredging left a lagoon beside the river entrance.

What happened at the Pentagon's building site on September 11, 1941, exactly 60 years before the 2001 attack?

Ground was broken on the very day the construction contracts were finalized, about three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor added urgency to the job.

During the Cold War, the Soviets reportedly thought which structure in the Pentagon's courtyard hid a bunker entrance?

A hot dog stand drew the suspicion because officers were seen going in and out at the same time each day, and the legend earned it the nickname Cafe Ground Zero.

The Pentagon was built with twice as many restrooms as its workforce needed because of what 1940s state requirement?

Racial segregation was state law, but a presidential order had banned discrimination against federal workers, so it became the one building in the state where those laws were not enforced.

Which president moved the Pentagon's planned site so it would not block the view from Arlington National Cemetery?

Franklin Roosevelt picked another site nearby and kept the five-sided plan, partly because he liked it and partly because a redesign at that stage would have been costly.

In a famous 1967 photograph taken at the Pentagon, a protester places which flowers into soldiers' rifle barrels?

Carnations fill the barrels in Flower Power, a picture Bernie Boston's editor buried deep inside the newspaper before it went on to win photography competitions.

At the 1967 March on the Pentagon, what did activist Abbie Hoffman vow to do to the building using psychic energy?

Levitate it until it turned orange and began to vibrate, he claimed, at which point the war in Vietnam would end.

Why were only about 800 people, rather than the usual 4,500, in the part of the Pentagon struck in 2001?

Renovation work had emptied most of the offices, and the nearly finished job had added steel reinforcement that kept that section standing for 30 minutes while hundreds of people got out.

Which hijacked airliner was flown into the western side of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. on September 11, 2001?

Flight 77 was a Boeing 757 whose crash started a fire that took several days to put out; all 64 people aboard and 125 people inside the building were killed.

The hijacked airliner that struck the Pentagon in 2001 had taken off at 8:20 that morning from which airport?

Dulles International was 31 minutes behind the jet when the hijackers stormed the cockpit and forced the passengers and crew to the rear of the cabin.

The 2001 strike on the Pentagon was the first major foreign attack on the capital area since which conflict?

War of 1812 fighting brought British troops to Washington in 1814, where they burned the White House and other public buildings.

At the Pentagon Memorial, the 184 benches for those killed there in 2001 are arranged in order of what?

The victims' ages run from 3 to 71, and each bench also shows by its direction whether that person died inside the building or aboard the plane.

What name was given to the push to rebuild the Pentagon's wrecked section within a year of the 2001 attack?

Phoenix Project crews beat their deadline, with staff moving back into the rebuilt outer offices on 15 August 2002, nearly a month early.

Which secretary of defense held a press conference inside the damaged Pentagon on the evening of the 2001 attack?

Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the building was still functioning and would be in business the next day.

Which novelist won a Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night, his account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon?

Norman Mailer set out to get himself arrested at the march, then described his night in custody in the third person.

Which radical group set off a bomb in a Pentagon women's restroom in May 1972, on Ho Chi Minh's birthday?

Weather Underground bombers caused flooding that destroyed computer tapes holding classified information, in what the group called retaliation for American raids on Hanoi.

Which former analyst leaked the secret Vietnam War study known as the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971?

Daniel Ellsberg had worked on the study himself, and the charges against him were dismissed after wrongdoing by Nixon White House staff came to light.

Which secretary of defense commissioned the secret Vietnam War history that later became known as the Pentagon Papers?

Robert McNamara set up the task force in June 1967, and its 36 analysts filled 47 volumes that were finished only after he had left office.

To save metal for the war effort, the Pentagon's builders linked its floors with what instead of passenger elevators?

Concrete ramps carried people between floors for decades; until 2011, the lone passenger elevator was reserved for the defense secretary.

Which state supplied the limestone on the Pentagon's outer walls, a stone also used for the Empire State Building?

Indiana limestone faces the building, and another 15,000 cubic feet of it was used to rebuild the section destroyed in 2001.

The Pentagon rose on land once home to what facility, considered one of the most hazardous of its kind in America?

An airfield with short, unpaved runways and a smoking garbage dump nearby operated here until 1941, when the government bought the land for $1 million.

The corridors running through all five floors of the Pentagon add up to roughly what total length?

17.5 miles of corridors and 7,754 windows fill the building, yet ten spoke-like hallways cutting across the rings keep any two points within a few minutes' walk.

With crews working around the clock, roughly how long did it take to build the entire Pentagon during World War II?

16 months was all it took, and office space was so short that the first staff moved in long before the rest of the building was finished.

A diamond exchange in which Indian city took the Pentagon's long-held title of world's largest office building in 2023?

Surat Diamond Bourse, made up of nine interconnected 15-floor towers, was declared the record holder by Guinness World Records in August 2023.

The Hall of Heroes on the Pentagon's main concourse is dedicated to the recipients of which military decoration?

Medal of Honor recipients are listed by name in the hall, which opened in 1968 and displays the Army, Sea Service and Air Force versions of the medal.

The Moscow hotline, whose American end sits in the Pentagon, was never a red telephone; what did it first use?

Teletype machines carried the first messages, encrypted with one-time pads, and test transmissions have included passages from Shakespeare and Chekhov.

Which California architect drew up the Pentagon's design in July 1941 but resigned before the building was finished?

George Bergstrom stepped down in April 1942 after misconduct charges linked to his presidency of the American Institute of Architects, and David Witmer finished the job.

Which Army construction chief gave his designers a single weekend in July 1941 to draw up plans for the Pentagon?

Brehon Somervell asked for a modern four-story building with no elevators, and he is buried in the national cemetery nearby, not far from what was called his brain child.

Contractor John McShain, nicknamed the Man Who Built Washington, built the Pentagon and which monument to a president?

Jefferson Memorial work was among more than 100 capital-area buildings his firm handled, including the reconstruction of the White House from 1949 to 1952.

Which neighborhood of pawnshops, factories and about 150 homes was cleared in the 1940s to make way for the Pentagon?

Hell's Bottom stood around Columbia Pike, and with other purchases the government acquired an extra 287 acres for the building and its grounds.

A fake image of an explosion beside the Pentagon briefly rattled stock markets in May 2023; what was it really?

An AI creation, the picture was debunked by authorities within hours but had already spread widely on social media.

Why was the Pentagon first drawn with five sides?

To fit the original plot at Arlington Farms, which was bordered by roads on five sides; the new site then allowed the lopsided outline to be made regular.

The word pentagon joins the Greek for five with a second Greek word, gonia, which carries what meaning?

Angle or corner is the sense of gonia, so a pentagon is literally five-angled; English has used the word for the shape since the 1560s.

The Pentagon's regular five-sided outline resembles which kind of fortification built during the age of gunpowder?

Star fort designs spread from Italy once cannon had made medieval walls obsolete; the likeness appeared when the building's lopsided first plan was made regular.

Which former Navy secretary became the first secretary of defense in 1947, taking the top civilian post at the Pentagon?

James Forrestal had tried to weaken the proposed department for the Navy's benefit and was then hard-pressed to run it; an aircraft carrier was later named for him.

Which newspaper began publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers on its front page on June 13, 1971?

The New York Times ran the first article, and the attorney general then sought an injunction to stop the paper from publishing any more.

The hijacked airliner flown into the Pentagon in 2001 had been scheduled to land in which West Coast city?

Los Angeles was also the destination of both airliners that were flown into the World Trade Center the same morning.

Which airline operated the hijacked Boeing 757 that was flown into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001?

American Airlines also operated one of the two jets flown into the World Trade Center that morning; the other two hijacked planes belonged to United.