John Bruce Medaris


John Bruce Medaris was an American officer in the United States Army a government administrator, and an Anglican priest.
During World War II Medaris was a colonel in the ordnance corps of the First Army, participating in the North Africa campaign, the Invasion of Sicily, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the invasion of Germany.
In 1955 Medaris assumed command of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Under his supervision, Wernher von Braun and the German Rocket Team developed the Jupiter missile in 1958.
After the Defense department removed responsibilities for long-range ballistic missiles from the Army, Medaris retired and wrote a critical memoir.
Several years after retirement, Medaris was ordained as an Anglican priest.

Early life

John Bruce Medaris was born in Milford, Ohio on 12 May 1902 to William Roudebush Medaris, a lawyer of Basque ancestry, and Jessie LeSourd Medaris, a school teacher and accountant. His parents divorced when he was four, leaving mother and son in impoverished circumstances.
Medaris Bruce was partly raised by his maternal grandmother, who encouraged him to be ambitious and independent from an early age. He began working at age 9 as a paper boy. Medaris later became a lamplighter, mail handler for the railroad, trolley conductor, and taxi driver, all the while attending school full-time.
Medaris joined a junior military organization and practiced daily on the rifle range. In his memoir he described his lifelong fascination with weapons.

First military career

In World War I, Medaris enlisted in the US Marine Corps, claiming to be over 18 when he was really just 16. Serving as a rifleman, he was deployed to France, but never saw combat. Medaris mustered out in August 1919.
Medaris entered Ohio Statue University to study mechanical and electrical engineering. While at Ohio State, he met his first wife. Medaris soon joined the Ohio National Guard. After winning an army commission in a nationwide contest, he was sworn in as a Second Lieutenant in the regular army in September 1921.
Medaris served with the 29th Infantry regiment at Fort Benning, Georgia, until 1924 when he was transferred to the 33rd regiment based in what was then the Panama Canal Zone While in Panama, Medaris learned Spanish and became an equestrian. In 1927 he won approval for a transfer to the Ordnance corps.

Civilian interlude

Soon after his last transfer, Medaris left the Army to work for a General Motors Export Corporation dealership in Colombia.. NOTE #2. He and his wife spent 18 months there, then returned to the United States.
After the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Medaris was ruined financially and got divorced. In 1930, he remarried and started working in management at the Kroger Corporation, He eventually bought an automobile dealership, but it failed 1938. Still an Army Reserve officer, Medaris then applied to return to active duty. NOTE #3

World War II

Medaris won appointment as Captain in the Ordnance Corps on 11 July 1939, and worked for three years with regional industries to facilitate U.S. rearmament. Following Pearl Harbor attack, he fought for deployment to a war zone, "by making myself thoroughly obnoxious." In December 1942, Medaris sailed for North Africa in December 1942 to support the II Army Corps from a base in Algiers.
After the Battle of Kasserine Pass, now Colonel Medaris led the effort to secure emergency resupply while his ordnance teams worked to repair tanks and guns. General Omar Bradley personally commended him. Following the invasion of Sicily, during which Medaris served under General George S. Patton, he was summoned to England. Bradley was preparing First Army for the Normandy invasion and wanted Medaris as his Chief of Ordnance.
Medaris landed on Omaha Beach on 7 June 1944. During the battle of Normandy he dealt with an exploding ammunition dump and severe shortages after a storm destroyed the Mulberry pier constructed off Omaha Beach. Medaris also dealt with the vulnerability of American tanks to German fire while attempting to scale the dense hedgerows in Normandy. A sergeant suggested welding sharp "tusks" to the tanks that could cut through hedges. Medaris estimated his crews would need 500 tons of welding rod to outfit the armored divisions and persuaded the general and Pentagon to supply them.
During his time in Europe, Medaris and his unit narrowly missed being hit by an off-course V-2 rocket. Finally, Medaris was responsible for selecting the location for the main ordnance dump that supplied the Allied assault across the Rhine River into Germany.
Medaris received a Distinguished Service Medal for his service in the European Theater of Operations.

Post war

From 1949 to 1952, Medaris served as military attaché in Argentina.
Medaris returned to the Pentagon just in time to address the shortfall in the provision of ammunition to the U.S. forces bogged down in the Korean War. His service during that emergency earned him promotion to Brigadier General.
After the Korean armistice in July 1953 Medaris turned his attention to the newest category of ordnance – guided missiles – only to be frustrated that the Army seemed to be losing out to the other services. He was contemplating retirement a third time when the Army gave him a second star and asked him to take command of the 1,600 scientists and engineers at the Redstone Arsenal effective 1 February 1956. NOTE #4

Army ballistic missile command

Medaris proved to be an excellent choice. Throughout his military and civilian careers he had displayed an irascible, feisty streak that often earned him the enmity of rivals. During World War II, for instance, he had been rejected for promotion to general three times. He also had an imperious streak. He sported a dashing mustache, wore impeccably pressed uniforms and spit shined boots, and carried a quirt – a short horse whip – which he would slap for emphasis while speaking his mind. He did not suffer fools gladly, but he never broke discipline, and by all accounts was an extraordinary manager who knew how to get the most out of people. He and Wernher von Braun became close friends during their years at Huntsville. NOTE #5
The scientists and engineers of the German Rocket Team had been drafted by the Nazi regime to develop large rockets as "vengeance weapons." Their crowning achievement, the V-2, was the world's first medium range ballistic missile. But the real motivation for von Braun and the others was spaceflight. At the end of the war most of the Germans fled westward to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets. The U.S. Army's Operation Paperclip was established for precisely this purpose. By 1946 the Army had reassembled the team at Fort Bliss, Texas, to test V-2s at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. They were relocated to Huntsville in 1950 and put to work on a surface-to-surface missile called the Redstone. But missiles as weapons, let alone spaceflight, were not a priority for the U.S. military because American bombers could readily threaten the U.S.S.R. with nuclear destruction from bases in Europe and Asia. The Soviets, by contrast, could threaten the United States only by developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Hence they placed a high priority on rocketry and made rapid progress. By the mid-1950s the Pentagon approved programs to develop two intermediate range ballistic missiles, the Air Force's Thor and the Army's Jupiter, a 58 foot tall variant of the Redstone missile. Meanwhile, an entirely different but intimately related train of events had begun to play out in the sphere of international scientific cooperation. The nations declared July 1957 to December 1958 an International Geophysical Year and one of the projects proposed was the launch of artificial satellites into earth orbit. The Eisenhower administration insisted that the project be exclusively scientific and assigned it to a small civilian program called Vanguard. Indeed, the Pentagon gave Medaris explicit orders not to launch a satellite, whether accidentally or on purpose, with his military rockets. Finally, the Eisenhower administration had a top-secret ulterior motive for not using military missiles in a space program or even launching a satellite prior to the Soviets. The Air Force and CIA were hard at work on the Corona Program, also known as Discoverer and WS-117L, the goal of which was to develop reconnaissance satellites able to spy on the Soviet Union and verify hoped-for arms control treaties. The White House feared that if the United States launched first, the Soviets would protest the violation of their air space, whereas the best way to establish "freedom of space" was to let the Soviets launch first. NOTE #6
In 1956 Medaris and von Braun had formally proposed launching seven satellites during 1957-58 only to be expressly forbidden. That became especially vexing after the first successful test of the Jupiter covered 3,350 miles on 17 September 1956. Tests continued the following year until 8 August 1957, when a Jupiter C missile launched a nose cone which could easily have been propelled into orbit by a small upper-stage rocket had the Army received a green light. Nevertheless, a big milestone was reached that day because the nose cone re-entered the atmosphere and was recovered intact, thereby demonstrating that the Army team's ablative heat shield was effective. Meanwhile, the Soviets had tested an ICBM in August and promised to launch a satellite very soon.
A distinguished delegation including Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy was visiting Redstone Arsenal on 4 October when news flashed that the Russians had launched a satellite called Sputnik 1. As Medaris recalled, von Braun's frustration poured forth in a torrent of words: "We knew they were going to do it! Vanguard will never make it. We have the hardware on the shelf. For God’s sake turn us loose and let us do something. We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. McElroy." Medaris cautiously interjected, "No, Wernher, ninety days." Sputnik proved to be a sensational Soviet propaganda feat, while a riot of recrimination, self-doubt, and fear spread throughout the United States and NATO during the weeks and months that followed. On 3 November the Soviets launched Sputnik 2 with a payload of 1,100 pounds, proving they now had the capability to visit nuclear destruction on North America. Senator Lyndon Johnson presided over sensational hearings to inquire how it was the United States was losing the "space race" to the clod-hopping Russians. The Pentagon, under intense pressure, at last gave Medaris authorization to prepare, but still not execute, a satellite launch.
The Vanguard's rocket blew up on the pad on 6 December and Americans were humiliated anew. But for the Eisenhower administration there was a silver lining: the fact that the Soviets had launched satellites first meant the legality of satellite overflight was established. So the Pentagon finally gave Medaris a green light to launch with a military rocket. The Huntsville team assembled the Juno launch system, which was a Redstone with small upper stages, at Cape Canaveral only to be thwarted by high winds until the evening of 31 January 1958, when the countdown was completed and the rocket arced perfectly into the night. But the terrible tension felt by Medaris, von Braun, launch director Kurt Debus, and the rest of their team dragged on for ninety more minutes until confirmation came from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's radar station in California that Explorer 1, America's first satellite, was transmitting from orbit. NOTE #7
The national panic sparked by the Sputniks should have been the best thing that could have happened for the Rocket Team. Medaris himself became head of the Army Ordnance Missile Command on 31 March 1958, with full authority over the ABMA, White Sands Missile Range, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Cape Canaveral Firing Range, and responsibility for all Army programs in missiles and space. During 1958 and 1959 the latter including more Explorer satellites and a series of Pioneer lunar probes. The Army's space launches enabled scientists to make significant discoveries beginning with the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the earth. Looking ahead to human spaceflight the Rocket Team launched and recovered two primates. In May 1961 a Mercury Redstone rocket launched the first astronaut Alan B. Shepherd on his suborbital flight. As early as December 1957 von Braun had drafted – and Medaris promoted – a visionary space program that called for a soft lunar landing by 1960, a two-man satellite by 1962, Saturn rockets capable of boosting ten tons into orbit by 1963, an orbiting space station by 1965, a three-man expedition to the moon by 1967, and a permanent manned lunar base by 1971. That inspired an even more elaborate Army plan called Project Horizon in June 1959.
Sputnik sparked a free-for-all among all the military branches, civilian bureaucracies, corporations, and universities about how to organize a gigantic effort to promote missiles and space technology swiftly and in ways that served several national interests. Medaris testified before Congress, in public appearances, and through the military chain of command. He advocated tirelessly in favor of keeping the ABMA team intact within a single, unified military and civilian space program so as to minimize redundancy, bureaucracy, and waste. But he and the Army lost out. The Eisenhower administration took counsel from the President's Science Advisory Committee, the National Science Foundation, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the Pentagon, and influential Senators led by Lyndon Johnson, and chose instead to divide the space program between military and civilian agencies and among the armed services. Its decisions on roles and missions restricted the Army to short-range rockets and gave the incipient ICBM programs such as Atlas, Titan, and Polaris to the Air Force and Navy. In July 1958 Congress created a new agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and gave it responsibility for all scientific programs and non-military launch vehicles. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was transferred to the NASA in December 1958, the German Rocket Team in 1959, and Redstone Arsenal in 1960, which became the NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. Medaris's consolation prize was to be a third star and a desk job in the Pentagon. Instead, he retired from the Army on 31 January 1960, two years to the day after the launch of Explorer 1, and wrote a plaintive, piercing memoir called Countdown for Decision. NOTE #8

Personal life and calling to the priesthood

He married Gwendolyn Hunter in 1920, who gave birth to a daughter they named Marilyn the marriage ended in 1930. He remarried a year later to Virginia Rose Smith by whom he eventually had two children, Marta Virginia and John Bruce Jr. After retirement from the Army, Medaris worked briefly in Washington and New York before moving to Maitland, Florida, where he became an active parishioner in the Church of the Good Shepherd. He studied theology, and was ordained a deacon in 1969 and priest in 1970. NOTE #9

Awards