Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [26]
And now they were coming on an inspection tour, these politicians and pencil pushers who were the perennial scourge of field officers. As a career Ordnance man, Medaris did not storm beaches, but he supplied the munitions for those who did. During World War II, he had moved thirty thousand vehicles for General Patton in the North African and Sicilian campaigns, and he had equipped General Omar Bradley’s entire First Army Group for the D-Day invasion. These were impressive logistical feats, but not the stuff of glory that made the newsreels. Still, Medaris managed to win a medal for bravery at Omaha Beach, in addition to numerous other combat citations and awards, and in spirit he identified more with the hard-charging fighting men of old than with the cautious new breed of technocrats taking over the military. Unfortunately for his career, this shared affinity included a disdain for authority and an enduring allergy to regulations.
It wasn’t that Medaris didn’t respect rules. But like Douglas MacArthur and Patton, he simply didn’t think they applied to him, as the Huntsville military police had discovered a few weeks earlier when he roared into his new command in a Jaguar and dressed in golf attire. “Didn’t you see the speed limit sign back there?” the startled MPs demanded.
“What did it say?”
“Forty-five miles an hour and you were going sixty.”
“Son, I’m General Medaris and the speed limit is now sixty.”
It was in this characteristically rebellious manner that Medaris assumed command of the newly created Army Ballistic Missile Agency on February 1, 1956. ABMA had just been founded by administrative fiat in what was essentially a bureaucratic counteroffensive by the army to keep the burgeoning air force in check. The old Army Air Corps, once an insignificant asterisk in the army’s accounting ledgers, had become an unstoppable juggernaut since gaining its independence as a separate service in 1947. In the nuclear age, bombers, not tanks, kept America safe, and it was pilots, not grunts, who were the darlings of politicians and policy makers. John Foster Dulles’s strategic deterrent so strongly favored the young air force that it now swallowed forty-six cents of every military dollar. Its manpower now nearly equaled that of the army, whose budget and personnel had shrunk by half, and air force assets in 1956 exceeded those of the fifty-five largest U.S. civilian corporations combined.
The army was thus fighting a rearguard action to stay relevant in the rapidly shifting military pecking order. The humiliating infantry debacles of the Korean War had not helped its cause, and missiles offered the West Pointers one of the few new areas with potential for expanding their role. Rockets, after all, were natural extensions of artillery. The air force, however, had different ideas, making the case that missiles were nothing more than delivery systems, effectively unmanned bombers, and thus ought to be assigned to the Strategic Air Command. Not to be left out of the squabbling, the navy quickly developed its own distinct missile doctrine and leaped into the fray as well.
An all-out rocket war had erupted among the three services, and it was into this internecine conflict that Medaris was thrust as the army’s point man. Ironically, the very same character traits that rubbed his superiors the wrong way had recommended him for the post. “You are aggressive. Some would say to a fault,” he had been told on winning the ABMA job, hardly a customary endorsement. But right now the army needed someone with his particular talents for this difficult mission.
Medaris reflected on his new assignment as he waited for the big military transport bearing the secretary of defense to arrive from Washington. His own plane, a four-seat