John H. Sides

Admiral John Harold Sides (April 22, 1904 – April 3, 1978) was a four-star admiral in the United States Navy who served as commander in chief of the United States Pacific Fleet from 1960 to 1963 and was known as the father of the Navy's guided-missile program.

Born in Roslyn, Washington to George Kelley Sides and Estella May Bell, he attended primary and secondary schools in Roslyn, then studied for one year at the University of Washington before being appointed to the United States Naval Academy, from which he graduated ninth in a class of 448 in 1925.

Commissioned ensign, he served four years aboard the battleship Tennessee before being dispatched to the Asiatic Station with the destroyer John D. Edwards to participate in the Yangtze River Patrol.

He returned to the United States in June 1931 to study naval ordnance at the Naval Postgraduate School in Annapolis, Maryland, beginning a long career in that field.

He completed the ordnance course at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1934, and in May began two years as assistant fire control officer aboard the light cruiser Cincinnati.

He served as flag lieutenant on the staff of a battleship division commander from 1936 to 1937, then spent two years in the ammunition section of the Bureau of Ordnance.

In July 1939, he assumed command of the destroyer Tracy, which was assigned to Mine Division 1 and operated out of Pearl Harbor with the Battle Force.

He commanded Tracy until November 1940, then reported aboard the light cruiser Savannah as gunnery officer.

Following the United States entry into World War II, he returned to the Bureau of Ordnance in March 1942 to serve as chief of the ammunition and explosives section, where his work in research and development was instrumental in creating fuses and explosives and devising new formulae.

At the Bureau of Ordnance, Sides nurtured a number of early rocket projects, often against high-level institutional opposition.

One notable success was the High Velocity Aircraft Rocket (HVAR), a 5-inch air-to-ground rocket that was used in Europe against trucks and tanks and was being produced at the rate of 40,000 per day by the end of the war.

"He was a real pioneer of the Navy rocket programs," recalled Thomas F. Dixon, HVAR project officer under Sides' supervision and later chief designer of the engines for the Atlas, Thor, Jupiter, Redstone, and Saturn rockets.

"All the way through it was a fight with the admirals. Caltech's professor of physics, Dr. Charles Lauritsen, had developed a barrage rocket - ideal for landings to clean up the banks. When we brought this to the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, however, his general reaction was, 'Don't put rockets on my battleships, cruisers, or destroyers.'"

Sides returned to sea in October 1944 in command of Mine Division 8 for combat duty in the Pacific theater, where the Navy credited him with "contributing materially to the success of the Okinawa invasion."

In April 1945, he became commander of Destroyer Squadron 47, and remained in that command until the end of the war.

After the war, he was assigned as assistant chief of staff for operations and training on the staff of the commander of battleships and cruisers in the Atlantic Fleet.

In September 1947 he reported for instruction at the National War College in Washington, D.C.

In June 1948, he began two years as deputy to the assistant chief of naval operations for guided missiles, Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery.

Over the next decade, he would build a reputation for missile expertise and eventually become known as the father of the Navy's guided-missile program.

As deputy assistant chief of naval operations for guided missiles, Sides risked his career by participating in the Revolt of the Admirals, an episode of civil-military conflict in which high-ranking Navy officials publicly clashed with their Air Force counterparts and civilian superiors over the future of the United States military.

Testifying as a guided-missile expert before the House Armed Services Committee on October 11, 1949, Sides warned that the Air Force's B-36 strategic bomber would not be able to penetrate Russian defenses to deliver its nuclear payload as claimed, since the United States already possessed supersonic guided missiles that would "seek out and destroy the really fast jet bombers now on the drawing boards"

and the Russians had likely inherited a similar capability from the German Wasserfall missile development program and personnel they had captured at the end of World War II.

When Sides became eligible for early promotion to rear admiral a month later, the selection board was perceived to be stacked against captains who had participated in the Revolt because it included none of the top admirals involved in the controversy.

Passed over as expected, in 1950 he took command of the heavy cruiser Albany for a twelve-month tour in the Atlantic Fleet.

Sides had hoped to captain the first guided-missile cruiser, which the Navy had expected to put in operation by that year, but its development schedule had slipped due to problems with the sound barrier.

In 1951, Sides became head of the technical section in the office of the director of guided missiles in the Department of Defense, K.T. Keller, the former president and chairman of the board of the Chrysler Corporation who had been appointed "missile czar" in October 1950 with a mandate to unify the independent service missile programs.

Keller ordered the services to shift from experimentation to production on five missile projects: the Army's Nike; the Air Force's Matador; and the Navy's Terrier, Sparrow, and Regulus.

As Keller's Navy deputy, Sides was responsible for producing all three Navy missiles, and was credited with being, "as much as any man, the father of the Regulus cruise missile."

"He was the real 'thinking' admiral in the guided missile field, and an outstanding man," recalled Regulus project manager Robert F. Freitag.

Sides was promoted to rear admiral in 1952 as director of the guided-missile division in the office of the chief of naval operations.

In that role, he directed the Navy's entire guided-missile program for almost four years, and played an influential and initially adversarial role in the development of the Polaris fleet ballistic missile (FBM).

As top missile advisor to the chief of naval operations, Admiral Robert B. Carney, Sides convinced Carney to veto several early FBM proposals, including a 1952 bid by Freitag and other Navy officers for a weaponized version of the Viking rocket, whose launch from the rolling deck of a ship had already been demonstrated.

Since the FBM would have to be funded internally by siphoning funds from existing Navy programs, Carney and Sides both judged that the research costs associated with the FBM were too open-ended to justify sacrificing present combat capability for an unproven future capability.

In 1954, Freitag and his colleagues at the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) again tried to engage the Navy in FBM development by funneling their research to a secret study committee chaired by Massachusetts Institute of Technology president James R. Killian.

The Killian Committee had a charter to unify the ballistic missile programs scattered among the services, and enthusiastically recommended that the Navy develop a fleet-based intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM).

This external endorsement by a distinguished independent evaluator persuaded the chief of BuAir, Rear Admiral James S. Russell, to fully commit the bureau to FBM development.

However, there was no guarantee that any amount of manpower or money could create the components required for a viable FBM system, which still lacked accurate systems for guidance, fire control, and navigation; adequate metals and materials for fabrication; a compact nuclear warhead with sufficient yield; and a solid rocket propellant to replace liquid fuels that were too dangerous to be used at sea.

"There wasn't even a concept as to a launching system," recalled Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, Carney's successor as chief of naval operations.

On Sides' advice, Carney again concluded that a full-fledged FBM program remained premature, and in July directed BuAer to discontinue all efforts to expand FBM development.

The first guided-missile cruiser would not become operational until 1955.