Well, yes and no. Remember, the first Japanese satellite was launched with this:
That's basically an overgrown sounding rocket, not actually a whole long ways beyond what Goddard was playing around with. It didn't even have guidance! They just figured out what direction they needed to point it and...pointed it that way. For that matter, the Vanguard wasn't too much more than that, either. Sure, they had tiny payloads, but they demonstrated the principle, and it became pretty quickly obvious that satellites would be terribly useful if you could only get them into space--that would rapidly induce a lot of effort to build larger launch vehicles to provide more useful payload masses and volumes (as indeed it did IOTL, even if converted IRBMs and ICBMs and derived vehicles dominated for a long while).