INGRID DOWS - AN ALTERNATE STORY PART 3 - THE SPACE AGE by Michel Poulin - HTML preview

CHAPTER 5 – A BURSTING PRODUCTION ORDERS BOOK

14:12 (California Time)

Tuesday, December 19, 1950 ‘C’

Hughes Enterprises headquarters, 7000 Romaine Street

Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

‘’EH EH, OUR VACATIONER IS BACK, IN TIME TO START THE CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR HOLYDAY PERIOD!’’

Ingrid, who had just walked into the ‘Triumvirate Office’ at Hughes Enterprises headquarters, gave a playful one-finger salute to Katharine Hepburn while going to her work desk.

‘’Very funny, Kate!’’

‘’So, how was your trip to Indochina, Ingrid?’’ asked Hedy Lamarr.

‘’Both fruitful and eventful, Hedy. Hien was able to pray on her family’s grave and I also found the old grave of my 18th Century incarnation as Tran Qui Khiem. We also found the site of where the old Tran family home was but its lot was still empty of buildings, so I decided to buy that lot, which covers 5.4 hectares. After the New Year period, I will go back to Gia Rai to initiate the construction of a new Tran family house on that lot, a house that will be in Hien’s name.’’

‘’You said that your trip was eventful, Ingrid. How so?’’ asked Katharine Hepburn.

‘’Well, I found out that the threat from marauding Japanese soldiers who still refuse to surrender is a very real one. The bus that was bringing me and Hien to Gia Rai was ambushed by six Japanese soldiers and our driver was killed. I however was able to kill all six of them with my pistol. When I made a two-day stop in the Philippines on my way back, I was told that, while many of the remaining Japanese soldiers have been killed since 1944, there are still significant pockets of Japanese diehards remaining around the jungles of the country. Our army really should make a special effort to eliminate those bastards for good, by sending a few extra infantry divisions on a temporary basis, in order to sweep up those Japanese. Thankfully, my two ex-maids and their families are still safe and I used my visit to buy them new houses in Manila.’’ Hedy Lamarr slowly nodded her head in approval at those words.

‘’What I especially like in you is your caring about others, Ingrid. You are the perfect anti-thesis image of a greedy billionaire.’’

‘’Talking of greedy billionaires, how about giving all our employees a nice Christmas bonus? We owe our success to their hard work and dedication. I was thinking that a hundred-dollar bonus to each workshop or office employee would be warranted, while our engineers, lab technicians, shop managers and executives would get a 200-dollar bonus. I believe that we can easily afford to give such bonuses, while they will boost the motivation and morale of our employees. So, what do you think?’’

‘’I wholly agree with your idea, Ingrid.’’ answered Katharine. Hedy also agreed with that proposal but also raised a point about a growing problem.

‘’Talking of success, the exploding popularity for Hughes Aircraft’s airplanes has resulted in a significant backlog in our production orders book. Our assembly lines are presently working full tilt but we are still falling behind in our aircraft deliveries.’’

‘’What about the production licenses we gave to Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, Convair and McDonnell to build more F-9s and B-12s for the Air Force? Can’t they help fill our military orders? They make fair money with those licensed production contracts.’’

‘’They do, but their own design teams are growing restless and are pushing their executives into concentrating on their own designs. They also are now refusing to produce our planes destined to commercial customers. As a result, we are now alone in producing our AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2 airliners and our delivery list to airline companies is starting to grow up. Our problem, if we want to fix that production shortage, is that building new aircraft assembly lines would take many months and cost us a fortune. Do you have an idea on how to take care of that problem, Ingrid?’’ Ingrid was thoughtful for a moment as she analyzed the problem exposed by Hedy.

‘’I agree with you that building new aircraft plants and tooling them up would be both time-consuming and very costly. The only realistic solution for this would be to boost our production efficiency at our present factories.’’

‘’How? Our workers are already giving the best they can.’’

‘’By doing like what our industries did during the war: let’s go for multiple work shifts by hiring more workers and technicians. We would still need a couple of months to teach them our production methods and products but it would be much faster than building new plants. By hiring experienced aircraft industry workers who were let go by other companies or who just retired, we would significantly accelerate their training programs. I understand that many of those workers would balk at working on night or weekend shifts, mentioning their need for ‘quality’ family time, but I believe that I could come up with new, imaginative work schedules which would be amenable to them. I will start right away on working on such new 24/7 production schedules. In the meantime, if you and Katharine could arrange for a speedy distribution of the Christmas bonuses we just discussed, that would help me a lot.’’

‘’We certainly can do that, Ingrid. Those bonuses could significantly raise the motivation and happiness of our workers.’’

‘’Good! One last point for you, girls: my long trip to Indochina and back showed me the crying need for a faster way to travel across the Pacific. My two-day trip just to return here from Vietnam was a real killer on my back. I am thus going to think about a commercially-viable design for a supersonic airliner.’’

‘’WHAT?!’’ exclaimed Katharine. ‘’We already are behind our aircraft delivery schedules and you want to design and produce yet another new aircraft? Are you nuts?’’

‘’No, I am simply recognizing a big hole which exists in the air transport industry today: that for a fast trans-Pacific airliner. I however believe that I can design something quite quickly, by using our B-12 as a basis for that supersonic airliner.’’

‘’Very well, Ingrid.’’ said Katharine, not entirely convinced. ‘’But creating more production teams should still be our top priority right now.’’

‘’I agree, Kate. Well, time to get to work, girls.’’

‘’Said the one fresh from a two-week vacation period.’’ sneakily replied Hedy. What she, Katharine and Ingrid didn’t know yet was that a big brick was about to fall on their heads.

10:50 (Washington Time)

Wednesday, January 17, 1951 ‘C’

Office of the Secretary of the Navy

The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia

When Ingrid was introduced into Chester Nimitz’ office at the Pentagon, she saw that Admiral Louis Denfeld, the Chief of the Naval Operations, was present, along with Rear Admiral Roger Stenwick, the head of the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, Rear Admiral Earle Mills, in charge of the Bureau of Ships, and Rear Admiral Charles Momsen, the director of the Navy’s David W. Taylor model basin complex in Carderock, Maryland. She knew then that she had not been asked to come to the Pentagon just to have tea. Nimitz, along with his admirals, shook hands with her before inviting her to sit with them around his low coffee table. Nimitz eyed her for a moment, appearing most serious, before starting to speak.

‘’General Dows, as you can surmise by the men present here this morning, the Navy has again a great need of your services and those of Hughes Aircraft. The results of the live test firing of both your missile systems and of your radars and Ship Point Defense System have been analyzed in depth and the findings have convinced us that your new systems would be essential elements for the modernization of our ships. As you know too well, President Truman’s disastrous defense expenditures and policies greatly weakened the U.S. Navy before he could be elected out of office two years ago. Unfortunately, repairing the damage he did and restoring our fleet to acceptable combat levels will take a lot of time, on top of costing a lot in terms of defense budgets. The Air Force has been able to benefit from your talents at designing new combat aircraft and is now in a reasonably decent shape, so we think that it is time for the Navy to fully profit from your expertise.’’

‘’Am I here to discuss the production rate of the navalised variant of my F-9 fighter-bomber? If so, then I must say that my aircraft plants are presently working at maximum, one-shift capacity, to satisfy the demands for my various Hughes aircraft. I have thus started a recruiting campaign to hire more aeronautical production workers, in order to form a second and, possibly, a third production shift at my assembly plants, but that will take a couple of months before it would affect my production capability.’’

‘’You have that many orders on your books, General?’’

‘’Please, simply call me simply ‘Ingrid’, Mister Secretary. Yes, Hughes Aircraft indeed has a full orders book right now, for my F-9 fighter, my B-12 bomber, my CH-4 transport helicopter and my AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2 VSTOL2 airliners. And I am not even talking about the Air Force massive orders for my air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. In the case of my AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2, the orders from various commercial airlines for them are still outpacing my present production capacity for those two types of airliners, thus my intention to expand my workforce to multiple production work shifts.’’ Rear Admiral Stenwick wriggled his right hand on hearing that.

2 VSTOL : Vertical and Short TakeOff and Landing.

‘’Wow! Many aircraft builders would love to have your problems of overflowing orders books.’’

‘’Then, I would tell those builders to get off their asses and to start producing truly innovative designs, instead of clinging to outdated ideas, Admiral. So, for what reasons exactly is the Navy in need of my talents this time, gentlemen?’’

‘’Basically, we want to retrofit many of our existing, World War 2 Era warships with your missile and radar systems, to make them competitive again in the face of our potential enemies. Your innovative VLS system, being highly modular, would be particularly well suited to retrofit our warships, along with your Ship Point Defense System.’’

‘’And how many warships would you want to have retrofitted with my missiles and radars, gentlemen?’’

‘’Twelve aircraft carriers, six battleships, 24 heavy cruisers, 36 light cruisers, 98 destroyers and 55 other, lesser vessels. That is not counting our new carrier, the UNITED STATES, which has just started to be built and which will incorporate from the start your new missiles and radars.’’ answered matter-of-factly Rear Admiral Mills, of the Bureau of Ships, making Ingrid swallow hard.

‘’A total of 231 ships and boats to be retrofitted? That represents a huge amount of new systems and modification work, gentlemen. Is the Congress even ready to fund such an expensive project?’’

‘’I intend to present our fleet modernization project to the Congress as soon as we will have calculated what it would cost in total.’’ answered Chester Nimitz. ‘’However, President Dewey is backing it to the full and, with the continued threat from the Soviet Union weighing on us despite Stalin’s death, we are confident that the Congress will swallow that big pill. The question is: can Hughes produce in a timely manner that quantity of missile and radar systems?’’

‘’I believe that I will be able to deliver those numbers once my second production shift will be activated, Mister Secretary. Uh, is any other builder involved in this modernization project?’’

‘’None, except for the shipyards which will be involved in the actual retrofitting work, Ingrid. The other aeronautical and naval armament firms in the country basically had nothing of real value to offer us in this project, as Hughes is miles ahead of everybody else in terms of high-technology weapons systems.’’

‘’Do you at least have a precise idea of what you want to have retrofitted to each of the various classes of warships involved in this project, Mister Secretary?’’

‘’You are here today with us so that we could take decisions on that precise matter, Ingrid. We hope that your sharp military and strategic mind will help to counsel us on what would be the best solution for each class of ship.’’ Ingrid let out some air, impressed by the degree to which all those admirals were ready to trust her on such a big and important Navy project.

‘’Very well, gentlemen: fire away!’’

When Ingrid returned to the Hughes Mansion three days later, on Saturday afternoon, Hedy Lamarr eyed her with some concern after opening the front door for her.

‘’Why did they need you for this long at the Pentagon, Ingrid? Did they pester you about our delays in delivering aircraft?’’

‘’No! Instead, the Navy piled up more potential orders for us in the near future. I spent those days in Washington discussing the details on how to retrofit 231 combat ships with our new VLS, SPDS and radar systems.’’

‘’TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE WARSHIPS TO BE RETROFITTED? And what would be the estimated value of such a huge contract?’’

‘’Oh, just a little over six billion dollars, spread over three years.’’

‘’SIX BILLION DOLLARS?!’’ exclaimed Katharine Hepburn, who had just run to join Hedy Lamarr at the entrance. That made Ingrid grin in amusement.

‘’I am sure that the Congress will react with the same kind of passion when the Navy will present it with its fleet modernization project.

‘’Who else is in competition for that contract, Ingrid?’’

‘’Nobody! We will be an exclusive provider for that project, along with a number of shipyards which will be doing the retrofitting work. Nobody else has anything equaling our VLS systems and radars.’’

‘’Geez! The likes of General Dynamics and Raytheon could well declare us as ‘Enemy Number One’ when they will learn about this contract project.’’

‘’Tough! It was up to them to produce something worthy of the attention of the Navy. Besides, we have our private security firm to protect us, don’t we?’’