 Roosevelt asked that he produce 8,000,000 tons of shipping during 1942, and gave him enough steel and his choice of shipyards and shipbuilders.Vickery delivered on this order, and by July could declare that more new ships had been produced than had sunk since the attack on Pearl Harbor.Admiral Vickery was responsible for vessel construction programs of the Commission commencing with the early Long Range Program to build 500 new merchant vessels in 10 years and then the much larger Emergency Shipbuilding program of World War II where under his leadership close to 6000 ships were built in only five years for the war effort.