Howard L. Vickery was an American naval officer and director of merchant marine shipbuilding during World War II.
Background
Howard L. Vickery was born on April 20, 1892, in Bellevue, Ohio. He was the second son and youngest of three children of Willis Vickery and Anna Louise (Schneider) Vickery.
His paternal grandparents had come to the United States from England in 1857. His father, a lawyer, moved in 1896 to Cleveland, where he became a county and later a state judge; he was also a noted book collector and Shakespearean authority.
Education
Howard Vickery attended public schools in Cleveland and in 1911, entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, from which he graduated, B. S. , in 1915.
After the war, Vickery was transferred to naval construction and assigned to a course of study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received an M. S. degree in naval architecture in 1921.
Career
Commissioned an ensign, Vickery was assigned to the cruiser Charleston. Four years at the Boston Navy Yard followed, as superintendent of new construction, docking superintendent, and outside superintendent. From 1925 to 1928, on special assignment, he assisted the government of Haiti as director of its Shop, Supply, and Transportation Division. After a year with the navy's, Bureau of Construction and Repair in Washington, Vickery served as technical adviser on shipping to the Governor General of the Philippines, 1929-1933.
In this capacity, he observed the building of Philippine ships in German yards and was the sole American to witness the launching of the German warship Deutschland. He returned to the Bureau of Construction and Repair in 1934 as head of the War Plans Section of the Design Branch (ships). At the same time, he attended the Army Industrial College. When the ocean liner Morro Castle burned off the New Jersey coast in 1934 with the loss of 125 lives, Vickery was assigned to a board of investigation. The board's report substantially upgraded shipping safety by recommending measures that were subsequently put into law, among them asbestos insulation and automatic fire-sealing doors.
In 1937, Vickery, now a commander, left the Bureau of Construction and Repair to assist its former head, Rear Admiral Emory S. Land, on the newly constituted United States Maritime Commission. With Land's promotion to chairman in 1938, Vickery assumed responsibility for the supervision of all shipbuilding, design, and construction under a ten-year program to rehabilitate the American merchant marine. Vickery's position was given further authority in 1940 with his appointment (which because he was a naval officer required special legislation) to membership on the Commission.
Two years later, he was promoted to rear admiral and made vice-chairman of the Maritime Commission and deputy administrator of the War Shipping Administration the wartime "czar" of American maritime construction, and responsible as well for charting the means by which the nation could maintain its merchant shipping growth after the war. For his extraordinary feat in producing unparalleled amounts of merchant tonnage in record time during World War II, Vickery has been called the "miracle man" of the wartime shipping industry.
Applying the lessons of World War I, shipbuilding and his own unique and advanced construction notions, he transformed the moribund American shipbuilding industry of the late 1930's into the world's fastest, most efficient, and foremost producer of vessels. His innovations included the geographic dispersion of shipyards and the adoption and perfection of new methods of assemblage.
Standardized designs permitted the simultaneous production of the same type of ship in widely scattered yards. They also made possible the multiple production of parts by various manufacturers to ensure a constant flow of supplies. Some of the parts were preassembled; this meant that less actual ship "building" occurred on the ways, thus greatly reducing the time lag from keel laying to launching. When, furthermore, it became apparent that too few established shipbuilders were equipped to carry out these new techniques, Vickery instituted the unprecedented practice of letting contracts to construction firms, like that of Henry J. Kaiser, without previous shipbuilding experience.
Vickery's acknowledged mastery of the technical aspects of ship construction was complemented by shrewd administrative capacity. He increased production through planned competition, incentive contracts, and constant personal on-site inspections of actual work. All told, by 1945, he had reduced the traditional time for completion of ships by 75 percent. Under Vickery's supervision, seventy shipyards produced 39, 920, 000 gross tons of vessels between 1939 and 1945, including the famous Liberty and Victory ships. The latter Vickery considered essential to the development and maintenance of America's postwar commercial trades. Vickery's hard-driving effort took a personal toll.
After suffering a severe heart attack in September 1944, he was forced to work on a reduced schedule the last months of the war, and in December 1945, he resigned with the rank of vice admiral. Still active, he was in the process of organizing a private tanker ship company when, in March 1946, he suffered a second and fatal coronary attack in Palm Springs, California, at the age of fifty-three. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Achievements
Religion
Vickery was a Congregationalist in religion.
Personality
Powerfully built, five feet ten inches tall and weighing 210 pounds, Vickery had enormous vitality on and off the job. Blunt, often tactless, disposed to go through to desired objectives directly rather than circuitously, he was at the same time a warm and earthy man, and his social conviviality enhanced his relationship with the shipping industry.
Connections
While his ship was engaged in transport duty out of Boston during World War I, Vickery met and married a Boston girl, Marguerite Blanchard, on April 9, 1917. They had two children, Hugh Blanchard and Barbara Willis.