Ships
- USS Cushing (DD-376) Captain, 24 September 1941 – 6 October 1942
Christopher Noble was a United States Navy officer, born on 16 June 1899 and a member of the Naval Academy class of 1920. He was promoted to lieutenant commander on 23 June 1938, the rank he held while in command at sea during the first year of the Pacific war. On 28 August 1943 he was advanced to the temporary rank of commander.
On 24 September 1941 he assumed command of the Mahan-class destroyer Cushing (DD-376). The ship had been built at the Puget Sound Navy Yard, laid down on 15 August 1934, launched on 31 December 1935, and commissioned on 28 August 1936. She carried the name of Commander William Barker Cushing. Edwin Thomas Short brought her into commission as her first commanding officer. Jesse Rink Wallace succeeded him, and William Bennett Jackson commanded her from May 1940 until Noble took the bridge.
In the years before the war Cushing worked mostly from San Diego, with periods of training at Pearl Harbor and one cruise to the Caribbean. Noble joined her in the last autumn of that routine. On 7 December 1941 she was undergoing overhaul at the Mare Island Navy Yard in California.
She sailed from San Francisco on 17 December 1941 and escorted shipping between the West Coast and Pearl Harbor until 13 January 1942. From 18 January to 2 February she patrolled for submarines around Midway, and she was back at San Francisco on 19 February. Through the spring and summer she screened Task Force 1, the battleship force training and patrolling off California. On 1 August 1942 she left San Francisco again, trained at Pearl Harbor, and headed for the Solomon Islands as the campaign around Guadalcanal expanded. Noble was still in command during that passage south.
His tour ended on 6 October 1942. Cushing fought later that month at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. On the night of 12–13 November, with Edward Nelson Parker in command, she led an American column into the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, was heavily hit by gunfire south of Savo Island, and sank the next afternoon. Seventy-two of her crew were lost. Noble’s year aboard had carried the destroyer out of a West Coast overhaul, through the early escort and patrol work of the war, and toward the Solomons.