Ships
- USS Missouri (BB-63) Commander, 23 January 1948 – 24 February 1948
John Barr Colwell was born in Pawnee City, Nebraska, on 26 November 1909. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1931 and joined the battleship Maryland. He next served on the Battle Force staff in California, then in the old flush-deck destroyers Rathburne and Aaron Ward.
Ordnance became his line of work. After postgraduate study in ordnance engineering he served in the battleship Idaho from 1939 to 1942. In 1942 he was a gunnery officer on the staff of the South Pacific Force under William Frederick Halsey, Jr.. A lieutenant since 1938, he was advanced to lieutenant commander in June 1942 and to commander that November.
On 20 January 1944 he took command of the destroyer Converse and remained in her until 27 September 1944. She operated with Destroyer Squadron 23, the Little Beavers, on raids that reached toward Truk. He then spent a long tour at the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren, still in ordnance.
He came to Missouri (BB-63) as executive officer. On 23 January 1948, as a commander, he assumed command in succession to Robert L. Dennison, and on 24 February 1948 he turned the ship over to James H. Thach, Jr.. Missouri had been in commission since 1944, when William M. Callaghan was her first commanding officer. In September 1945, with Stuart S. Murray in command, Japan’s surrender was signed on her deck in Tokyo Bay, with Chester William Nimitz among the senior officers present.
After Missouri he served on the staff of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, and in the Bureau of Ordnance. He was advanced to captain on 1 July 1949. In 1953 and 1954 he was executive assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger Kyes. He later served as deputy to Admiral William F. Raborn during the development of the Polaris fleet ballistic missile, one of the central assignments of his career.
He returned to command at sea in the fleet oiler Elokomin and then in Galveston, the Navy’s first guided-missile light cruiser. That cruiser put an officer trained in battleship and destroyer gunnery in charge of a ship built around missiles.
As a flag officer he commanded Amphibious Group Four, directed the long-range objectives group for the Chief of Naval Operations, commanded the Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet, and served as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Fleet Operations and Readiness. He was promoted to vice admiral in 1964. On 5 January 1968 he attended the commissioning of the nuclear submarine Pargo at Groton, Connecticut. Colwell retired in 1969 and died in Takoma Park, Maryland, on 5 February 2008.