Ships
- USS Porterfield (DD-682) Captain, 30 October 1943 – 13 May 1944
John Carl Woelfel was born on 20 February 1905 in Marion, Indiana. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1927. Promotion in the peacetime Navy was slow, and he reached lieutenant on 30 June 1936. After the United States entered the war he became a lieutenant commander on 16 December 1941 and a temporary commander on 10 September 1942.
His command at sea was the new Fletcher-class destroyer USS Porterfield (DD-682). Bethlehem Steel laid the ship down at San Pedro, California, on 12 December 1942 and launched her on 13 June 1943. Mrs. Louis B. Porterfield, widow of Rear Admiral Lewis Broughton Porterfield, sponsored the ship at the launching. Woelfel, then a commander, placed Porterfield in commission on 30 October 1943 as her first commanding officer.
After shakedown, Porterfield joined Task Force 53, sailed on 12 January 1944, and arrived off the Marshall Islands on the 31st. Her first combat work was shore bombardment of the small islands of Kwajalein Atoll, followed by harassing and neutralizing fire on Roi and Namur as those islands were taken. Woelfel remained in command through the rest of that opening Central Pacific deployment and into the spring of 1944.
On 13 May 1944 he turned Porterfield over to Donald Wesley Wulzen, who later became a rear admiral. The destroyer stayed in the Pacific war under Wulzen, then under Arthur Frederick Fischer, and afterward under Neil Bruce MacIntosh, who was still in command when she was decommissioned on 15 July 1946. Woelfel was advanced to temporary captain on 20 March 1945. He died on 6 December 1982 in Long Beach, California, at the age of seventy-seven.