Ships
- USS Lamson (DD-367) Captain, 1 May 1944 – 31 July 1945
John Vavasour Noel was born in Peru on 2 June 1912 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1936. He went to sea as an ensign in the cruisers Astoria and Indianapolis. Tennis was already a serious interest, and it remained one through a career that eventually carried him to the rank of captain.
He was serving in the light minelayer Sicard at Pearl Harbor when Japanese aircraft attacked on 7 December 1941. In August 1943 he returned to Sicard as commanding officer, a lieutenant commander, and he stayed in that billet until March 1944. Promotion to commander came in the middle of that March.
On 1 May 1944 he took command of the Mahan-class destroyer Lamson, relieving Charles H. Pitts. The ship had been in commission since 1936, when Hubert Esterly Paddock first took her out, and she was already a veteran of the Solomons and New Guinea, including a long stretch under Phillip Henry Fitzgerald. Under Noel she finished work in Hawaiian waters, reached Eniwetok on 8 August 1944, and spent the next two months with the Fifth Fleet on patrol and antisubmarine screening in the Marshall Islands.
That autumn Lamson moved to the Seventh Fleet for the return to the Philippines. Noel had her in the Leyte Gulf landings and on the dangerous supply runs into Ormoc Bay. On 7 December 1944, while she was screening a convoy in the bay, her gunners shot down two attacking aircraft before a third crashed into the ship, set her on fire, and killed and wounded many of the men topside. The crew kept Lamson afloat. After repairs she spent the rest of his command on patrol and air-sea rescue off Iwo Jima. He turned her over to Robert McCormick Ayer on 31 July 1945.
After the war Noel studied at Stanford and taught at the Naval Academy. He served as executive officer of the cruiser Rochester and later commanded Altair. His best-known postwar ship was the guided-missile cruiser Springfield, flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Admirals George Anderson and David McDonald each used her as flagship before becoming Chief of Naval Operations.
Washington duty followed as naval aide to an Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he then went to Paris as naval attaché. He retired in 1965 and worked for the Milchem Company. Through the later years he wrote steadily, and several of his books became standard Navy texts for officers learning shiphandling and the work of a division officer. He died in 1991.