Ships
- USS Lamson (DD-367) Captain, 1 November 1943 – 1 March 1944
Joseph Russell Rubins was born on 27 May 1905 in Hardin County, Ohio, and served as an officer in the United States Navy. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 July 1936 and to lieutenant commander on 1 January 1942.
On 1 November 1943 he became captain of the Mahan-class destroyer USS Lamson (DD-367), relieving Phillip Henry Fitzgerald. Bath Iron Works in Maine had built the ship, and she had been commissioned in October 1936 under Hubert Esterly Paddock. When Rubins took her she was a Seventh Fleet destroyer in the Southwest Pacific, already a veteran of the Guadalcanal campaign and of the night battle off Tassafaronga.
On 26 December 1943, as Marines landed at Cape Gloucester on the western end of New Britain, Lamson joined the ships bombarding the beach defenses. In the air attacks that came with the landing, the destroyer was credited with shooting down two Aichi D3A dive bombers.
At dawn on 2 January 1944 she was one of nine destroyers covering the Saidor landing on the north coast of New Guinea, the operation called Michaelmas. The destroyers shelled the shore before the troops went in, and together they fired 1,725 five-inch shells into the landing area.
Rubins left the ship on 1 March 1944, when Charles H. Pitts relieved him. Lamson remained in the war under later captains. John Vavasour Noel had command in December 1944 when, near Ormoc Bay during the Leyte campaign, she knocked down two aircraft before a third crashed into her, killing 25 men and wounding 54. After repairs she finished the war on patrol and rescue duty. Robert McCormick Ayer and then George Gill Ball commanded her after the fighting ended. In July 1946 she was sunk as a target ship in the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. Rubins died on 22 September 1965.