Greatest Generation Celebration

Herb Neff just turned 104. The World War II veteran, who served as a 1st sergeant in the U.S. Army during the war, celebrated his birthday Friday at Tuscany Villa in East Naples. 

Really, he was only 103 on the date of his party, but they only jumped the gun by three days, and that let his birthday celebration coincide with the weekly happy hour at Tuscany, so along with birthday cake, all the residents had the opportunity to enjoy a drink or two. Herb was joined for the occasion by his son Kurt, a Naples resident, and Kurt’s wife Terry.  

Kurt credited Herb’s previous appearances in the Coastal Breeze – stories about his 100th and 101st birthdays, written by Scott H. Shook – with strangers picking up the tab when they went out to eat on Marco Island. The WWII Vet ballcap probably helped, too.  

Neff enlisted in the Army in 1943 and saw some remarkable service. While he is quick to say that he didn’t see any action in his three years in World War II, he did cross paths with two of the biggest players in the war: J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Douglas MacArthur. 

Neff was born in Germany in 1921 and moved to the United States as a child. In his early teens, his father sent him back to Germany, Nazi Germany at the time, for technical training. He brought Herb back home when he was concerned about his safety with WWII looming. 

While Herb had to pay back the little he would have earned for his apprenticeship, said Kurt, he still to this day receives a pension from Germany for his work there. “It’s $900 a year for 39 years (so far),” said Kurt.  

With the apprenticeship Neff completed while in Germany, and presumably high test scores, the Army immediately sent him to Ohio State University for a year of training. From there, he was shipped out to Los Alamos. 

Los Alamos had just been opened, with the sole purpose of designing and building an atomic bomb. While at Los Alamos, Neff was exposed to Oppenheimer, who was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project – the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons.   

"I was at Los Alamos for a short time,” Neff said, “but I was shipped overseas. I don’t even know why. I think it was because I wasn’t a citizen at the time. I had been in Germany before that as an apprentice. I went out there to learn a trade and came back before the war. Maybe that made them uneasy, I don’t know. They never told me.” 

While at Los Alamos, he observed Oppenheimer in action and heard him speak. 

"Oppenheimer was there,” Neff said. "He talked to us. He was lecturing. New guys came in, 40-50 people, and he came around. Other people were there, too.” 

Neff said security was very tight at Los Alamos. 

"The mail was censored,” he said. "We couldn’t talk to anybody on the phone. Anything you wrote had a postmark from overseas - not New Mexico.” 

Herb’s story about Los Alamos has gone through some revisions but after almost 80 years, a guy can be excused for some creative ambiguity, and it’s unlikely anyone will challenge him on the facts. Of the roughly 16.4 million who served in World War II, fewer than one-third of one percent are still alive. Herb has beaten the odds, and along with his late wife Edith, who lived to be 97, passed along some great genes for longevity to Kurt.  

In any event, someone at the time realized Neff was not actually a U.S. citizen, but a German national, and that probably ended his time at Los Alamos. He was sent to California, made a naturalized citizen on the spot by a judge, and posted to the Pacific theater. 

After being shipped out, Neff served in such far flung locations as New Caledonia, Fiji, and the Philippines, where he was part of another iconic moment in WWII history, an encounter with Gen. MacArthur.  

"MacArthur came,” Neff said. "We had to get off the roads. It was raining. And our company was not set up yet. We were in the area. There was a big circle that was like a race track that MacArthur drove around. We had to go into our tents. We had to be off the circle. He promised he’d return. He returned. We didn’t go out and celebrate or salute him or anything because it was raining. He made his trip and that was it. That was the first time he came back to the Philippines.”