During WWII Herman served in the Navy and achieved a rank of Fireman, 2nd Cl. He enlisted on December 21, 1941, and first served on a battleship and destroyer. He was then assigned to a tugboat, the USS Nauset (AR-89), when it was first commissioned on March 2, 1943. It sailed from Norfolk, Va., to Algeria, and performed towing and salvage operations along the North African Coast. It then proceeded to participate in the invasion of Sicily. It had several assignments culminating in the attack on Salerno, known as Operation Avalanche. On September 7, the Nauset successfully guided a British assault craft into the fray, to clear mines near beachheads. However, the vessel soon came under attack from the Luftwaffe in the Gulf of Salerno and a bomb that exploded near the vessel caused fires to break out and envelop the tug. Burned and wounded men were transferred during a rescue operation by two nearby tugs, as the deck fire was extinguished. But the below decks fires could not be contained and flooding broached the critical point - the tug was abandoned. The Nauset righted itself and was reboarded to secure tow lines, but it soon exploded and split in two, most likely due to a mine. Of the wartime complement of 113, 18 were known dead or missing and 41 suffered severe injuries. Herman was one of the missing. His disappearance was reported in local newspapers.

A monument application in 1960 to Arlington National Cemetery indicated that Herman was lost at sea and the body never recovered, but errroneously ascribed a death date of September 10, 1944, fully a year after the Nauset sank. The later death date may be the date he was declared deceased and appears on Herman’s markers both at Arlington and at St. Lawrence, Pa.

Herman has three memorials. He has a headstone at Arlington National Cemetery, a cenotaph in St. Lawrence, Pa., and he is also memorialized at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery near Nettuno, Lazio, Italy.