Sapper Herbert ‘Bert’ Beros was born in Hamilton, Ontario in Canada on 30 April 1907. He was a miner and made his way to Australia. Where he worked in the mines at Mt Isa in Queensland. He later moved to Lithgow in NSW, where him and his wife Vera, lived at 47 Mort St. On 31 March 1942 Bert enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).
Bert ended up in the Engineers and after his initial military training which included bomb disposal, was posted to the 2/4 Field Company. He would arrive in Port Moresby on 14 August 1942 not long after the the Kokoda Campaign had started. It was her in New Guinea that Bert would write some of the most famous Australian poems of the Second World War.
His most famous work- “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” was written early one morning on the Kokoda Track. One of Bert’s officers sent a copy of Bert’s poem home to his mother who in turn saw that the verse was published in in Brisbane’s Courier Mail. Thus, projecting Bert and his work into the limelight.
Later a body of Bert’s work would be published in a book of verse. The publisher would write in the foreword:
“Men of action are not usually men of words; the soldier is rarely able to give expression to the things he feels. But Sapper Beros is one who can bridge the void between perception and revelation. He is a graduate of the school of hard knocks, knows and loves his fellow man, and writes with sympathetic understanding of human qualities.
In 2017 I led a group of Australians on a special Kokoda trek. It was special as we wore the clothing that the Digger’s back in 1942 wore, we ate the same food, carried .303 rifles, slept on the ground with a grey wool blanket all while walking in hard leather army boots, following in the footsteps of B Company of the 39th Battalion. We were not there to re-enact the battles fought rather to understand what is was like for an Australian soldier grappling for the first time with the rugged terrain of the Owen Stanley’s.
One of the trekkers was Captain Karl Turvey, an officer of Engineers in the current Australian Army. David Jenkins our videographer captured Karl at dusk reading one of Bert’s poems, WX Unknown
