A Polish Army Unit Bought A Bear Cub In Iran For Tins Of Beef, Enlisted Him As A Private With A Paybook And Serial Number, And He Carried Artillery Shells For Them At The Battle Of Monte Cassino.
In April 1942, a Polish army unit travelling across Iran bought a small brown bear cub from a hungry shepherd boy for a few tins of beef. They enlisted him as a private.
The bear was bought in the town of Hamadan in northwestern Iran on the eighth of April, 1942, by soldiers of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish Second Corps. The Second Corps was an army of Polish ex-prisoners-of-war released from Soviet gulags after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. They were marching west across Persia and Iraq to fight Germans in Italy. The soldiers gave the bear a Polish name: Wojtek. Pronounced VOY-tek. It means happy warrior. By 1944 he was six feet tall and weighed five hundred pounds. He played football with the soldiers, wrestled them, and never hurt anyone. He drank beer from a bottle held in both paws. He smoked cigarettes by lighting them and then eating them.
In late 1943 the Second Corps was ordered to Italy. The British troopship would not allow animals. So the Polish unit officially enlisted Wojtek as a soldier. They issued him a paybook, a serial number, the rank of private, and a small photograph pasted into his army file. He was carried up the gangplank as Private Wojtek of the Polish Army. In May 1944 the Polish Second Corps fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino, one of the bloodiest engagements of the entire Italian campaign. According to the war diary of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company and the testimony of dozens of veterans afterwards, Wojtek carried hundred-pound wooden boxes of artillery shells from the supply trucks to the gun positions, walking upright on his hind legs in imitation of the soldiers around him. He never dropped a single one. After the battle the regiment changed its badge. The new badge was a bear carrying an artillery shell.
The Polish Second Corps demobilised in Scotland in 1947. Wojtek's veterans could not go home. Stalin held Poland. To return meant prison or worse. The bear went to Edinburgh Zoo on the fifteenth of November, 1947. His old comrades visited him there in their British army uniforms for the next sixteen years. He recognised the Polish language. He caught cigarettes thrown into his enclosure. Wojtek died at Edinburgh Zoo on the second of December, 1963. None of his comrades had been allowed to go back to Poland either.
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