Wojtek

Soldiers of the Polish II Corps, released from Soviet labour camps and making their way to the Middle East, bought a bear cub from a boy near Hamadan in Iran in 1942 for a few tins of food. They fed him condensed milk from a bottle, and he grew to over two metres and nearly two hundred and fifty kilos. He wrestled with the men, drank beer, smoked — or rather ate — cigarettes, and slept in the tents. When the corps sailed for Italy in 1944, British transport regulations would not carry a mascot or a pet. So the 22nd Artillery Supply Company enlisted him: name, rank of private, serial number, paybook and rations. He travelled as a soldier. At Monte Cassino in May 1944, watching men unloading crates of artillery shells from the trucks, he began carrying them himself — twenty-five-kilo boxes, up to the gun positions, and by every account he never dropped one. The company adopted a bear carrying a shell as its official emblem, and it is still worn. He was demobilised in Scotland in 1947 and went to Edinburgh Zoo, where Polish veterans came to see him for the next sixteen years and would sometimes climb in. He is said to have brightened at Polish being spoken to him. He died in 1963, aged twenty-one. A bronze of him and a soldier walking together was unveiled in Princes Street Gardens in 2015.

Loved by · The 22nd Artillery Supply Company

Honours

• 1943Enlisted as a private with a paybook and rations so the transports would carry him
• 1944Carried crates of artillery shells to the guns at Monte Cassino, and dropped none
• 1944A bear carrying a shell became the official emblem of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company
• 2015Bronze unveiled in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

Their kind

The smallest of the brown bears, once common from the Caucasus to Iran. Cubs orphaned by hunters were often raised by people, which is how this one reached a Polish artillery company.

A life in seasons