In April 1943, a group of Polish soldiers in Iran encountered a young boy carrying an orphaned Syrian brown bear cub. They purchased the cub for a few cans of food and some chocolate, and a legend was born.
The cub — named Wojtek, a Polish name meaning "he who enjoys war" — was adopted by the soldiers of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps. In the weeks that followed, Wojtek became something entirely unprecedented in modern military history: an actual enlisted soldier.
He was registered as a private, given a rank and a service number, and was listed on the unit's official rolls. He received the same rations as the other soldiers. He learned to walk upright for extended distances. He drank beer, smoked cigarettes (or rather, he ate them — he seems to have preferred the tobacco to the smoke), and was apparently an enthusiastic participant in wrestling matches with the soldiers.
What distinguished Wojtek from a mere mascot was what happened at the Battle of Monte Cassino in May 1944, one of the bloodiest and most grinding campaigns of the Italian front. Watching the soldiers loading artillery shells and supply crates, Wojtek began to imitate them. He learned to carry 100-pound crates of artillery ammunition, walking on his hind legs, ferrying shells from supply point to battery. The soldiers reported that he never dropped a crate.
His contribution was genuine enough that after the battle, the 22nd Company applied to have an image of a bear carrying an artillery shell registered as their official unit badge. The badge was approved. It became one of the defining symbols of the Polish II Corps.
After the war, Wojtek was demobilized along with the rest of the unit and donated to Edinburgh Zoo, where he lived until 1963. Polish veterans from the Corps who had settled in Scotland would visit him regularly, greeting him in Polish and occasionally wrestling with him across the enclosure fence. He apparently remembered them and would stand to be scratched on the nose and given cigarettes by his old comrades.
Today, there are statues of Wojtek in Edinburgh and in Krakow. The Poles have placed him alongside their other wartime heroes — not as a curiosity, but as a companion and a soldier who carried his share of the burden through one of the war's longest campaigns.