Wojtek: The soldier bear who fought Hitler's Nazis

Wojtek<<Happy Warrior>> the bear, a 500-to-600-pound brown bear that was essentially adopted by Polish II corps soldiers who had been evacuated from the Soviet union during World War II.It was exactly 75 years ago this Saturday, on April 8, 1942, that the cub was discovered in the mountains of Iran, by a group of Polish prisoners of war who were being transported from a Siberian gulag through the Middle East to Alexandra, Egypt. From there, they were shipped off to Europe, most famously to fight in the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. 

They nursing the bear with a bottle of condensed milk in a vodka bottle, the soldiers treated Wojtek like a baby, perhaps because their own families had been torn apart by the war.But pretty soon, as bear cubs are wont to do, Wojtek grew up.“He would accept lit cigarettes, take a puff and swallow them,” Dymitr Szawlugo, one of the soldiers who took care of the bear, once wrote. “He loved to drink from a beer bottle, and when it was empty, he would look through the opening to see where the rest of the beer was.”

While in Egypt and the Middle East, Wojtek needed all of the refreshing liquids he could find in the sweltering heat. According to Brendan Foley, an author working on a film inspired by the bear’s life, the bear would chase after oranges that the men used for grenade practice. He learned how to break into the communal shower huts and turn on the shower on his own, which was a problem because the water was rationed and his ingeniousness would sometimes result in water shortages. The men even taught the bear how to pick up new recruits and hold them upside by the boots to make the rookies think they were getting eaten.During the Battle of Monte Cassino, the bear was seen on the front lines carrying what was thought to be live ammunition to help load the guns. Henryk Zacharewicz, another member of the 22nd Transport Company, said the bear was really just carrying empty ammo crates and used shells, according to Dymitr’s son Andy Szawlugo, who is now a dentist in Burlington, Ontario.

The press corps had a field day with the image nonetheless, and the bear became a cult hero. The regiment changed its insignia to an image of the bear and an ammo shell and boasted that the bear was an “enlisted” soldier, giving him a rank and number.

The bear died in 1963, partly of damage to his esophagus, perhaps from swallowing cigarettes, Foley suggests. A bronze Statue of the bear was unveiled in central Edinburgh in November 2015.