On This Day in History: April 8

Wojtek the Bear

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Winnie the Pooh traveled with a soldier from Canada to England during World War I, but never crossed over to France to see any action. Wojtek the bear, conversely, didn’t sit out World War II in a zoo. He was a cigarette smoking beer swilling combat soldier with the Polish military helping to defeat the fucking Nazis.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 8, 1942--

Before the Nazi asswipes invaded the Soviet Union, the two nations had a deal to divide up Poland; they invaded from either side, and it sucked to be Poland. But then the Soviets joined the Allies and released their Polish POWs, and those soldiers were formed into an army and told yo we need your help defeating these Nazi fucks. They were sent to the Middle East, and they met a bear.

On April 8, 1942, the Polish soldiers encountered an Iranian boy with a brown bear cub whose mother had been shot by hunters. A Polish lieutenant bought the bear, and he became mascot to an artillery division. Okay the bear was a mascot. So fucking what? You need to understand something about the situation for these Polish soldiers. Their home had been invaded by two powerful enemies and they’d spent over a year in Soviet gulags. They had no idea if their families were alive. (A lot of them weren’t. Poland had the highest per capita casualty rate of any nation in the war.) This bear wasn’t just a mascot, he was a critical morale booster the men could bond over. Continues below …

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They named him Wojtek, which is a diminutive form of the Slavic name Wojciech, which means “happy warrior.” They fed him milk out of a vodka bottle. They gave him lit cigarettes and he’d take a puff then eat them. He drank beer, and when the bottle was empty, he’d look inside it and wonder where the fuck did all the beer go? He would march with the men on his hind legs and learned to salute.

He traveled with the Polish Army through the Middle East, and when it came time for them to take a British ship to Italy to take part in the Battle of Monte Cassino, the British were total killjoys and say hey no mascots on the ship. So the Polish drafted him as Private Wojtek.

The bear got big, eventually coming to weigh over a thousand pounds. He continued his mimicry of the men by pitching in at Monte Cassino carrying ammunition crates during the battle. A crate that took four men to maneuver, Wojtek carried by himself. He never dropped one. For his service, Wojtek was promoted to the rank of corporal, and the company adopted a symbol of a bear carrying an artillery shell as its official emblem.

After the war, the soldiers didn’t want Wojtek to go back to Poland because they feared their Soviet occupiers would turn him into a communist symbol. Wojtek ended up on a farm in Scotland and then eventually in the Edinburgh Zoo, where he lived until his death in 1963. 

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