Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear adopted as a cub in Persia in April 1942 by Polish soldiers of Anders' Army. He was enlisted in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the 2nd Polish Corps so that he could sail with it to Italy, is said to have carried ammunition crates during the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944, rose to the rank of corporal and died at Edinburgh Zoo in 1963.
In the spring of 1942 tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians came out of the Soviet Union into Persia. Many had spent two years in prisons, labour camps and places of exile. They were thin, sick and far from a country that no longer existed on the map. On the road through Persia some of them met a boy carrying a bear cub, and that meeting became one of the best loved stories of the Second World War.
The cub, Wojtek, grew up with the soldiers, travelled with them through Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, was entered on the roll of their company and ended the war in Scotland. His story is told everywhere, often with embellishments. This guide keeps to what is documented, and says plainly where the story turns into legend.
A cub on the road out of the Soviet Union
The army that adopted Wojtek was the force raised in the USSR in 1941 and 1942 by General Władysław Anders from Poles released from Soviet captivity. When it was evacuated to Persia it brought with it thousands of deported Polish civilians, many of them women and children.
On 8 April 1942, on the journey from Pahlavi to Tehran1, Polish soldiers met a young Iranian boy with a bear cub whose mother had been shot by hunters. An 18-year-old refugee, Irena (Inka) Bokiewicz, fell for the cub, and at her urging Lieutenant Anatol Tarnowiecki bought it1. Accounts of the price differ; food, a little money and a penknife all appear in the retellings.
For three months the cub lived in a Polish refugee camp near Tehran, mostly in Irena's care. In August 1942 he was handed to the 2nd Transport Company, later renamed the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, and the soldiers named him Wojtek. Corporal Piotr Prendysz became his handler2.
Growing up with the 22nd Company
At first the cub struggled to swallow, and the soldiers fed him condensed milk from an old vodka bottle. Later he ate fruit, marmalade and honey, and he developed the habits that made him famous: he drank beer and ate, or seemed to smoke, cigarettes3. He wrestled with the men, learned to salute and slept close to soldiers on cold nights.
Photographs taken in the Middle East, now held by the Imperial War Museum, show a half-grown bear wrestling with soldiers in shorts. For men who had lost homes and families in the east, a playful animal that trusted them completely mattered more than any regulation. The company carried him with it through Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.
How a bear became a private
In early 1944 the 2nd Polish Corps was sent from Egypt to Italy to fight beside the British Eighth Army. The British transport ships did not accept mascots or pets, so the company found a simple answer: Wojtek was officially enlisted as a private4 and listed among its soldiers.
From then on he had a paybook, a rank and a serial number, and he drew rations like everyone else. He lived with the men in tents or in a wooden crate carried on a truck. The joke had a serious side. The enlistment was the only way the company could keep him.
Monte Cassino: what is documented and what is legend
In May 1944 the 2nd Polish Corps attacked the German positions around the abbey of Monte Cassino, and on 18 May Polish soldiers raised their flag over the ruins. The 22nd Company's job was to keep the artillery supplied, moving shells forward by truck along roads under fire.
The famous story is that Wojtek, watching the men unload, began to copy them and carried crates of 25-pounder shells, each weighing about 45 kg1, without dropping a single one. His veterans told this story, and at least one British soldier later recalled seeing a bear carrying ammunition crates. Even so, the story has generated debate over its accuracy1, and how often he helped, and how close to the front, cannot be established from the records.
What is certain is what happened next. A drawing of a bear carrying an artillery shell was adopted as the official emblem of the 22nd Company2, and Wojtek was promoted to corporal. The single shell held in his paws on badges and statues is a symbol, not a photograph of the event. He worked, the soldiers said, with crates.
Scotland, the zoo and the last years
After the war the company was brought to Britain with the rest of the corps and passed into the Polish Resettlement Corps. Wojtek lived with his comrades at Winfield Airfield on Sunwick Farm, near Hutton in Berwickshire, where local people and the press took him to their hearts. Like most of the men of the 2nd Corps, he had no free Poland to go back to.
When the company was demobilised he could not stay with the soldiers, and on 15 November 1947 he was given to Edinburgh Zoo3. Former Polish soldiers came to visit him for years, calling to him in Polish and throwing him cigarettes. Visitors said he still responded to the language of his old unit.
Wojtek died on 2 December 1963, aged 214, of natural causes. By then he weighed nearly 500 kg and stood over 1.8 m tall.
The Wojtek statues: Edinburgh, Kraków and beyond
In Kraków, on 18 May 2014, the 70th anniversary of the capture of Monte Cassino, a 2.3 m bronze Wojtek by the sculptor Wojciech Batko5 was unveiled in Jordan Park.
Edinburgh, Kraków's twin city, followed on 7 November 2015, after a long campaign6 by the Wojtek Memorial Trust. The bronze by Alan Beattie Herriot in Princes Street Gardens shows a Polish soldier and the bear walking side by side, with a long relief telling Wojtek's journey.
There are many others. Duns in the Scottish Borders, near the old Winfield camp, received a statue in 2016 as a gift from the Polish town1 of Żagań. The Sikorski Museum in London has a sculpture by David Harding, the Imperial War Museum holds a commemorative plaque, and statues have stood since 2019 in Cassino, Szczecin and Sopot.
Why Wojtek still matters
Wojtek is easy to turn into a cartoon: the bear with beer and a shell. The real story is quieter and better. A refugee girl and a group of exhausted soldiers took in an orphaned animal, kept him through deserts and a sea crossing by enlisting him, and stood by him when the army that had sheltered them all was disbanded.
His statues stand in both of the countries that became homes for Anders' soldiers, Poland they had fought for and Scotland that took them in. That is why people still tell his story, and why it is worth telling accurately.