In 1944 they enlisted a bear and gave him a soldier's number

Soldiers of the Polish II Corps bought a bear cub in Hamadan, Iran, in the spring of 1942, trading a few tins of food for him. In 1944, when the unit shipped out to Italy and British regulations banned pets on board, the command solved it on paper: they enlisted the bear as a private in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, with rank, service number and a paybook. He walked up the gangway with the troops.

His name was Wojtek, short for Wojciech, and by then he weighed 230 kilos and stood almost two metres tall. He had grown up among lorries: he drank his ration of beer and ate the cigarettes they handed him lit.

At the battle of Monte Cassino, in May 1944, the company was unloading shells by hand under fire, and Wojtek carried crates of ammunition alongside the soldiers. The unit kept the image: it adopted a badge showing a bear standing upright with a shell in its arms, and that crest ended up painted on their lorries.

When the war ended, the II Corps was demobilised in Scotland. Wojtek spent two years at a camp in Berwickshire and in November 1947 he moved into Edinburgh Zoo, where Polish veterans would come to talk to him in Polish. He died there on 2 December 1963, aged twenty-one, under the same name and the same rank he had boarded the ship with.