Was Wojtek the soldier bear really a corporal?

Wojtek the soldier bear was real, and he did travel with Polish troops from Iran to Italy and Scotland. Whether he held a rank or hauled shells at Monte Cassino is far less settled. I read the article everyone repeats, then the Polish wartime history group that disputes it.

What does the usual story say about Wojtek

The usual version runs like this. Polish soldiers got a cub near Hamadan in Iran in 1942, and by that August he belonged to the transport unit later called the 22nd Artillery Supply Company [1]. Rules for the ship to Italy barred mascots and pets, so the men listed him as a private, with a paybook and a serial number. After the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944 he was made a corporal [1].

That is also the version on our own card, which says a bear was enlisted as a soldier and given a rank and has him carrying ammunition crates. It is one of the stories in the history library, and after reading the pages below I think the card states as settled something that is still argued over.

Wikipedia is careful on one point. It says the crate story has been debated, then offers "a British soldier recalling seeing a bear carrying crates of ammunition" [1]. The BBC's report on the documentary where that memory appears calls him only a British veteran and gives no name.

Der Spiegel retells the same interview, then hedges in its next sentence. It grants that the tale may not be true and says it made the bear a legend among the men either way.

It sounds fake because a bear with a paybook reads like something invented over a campfire, and one source says part of it was.

It holds up because the bear himself is beyond doubt. Forces News points to Pathé film of him wrestling with soldiers and to photographs of him with the men. The accounts I read agree that a bear with a shell became the company's emblem. Wikipedia has him going to Edinburgh Zoo in 1947 and dying there in December 1963 [1].

Did Wojtek hold a rank in the Polish army

The strongest objection comes from the Kresy Family Polish WWII History Group, which keeps a page testing each Wojtek story. On enlistment it marks the story false: "Wojtek was not issued an army number, nor was he given a rank" [2]. Its stated basis is the records held at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London.

The same page finds no evidence for the promotion to corporal. It adds that the bear left Alexandria with his company on the MS Batory on 13 February 1944, bound for Taranto [2]. So he got on the ship, and on this account no enlistment was needed to do it.

Against that stands a man who was there. Wojciech Narębski served in the company as a teenager, and he told the BBC that the bear had a pay book, drew no money and was officially a soldier. Wikipedia's summary box lists the rank as corporal and the service number as 253 [1].

Some of the colour around the rank looks wrong. Der Spiegel opens with a British official finding a Corporal Wojtek on his roster at Naples. The Kresy page on that meeting says it could not have happened there, because the company's diary has the ship landing at Taranto, and that the official met the bear later in Scotland.

Note what the Naples scene would imply if it were right. A bear already listed as a corporal on arrival in Italy could not have earned that rank at Monte Cassino afterwards. Those two parts of the legend do not fit together.

I have not seen the museum's records or the diary myself, only this group's account of them, so the rank stays open. One way both sides could be right is a paybook the men made up themselves with no official number behind it. That is my guess, and no page I read says it.

Did he carry shells at Monte Cassino

The Kresy group is blunt here too. Its page on the crates says men of the company apparently invented the tale around a campfire after the battle and persuaded a visiting war correspondent, who printed it. It also says no photographs show the bear carrying crates.

Its page on the shells goes further. It places the bear at the company's base camp at Venafro, about thirty kilometres from Cassino, and away from the fighting. It quotes Narębski saying the bear usually wore a chain in camp and stayed under the control of an older soldier, Piotr Prendyś.

Narębski's memory cuts both ways, though. He was a driver, and by his own account he saw the bear only at the start and end of a working day. He can say where the bear usually was. He cannot rule out what happened while he was out on the road.

On the other side, the playwright Alan Pollock told Forces News that several witness statements put the bear at the crates. The article does not name those witnesses, and I could not find them. Wikipedia's detail that he carried crates weighing 100 pounds and dropped none is the kind of flourish I could not trace to a primary source [1].

The emblem does not settle it. A badge of a bear with a shell proves the company loved the story, and it would look the same whether the story began with a real afternoon or a campfire.

Did Wojtek drink beer and smoke

Less than the legend says, on the evidence I read. Narębski told the BBC the bear liked beer and could not be made drunk by a single bottle. Forces News reports that some people think the bottles held water or condensed milk, since alcohol was valuable. The Kresy group's page on the habit says he more often drank water or tea from beer bottles, and that he swallowed cigarettes instead of smoking them.

Where the retellings drift from the pages

Three other cards on the same shelf deserve this treatment, and I have not yet read their sources this closely. One has Japan sending around 9,000 bomb carrying paper balloons across the Pacific. Another has the American army trying camels in the West before the experiment collapsed. The third is Australia's war with emus.

Questions

Was Wojtek really a soldier in the Polish army?

He lived with a Polish transport company and was treated as one of its men, but his official status is disputed. Wikipedia says he was listed as a private so he could sail to Italy [1]. The Kresy Family group says records in a London museum show he had no army number and no rank [2]. I have not seen those records myself.

Did Wojtek the bear really carry ammunition at Monte Cassino?

It is unproven. A British veteran recalled seeing it, and Wikipedia notes that the story has been debated [1]. The Kresy Family group calls the story false and says the bear stayed at a base camp away from the fighting. Nobody I read produced a photograph of him carrying a crate during the battle, and the witness in the documentary is not named in the reports of it.

What happened to Wojtek after the war?

He went to Scotland with his company and lived near the village of Hutton in Berwickshire. After the unit was demobilised on 15 November 1947 he was given to Edinburgh Zoo, where former Polish soldiers came to visit him. He died there on 2 December 1963, aged 21, according to Wikipedia [1].