The 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps, which is the unit that enlisted a bear, and which afterwards put him on its badge.
Iran, 1942
Polish soldiers freed from Soviet camps under the Sikorski agreement were moving south through Persia towards the British forces in the Middle East.
Near Hamadan a group met a local boy carrying an orphaned Syrian brown bear cub. They exchanged tinned meat, chocolate and a penknife for him.
They named him Wojtek.
Growing up in a company
He was hand-reared, initially on condensed milk from a bottle. He grew large, eventually around two metres standing and close to two hundred kilograms.
He wrestled with the men as a matter of routine. He was given beer. He rode in vehicles. He slept in tents alongside soldiers.
The enlistment
When the II Corps was posted to Italy, transport regulations did not permit animals or mascots on the ship.
The solution was administrative. Wojtek was formally enlisted as a private soldier, with a service number and a pay book, and shipped as personnel.
Monte Cassino
The battle in May 1944 was among the hardest of the Italian campaign, and the Polish II Corps took heavy casualties taking the monastery hill.
Wojtek's company supplied ammunition to the artillery. He imitated the soldiers, carrying crates of shells upright to the gun positions. The veterans' accounts, repeated independently over many years, agree that he never dropped a crate.
The company subsequently adopted a bear carrying a shell as its official insignia, which it retains.
Scotland
After the war, Polish forces in the west faced a homeland under Soviet control and many did not return. Large numbers were demobilised in Scotland.
Wojtek went too. He spent time on a farm in Berwickshire and in 1947 was transferred to Edinburgh Zoo, where he lived until 1963.
Former soldiers visited. There are consistent accounts of cigarettes being thrown over the enclosure wall, and of him responding to Polish.
Why it goes on a wall
Because an army at war produced a piece of paperwork giving a bear a rank and a number, and then that bear carried ammunition through one of the worst battles in Europe and put himself on the regimental badge.
Enlisted, numbered, and never dropped one.