Wojtek the bear at Monte Cassino
A brown bear serves in the Polish army as a private
Polish soldiers bought the cub Wojtek in Iran in 1942 and enlisted him as a private so he could board a ship. At Monte Cassino, his comrades recalled, he carried crates of shells, and he became the company’s emblem.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Did you know
A brown bear served in the Polish army in World War II. Wojtek was enlisted as a private so he could board a ship in Egypt, and his company’s badge became a bear carrying an artillery shell. Share →
Wojtek, the bear veteran of Monte Cassino, ended his days at Edinburgh Zoo in 1963. Polish comrades visited and tossed him cigarettes, which he had loved since his army days — he ate them rather than smoked. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 5 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 1 year later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 3 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 4 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 5 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 8 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 3 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 2 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 1 year later
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 13 years later
Middle East
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 21 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 12 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 4 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 4 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 9 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 9 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 12 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 14 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 16 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 19 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 1 year later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 1 year later
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 3 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 9 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 22 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 15 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 1 year later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 3 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 11 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 25 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 8 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 3 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 2 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 10 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 15 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 75)
- Winston Churchill (aged 70)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 66)
- Albert Einstein (aged 65)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 63)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 55)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 55)
- Mao Zedong (aged 51)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 26)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 15)