April 18, 2023 • 47 mins
Author Ben Thompson and professor of history Dr. Pat Larash discuss a selection of war hero animals both furry and feathered, including the incredible tale of Voytek the Soldier Bear -- a massive beer-drinking Syrian brown bear who helped Polish artillery fight Nazis in World War II.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. It is May sixteenth, nineteen forty four.
Under the cover of darkness. The brave men of the
Polish second Corps storm uphill towards the mountaintop fortress of
Monte Cassino, their advance hated by the thunderous guns of
Allied artillery airplanes scream overhead, muzzle flashes, tracer fire and
(00:23):
explosions flash brilliant in the darkness.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
But the Allied guns must keep firing.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's why the Polish twenty second Transport Artillery Company is
hustling back and forth carrying heavy artillery shells from the
transport vehicles to the white hot howitzers and mortars to
keep them raining fire down on the enemy. Among this
transport crew is one particularly burly soldier, so strong he
can lug these massive shells around all by himself, a
task he completes tirelessly for hours to help his men
(00:51):
succeed in the battle. This soldier's name is Private Voytech,
and he is a bare, actual fucking bear.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And this is in fiction. Hello, and welcome back to
Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I am here as always with my co host doctor.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Pad Larish Pat. I noticed that you have a new cat. Yes, yes,
Luna is a kitten.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
She's about four months old now, and technically she belongs
to my housemate, but I'm on cat duty today. So
if you hear a little miow or something in the background,
are more likely to sound of something being knocked off
of a shelf. Yeah, that's Luna, the kitten.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Little kitty cat meowing might not work very well for
Badass of the Week, but I think if your cat
like destroyed something in the background, that could actually kind
of work for us.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yes, from the point of view of the podcast, I
think it's a great idea. From a point of view of,
you know, living in my apartment.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I was telling you about when I was in Venice
there was the Venetian guy who took his cat into
naval battles with him.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
He was one of the Doges and he.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Was fighting generally the Turks, and he used to go
into battle with them. He would dress in red and
he would bring his cat with him, and his cat
was like taxidermied in the museum, which I thought was
kind of interesting. So have you determined whether Luna is
a war cat yet or not.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Will I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna eliminate that possibility.
You should see her go after these little felt catnip
mouse toys that we thought for her. She does battle
with them. They do not last. She does not take prisoners.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I have two cats and they're like that.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
They just you give them one of these little, like fuzzy,
cute stuffed animal things, and then you wake up the
next morning and its head's been ripped off and jammed
into my shoe and like the skin it and they
eat the guts and it's like, oh my god.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
And the cat's they're sharing with you somehow, I think.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I mean, hey, look I've killed this thing for you, master, Like,
I don't know, maybe that's kind of cool. There's some
kind of there's some kind of badass aspect to that, I imagine.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, and that Venetian dude, I mean, I'm where he
and the cat had a good relationship. I mean, I'm
in my head, I'm coming up with this theory that
the cat was the real general and kind of just
driving around the human like in ratitude.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, okay, just making him point to various things on
the map, like boat go here. Yeah, we'll cross the tee.
We'll have the turks right where we want them.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, our cat, we our baby likes to play with
the cats, but like they're way bigger than him, and
he just likes to kind of. I guess they're not
way bigger than him anymore, but they used to. He's
he provokes them and they try to restrain themselves from
Mullingham and my wife. They're little house cats, right, But
my wife was like, oh, you know, there was one
time that the boy cat was getting pretty grumpy and
you could see it in his face and he was
(03:41):
really upset, but he was not attacking the baby, which
was nice because I was get in trouble he does that.
But my wife was like, I'd be really scary, like
if that thing was bigger, And I was like, we
have that. It's called a man eating tiger. Yes, and
they kill people. They're serious stuff. So I mean, I
(04:02):
think that's kind of a good lead into what we're
going to talk about today, which is kind of badass animals. So,
over the course of warfare, there have been many animals
involved in varying conflicts and battles and confrontations throughout human history,
and I want to start with one that is kind
of Anybody who has beten to my website or knows
of my website found this article somewhere. It's among the
(04:24):
most popular articles that I've ever written on the website,
which is great because it's one of my favorites also.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So today I want to talk about voytech. The bear.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I want to talk about the bear that fought for
Poland in World War Two. All right, welcome back, let's
get into it. So Poland famously had a pretty rough
World War Two. Actually, they've had a pretty rough several
(04:54):
centuries period of time because they're kind of stuck in
a very bad geographic location. People of Poland are extremely tough,
and they're extremely big and scary, and they're very good warriors,
and they have a very good warrior tradition, a very
strong military tradition. They just unfortunately always seem to be
stuck between Germany and Russia, and because moving geography is
(05:16):
not a particularly easy thing, they seem that.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
That's going to be there.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
They're a lot in life for a long time, and
in World War Two, you know, Poland pretty tough country.
They just got reunited after World War One. Russia's on
one side, Joseph Stalin. Germany's on the other side with
Adolf Hitler. They decide, hey, let's just like sign this
non aggression pack. We won't fight each other. Let's just
team up and beat up the Poles, and whoever takes
(05:40):
whatever land, that's fine, you can just take whatever, and like,
let's just get rid of these guys. And so in
nineteen thirty nine, that's what they do. They both attack Poland,
one from the east and one from the west. It's
not a great position to be in. Poland fights pretty well.
They get kind of a bad rep for some of
the things that happened because they collapse relatively quickly.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
But there's a lot of jokes that.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Are made about, oh, the Polish like attack tanks with cavalry,
and I always hate those because Poland had the best
cavalry in the world and they didn't have tanks, and
so what are you going to do?
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Right?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
You got to charge tanks with cavalry if that's all
you got, you don't really have any other options.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, you use what you got. Yeah, exactly what are
you going to do? Right? They actually held out pretty well.
They held out.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Longer than people thought they were going to and there
are a couple battles where they had some pretty heroic stands.
But I mean, what are you going to do when
you've got the Russian army on one side and the
German army at the other side. So Poland falls and
some of the Poles that were on the Russia sector
they were taken as prisoners of war and they were
sent off, of course, to Siberia and the Gulags and
(06:40):
the prisoner of war camps and all the horrible stuff
that Stalin had ready for them, and all the horrible
things that Stalin liked to do to prisoners of war.
So they go there and they're imprisoned. But eventually the
Germans turn on Stalin. So after Poland has taken, the
Germans just keep on marching and they go right into
Russia and they're crushing Russia in the early.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Days of the attack of World War two.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
They're moving very very quickly through Russia and through the
USSR and Stalin's getting nervous, and Stalin basically decrees that
all of these Polish prisoners of war should go free
now and go fight for the Allies, go take your
arms back up, and now we're going to fight the Germans.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
And these are the Poles who are in the Gulags,
enduring all of the hardships and the Gulags, and then
all of a sudden, bam you have. You know, they're
released to go fight. So just surviving the Gulag itself
is pretty badass to begin.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
With, absolutely, and a lot of people died over the
process of being transferred to the Gulags and serving a
year or so in the Gulags. Like you're looking at
like sub zero temperatures every day with substandard clothing and
you're out there with a pickaxe like a rock quarry, right,
Like it was hard work. And you know, there's a
lot written about how rough this time was, and these
(07:52):
guys were enduring these pretty terrible stuff. And then Stalin's like,
good news, guys, now you get to go charge Germans.
And the Poles they were happy to be out of
the Gulag. I bet they weren't really that excited about
serving in the Red Army. So they say, okay, we'll
fight for the Allies, but we want to serve in
the British Army, So okay, So they get put on
(08:12):
a train and they get sent down towards Palestine, which
is where the British Army is regrouping. They're fighting in
North Africa. They're fighting against Rammel, the Desert Fox. So
the British eighth Army is there and so these Poles
that get released from the gulags, they get sent down
brew Palestine into Egypt to help fight Rammel. And one
of these groups, they're called the Polish Second Corps. They're
(08:34):
a unit that forms of these former Polish soldiers who
are kind of homeless now and they're on the move.
And while they're traveling through Palestine, one of the groups
of the Polish Second Corps was the twenty second Transport
Artillery Company. These guys drive the trucks that bring ammunition
to the artillery pieces for the Polish Army. These guys
(08:56):
were driving and they saw, you know, just driving by
the side of the road. They saw this young boy.
He's carrying a bag. He looks very like malnourished, very dehydrated,
has having a bad time. He's kind of wandering around
in the desert. The Polish truck stops and these guys
get off. When they walk over and they say, hey,
you know, are you okay? Do you want some food?
You eat some water, you eat this this, give them
some chocolate, They get them some water. They don't have
(09:17):
a lot of rations, right, they just have what they
were carrying on them. But they give them some stuff
and the boy's very very grateful for it. And then
the pole say, well, what's in the bag? And the
boy opens it and it's a little brown bear cub
about the size of a dog, also extremely malnourished. It's
been being carried in a bag through the desert. The
boy is having a hard time taking care of it,
(09:38):
but it looks sick and it looks like it's not
doing too good. And these guys, you know, they think
it's cute. They think it's weird that there's a bear,
and they're.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Like, well, I think it's weird too.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, it's pretty strange thing as a boy wandering through
the desert with a bag that has a bear in it,
But that's probably a story all by itself. And they say, okay,
we'll give you what we have, but like, why don't
you give us the bear.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
We'll take care of it.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
And so the boy gives them the bear and they
nurse him with a little baby bottle of milk, and
they name him Voytech, which is a Polish name. I
spell it Voytek, but in Polish you would spell it
woj te K, which you'll see sometimes, which woj is
also pronounced Voytech. So that's just because Polish is a
(10:19):
crazy language, and I don't understand how anybody learns it.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Clearly, clearly polls managed, yes, exactly, somebody thinks anyway, So
voy Tech, however, you're spelling his name the bear, the bear.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Cope, yes, So voy Tech becomes the official mascot of
the twenty second Transport Company. He's like a little pet,
and they love him and they feed him and they
nurse him back to health, and then he gets bigger
and stronger and bigger and stronger and bigger and stronger,
and he grows to be over six feet tall and
nearly six hundred pounds.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
So now he's a big bear.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
He's a it's not grizzly bear size, but he's a
bigger than a person, five hundred pound bear. But he's
been growing up with these guys, these Polish Transport Company.
He's been sitting by the campfire with them. He's been
traveling with them. They taught him that when they ride
in their jeeps, Voytek sits in the passenger seat of
the jeep and he sticks his head out the window
(11:11):
like a puppy would, But he sits like a like
a person would sit.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
But then he sticks his head out like a puppy. Wood.
He likes to drink beer, he likes to smoke cigarettes.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Bears a pretty badass.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
I don't think he initiated the cigarette smoking, but I
think that's just a thing that everybody was doing in
World War Two. If you watch movies from the forties,
everybody's smoking and drinking all the time. Yeah, start drinking,
start drinking it, smoking minute you wake up, until the
midie you fall asleep.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
I think the general public didn't really understand the bad
effects of smoking. And also, if you're out fighting in
the trenches, you know you got your coping mechanisms.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah yeah, like yeah, even if they knew that, like
a lung cancer was a possibility going into your sixties
and seventies, there was definitely a chance you were going
to get blown up like that night. So you know,
maybe this cigarette and like this beer isn't going to
be so bad a.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Long term and the bear was one of them.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yeah, he was one of them, right, he was like
at first it was kind of like this cute little
morale mascot, and then it became one of the guys, right, like, Yeah,
he'd ride with them, he'd sleep in a tent like
they would, he'd march information with them. There's pictures of
this stuff, like the guys would wrestle with the bear,
and the bear would like play wrestle with them for fun.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
It would like drink.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Beers with them, like out of a bottle, Like you'd
hand them a beer bottle and you'd drink it. Like
Tho's pictures of this stuff, and it's really it's amazing.
It's really really funny and really cute and just unbelievable
to look at.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
So one story that comes from this.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Time is they were encamped in Palestine and there was
one day that a German agent managed to sneak into
the Polish camp at Palestine. Right, the Germans knew that
the Poles were coming, they knew they were going to
link up with the Eighth Army, and they needed to
get some agents in there to investigate to figure out
(12:53):
how many guys they had, how equipped they were, you know,
where they were moving, what their plans were when they
were going to link up with the eighth Army. And
so this agent sneaks in to the Polish camp. He
sneaks into one of the bathhouses near the barracks. He's there,
he runs the shower just to make sure that there's
a little bit of background noise to cover what he's doing.
(13:15):
He's in there, he's looking around, and he's got his
piece of paper with him.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
He's got his journal and pen.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
And he's looking out the windows. He's kind of peeking
out here and there. He's making notes on what the
Poles have.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Oh, these guys are here. I'm seeing some artillery.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
I'm seeing you know, maybe they've got some transport stuff here.
He's trying to be really sneaky. He's looking around, he's
looking around, and then he hears a very low goott
or old growl, and he turns and he sees a bear.
He sees our friend Voytech about two feet away from him,
(13:50):
six and a half he tall, five hundred pounds. Voytek
had learned to operate the hot showers and really enjoyed them.
And when he came in there and saw somebody. He
didn't like it, so he growls at this German agent.
The German agent doesn't know what to do. He screams
for help. Voy Tech clubs him with the paw. A
(14:11):
dude hits the ground. Voy Tech stands over top of
him and wars and the rest of the Polish troops
around him come running to see what's going on, and
they find this poor said German agent lying on the
floor of the pathhouse, having been clubbed upside the head
by Voytek the bear. He is immediately ready to confess
(14:32):
that he's a German agent, and not only that, he
is willing to give up all the information on who
sent him there and how he got in and any
other German agents in the area. Whatever you want me
to tell you, I will tell you, because do not
leave me alone with that bear again. And before the
Polish twenty second Transport Company has seen any action in
World War two, voy Tech is already a war hero
(14:55):
for capturing a German spy.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Good job, voy Tech. Now, I wanted to go back
to one detail, So did do I hear you write
that voy Tech, our friend voy Tech, who is a bear,
is in the showers not because he's randomly wandering around
being a bear who's randomly wandering around, but because he
was taking a hot shower that he could operate himself.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yes, voy Tech could work the baths.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Somebody showed him how and he remembered it, and he
could work the baths and the shower and he really
liked it. So he would go in there all the
time to take baths and showers and nobody complained about
him using too much hot.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Water cool cool spunite for Voytek.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
So after this, the Poles link up with the British
Eighth Army and they're going to go fight Raml in
North Africa.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
But there's one problem.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
When the Polish Second Corps, which remember has escaped the
Gulag and now just traveled all the way down through
the Middle East, they link up with the British and
now they're going to join the eighth Army. They're going
to be brought into that force. But there's a little
bit of a problem because the British Army has no
provisions for pets or mascots. They're not allowed in the
(16:06):
Eighth Army. So what do the Poles do. They've got
Voytech and he's one of the guys. They can't go
into battle without this guy.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
So what do they do.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
They enlist him in the Polish Army. They give him
a title, they give him a rank. He becomes Private
voy Tech. He gets a serial number, and he's added
to all of their official rosters, where he remains throughout
the entire rest of the war. He is officially a
member of the Polish Army. The Brits, of course, are
just like our whatever. If if you feel that strongly
about it, you can have him. The PaperWorks all in order, Yeah,
(16:35):
papers were in order. They were all filed correctly and
on time. And so when the truck pulled up and
Voytek the bear had his head out the window, nobody
said anything to him.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
So they fight through North Africa.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
The Second Court doesn't see a ton of action there,
but they the Eighth Army does defeat Rammel and push
him out of North Africa, and then they launch an
invasion of Italy. The idea is to push up through
Rome to you liberate Italy from Mussolini and the fascists
and to severely weaken the German defenses. And not only that,
but one of the big things about attacking through Italy
(17:10):
was also to force the German Army to defend the
north and the south of Europe. So attacking up through
Italy especially, they're going in in like January of nineteen
forty four, so five six months before D Day. The
idea is the Germans have to decide which coast they're
going to defend, because it was going to be a
pretty massive endeavor to try to fortify Normandy and Italy
(17:34):
at the same time. So the Polish Army moves into
Italy with the British and the Second Corps gets right
in the middle of everything at the Battle of Monte Casino,
which is the bloodiest and most brutal battle that is
fought in the Italian campaign.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
It's part of the defense that surrounds Rome.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
So if you wanted to take Rome, you had to
break through the lines, and this was a really good spot.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
To do it. However, very very heavily. For it's an
old it was built in five hundred. It was an old.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Medieval abbey that over the last thousand years had been
built and rebuilt and built and rebuilt. But it is
Monte Casino. Monte means mountain, right, It's at the top
of a mountain. It is heavily entrenched. There's no easy
way up there. You have to climb and scramble and
claw your way up against line after line of trenches
(18:24):
and machine guns and artillery. Extremely bloody battle, extremely brutal
fighting in World War Two here and the Poles are
right in the middle of it. The Second Polish Corps,
they're there in January nineteen forty four when the battle begins.
They launched one of the first assaults and they're going
to launch one of the last assaults. The final breakthrough
doesn't happen until the end of May, so they are
(18:45):
there for five months, battling the Germans day and night
on airplanes, artillery gunfire.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
There's four huge like multi division assaults on the hill.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
They just keep getting thrown back and thrown back, making
progress inch by inch.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
It's a very very difficult struggle to take this position.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
The twenty second Transport Artillery Company and Voytech.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Their job is to support the.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Polish Artillery and the eighth Army's artillery. They are a
transport company, so they drive the trucks. They load the
trucks up at the mootom with as many artillery shells
as they can load, they drive into the front lines
and they carry them to the guns, and the guns
shoot them.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
And because you have.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
These guys assaulting these positions, you need to have constant
artillery fire.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Maybe you're not going to blow up some of these
hardened positions, but you can take out mortar teams, you
can take out artillery teams. You can throw enough shells
at the defenders that maybe keep their snipers and their
machine guns heads down so they're not firing as much.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Give your guys a little bit more time to close
with them.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
It is a very important job, and it's.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Hard work because you're carrying these big, heavy artillery shells.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Back and forth all day long. The battle continues and
casualties start to mount. The Allies are making progress, but
it's slow.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
They're getting beat up.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
The Germans are countering with airplanes and artillery that are
hitting especially the back lines of the Polish forces.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
The artillery to transport.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Every man in the Polish Army along Second Corps is
called into action, and every.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Bear, including our friend voy.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Tech, including our friend voy Tech Void Tek Bear private
in the Polish Second Corps carries artillery shells from the
truck up the mountain into the guns day and night.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
To keep the guns firing.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
They train the bear to carry artillery shells, which he
can carry shells that are he walks on his hind
legs and he carries artillery shells that are so heavy
that it takes two humans to carry them. And Private
Voytech can do this, and he can walk it up
the hill and walk back to the truck, get another
artillery shell, bring it back up, bring it back and
(20:58):
he does this for days, especially at like the height
of the battle, when everybody was kind of called to
the front, he was there and he was loading the
artillery shells. And to this day the logo of the
twenty second Artillery Supply Company of the Polish Army is
a drawing of a bear carrying an artillery shell. It's
still the patch that they wear on their uniforms. The
(21:19):
big height of the fighting is in the middle of
may Voyteks. There he's loading their artillery. The artillery does
its job, the soldiers on the ground do their job,
and the second Corps these refugees from the Gulags who
had been kicked out of their homes and their home
is currently in German occupation. They lead this attack up
the hill at Monte Casino and they.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Fly a Polish flag over that abbey.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
It's one of the biggest successes that they have of
the war, and Voytek was there for it, and that's
pretty amazing. Rome falls within a month, Mussolini is deposed
and the Germans have to withdraw back out of Italy.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So what happens to Voytec then, Well, Voytek serves through
the rest of the war.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
But it's interesting because even after the war ends, there's
nowhere for the Polish to go because, okay, hooray, we've
won World War Two, we've kind of divided up the
remnants of the Third Reich, but Poland is part of
the USSR, and so these guys weren't really that excited
about going back to Poland and be back under Stalin's
(22:21):
reign because they were a little nervous that maybe they're
going to end up back into gulags again. So a
lot of these guys settle in England. England gives them
asylum to stay there. So a lot of the soldiers
who fought in the Second Corps end up living in England,
and Voytec is no exception. He's not a house pet.
So you can't just go home and live in somebody's
flat in London.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
No, especially not a flat in London. I mean, have
you seen the size of some of them. They're like
little poster stamps.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
They literally wouldn't fit in the closet there. Yeah, that's
definitely true. They put him in the Edinburgh Zoo. So
he goes and lives in the Edinburgh.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Zoo where a lot of his people from his old
unit also live in Edinburgh. And they would say that
for the next twenty or so years, former soldiers from
his unit would go to the zoo to visit him
and wave at him, and then they would jump into
the animal enclosure with him and run up and start
play wrestling with them and fighting with him, and it
would kind of horrify some of the people that were
(23:10):
there at the zoo and didn't realize what was going on,
but I'm sure Voytech appreciated it. They'd smuggle him in
cigarettes and beers and stuff, I guess, and you know,
by all accounts, he was a pretty happy dude at
the Edinburgh Zoo. He passes away of natural causes in
nineteen sixty three at the age of twenty two, which
was pretty good for a bear, especially one that's survived
(23:30):
a war and.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
All those cigarettes and booze.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, alcoholic, hard smoking, hard drinking bear. Yeah, twenty two
is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
They have statues of him now in Poland and Scotland
and England, plaques commemorating him at the Canadian War Museum
and the Imperial War Museum. It was just an amazing
story and I really encourage you to go look at
the photos of this bear. Go look up a voytech
the bear, and it's pretty amazing to watch him marching
around with the Polish Army.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I've looked at some of those photos and they range
from you to absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, Like there's some of them where it's like, oh,
he's really cute, little bear, and then there's somewhere you're like,
oh my god, he's way bigger than I thought he was.
He's four inches taller than that guy that's play wrestling with.
His arms are bigger around than that guy's torso, and.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
That's how he can carry all that artillery.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, it's a nice thing to have, and it's probably
a little demoralizing for the Germans to be looking through
their binoculars and seeing a bear loading artillery shells against you.
That's not an encouraging thing when you're entrenched trying to
defend against the overwhelming numbers.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Oh snap, So Voytek is this big over six foot tall,
you know, several hundred pounds, you know, big hercules of
a creature and small creatures, small nimble creatures can also
be badass in wars fought between humans. So I'd like
to talk about from the war before, if you rewind
(24:57):
in your head's to World War One, I want to
tell the story of cher Ami, the carrier pigeon one
lone pigeon versus German machine gunners in the rain? Can
he get home and deliver a message that could save
the lives of hundreds of American troops trapped behind German lines?
(25:23):
All right, welcome back. So it's nineteen eighteen and World
War One is raging across Europe and we're in the
Mousargun Offensive, which is in the northeastern forests of France.
We're deep in the Argun forest and over five hundred
US troops of the seventy seventh Division under Major Charles W.
(25:44):
Whittlesey thought that their flanks were being supported by other
American troops and French troops. But remember that this is
nineteen eighteen and radio and telephone communication isn't as reliable
or secure as we'd expect today. Unbeknownst to the seventy seventh,
this support on their flanks was held.
Speaker 4 (26:06):
Up, which means that they went too far into the
forest and they were trapped behind German mines. They have
no access to supplies, no access to reinforcements, their ammunitions
running out, foods running out, even the.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Water is running out. Nearby, there's a burbling stream of
fresh water, but if you want to get to it,
you have to clawl out under fire to get fresh water.
And on top of that, they're not only in danger
from the Germans, but also from the other Allied troops
who didn't know that they were there. So there's a
(26:43):
lot of friendly fire, and there's nothing friendly about it.
It's American, I mean, the consequences are not at all friendly.
American heavy artillery by accident killed thirty men of the
seventy seventh, and other men of the seventy seventh are
dying not just from this friendly fire but also from
German fire. And also just from the hardship of being
cut off from reliable supplies and water.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
So I I think I've heard this story before. This
is the Lost Battalion range.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
This is totally the Lost Battalion. Yeah, and this is
how lost they are. They know where they are, but
other people don't know where they are, so I wouldn't
call them lost, I'd call them misplaced. So they need
to let the other Americans and the French know where
they are so they can stop inadvertently whooping their asses.
(27:27):
And Major Whittlesey in charge of the seventy seventh, he
sends runners and they're killed or captured by the Germans. Okay, yes,
there are other forms of communication that exist, but they're
not as available as you might like. Radio is too fragile,
the wires are too delicate and get broken or even cut.
(27:47):
And also, our guys, the Lost Battalions were out of
radio range anyway, and telephones just did not They didn't
have telephones set up. But Major Whittlesey is trying really
hard to find a way to get a message out
to the Allies. Hey, where this seventh. We're here, these
are our coordinates. Please stop shooting us. That's a reasonable request. Right, Well,
this is nineteen eighteen, and back in those days, carrier
(28:10):
pigeons were still a thing, and the Pigeon Fancier Society
in Britain had actually been raising and training carrier pigeons,
some of them actually they'd gotten from France, and they
had been training and raising carrier pigeons, which they then
gave to the American Army, the US Army, to use
(28:30):
as a form of communication.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
I love the carrier pigeons just it seems so medieval, right,
It's like Sender Raven, you know, like it's amazing that
they have machine guns and submarines and airplanes in this
war and they're still sending birds with little messages attached
to them.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Yeah, totally. And I mean, Ben, you said medieval. We
actually have sources attesting to the use of carrier pigeons
or you know, some sort of homing pigeon, even back
to ancient times. There are probably several cultures that had
figured this out. I can give you a source, a
Roman source from Frontinas. Apparently Hirsh's, one of Julius Caesar's lieutenants,
(29:11):
used pigeons. He would keep them in the dark and
he would keep them starved, so he'd be super motivated
to take a message out. But anyway, anyway, I digress.
The seventy seventh Battalion, the Lost Battalion is undaunted. They
have pigeons, and so Major Willisy and his staff, presumably
someone there has really really really good handwriting and very
(29:33):
good fine motor coordination, they write out the little message,
Hey we're here, We're at these coordinates, please stop shooting us,
Love the seventy seventh and roll it up, stick it
out little canster, stick it on the edge, stick it
on the leg of a pigeon, and they send the
pigeon out. And keep in mind that this is not
Central Park. This is not just a pigeon flying around
(29:53):
minding his own business, maybe like eating a cheese doodle,
maybe pooping on a statue. This is a pigeon flo
buying out under artillery fire. So this is not an
easy journey. And also people know about carrier pigeons, and
so German machine gunners are trained and ordered to shoot
(30:14):
down pigeons on site. Sucks to be an ordinary pigeon
minding your own business, and it particularly sucks to be
a carrier pigeon because the Germans are gunning for you.
So Major Riddlesey sends out a pigeon. Is it going
to make it? You know? The men of the seventy
seven are like looking with their binoculars. Shot dope, They
(30:35):
shot that down. He sends out another pigeon, shot down,
sends out another pigeon. Doesn't make it, and this happens.
Pigeon after pigeon falls to German fire. There's one pigeon left, Shelley.
It means a dear friend, all of our hopes are
riding on you. They write out in their teeniest, tiniest
(30:56):
hand writing thinnest midpen. They write out a little message
and roll it up. They put it in the little canister.
That ties the little canister to Chepan's leg, and they
release our dear friend Cheva. And he said, so he flies.
It's raining, and it's raining like literal rain. In addition
to raining bullets, Cherami flies.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
He dodges bullet, here, robes a bolt there, bang go bang.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
All of this stuff has gone on around him. And
he flies and he flies and he goes ahead.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
He's hit.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
He falls. Major Wibberlesey's looking through his binoculars. My god,
this poor pigeons on the ground. What's going to happen now?
He just can't take his eyes away. Oh wait, he
sees something stirring. Cherami is not dead. This pigeon, this
(31:53):
badass pigeon, picks himself up canister still strapped to his leg,
and launches himself back up into the air in the rain,
in the artillery fire, and he keeps flying, and our
dear little friend Shaam covers twenty five miles and a
half an hour and gets the message through. Finally, the
American and the French stop accidentally shooting the seventy seventh,
(32:18):
and they the seventy seventh, what's left of them at
this point. The seventy seventh yet rescued, They get to
come back. And not everyone in the seventy seventh has survived,
but the one hundred and ninety four men who were
still alive at the time Sharemi delivered his message owe
their life. They owe their rescue and their life to
this undaunted little pigeon and his ability to deliver the message. Wow,
(32:40):
and that's our guy, that's our little that's our little pigeon.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
He lived, he survived, he survived, He survived.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Yeah, yeah, he flew a total of twelve missions, which
apparently is high. Apparently that's a high number of missions.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
If he flew twenty five bomber missions in World War Two,
you got to retire, right, Twelve seems pretty good.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Yeah, very honorable discharge. And so how is Sheremi commemorated today? Well,
sharam is in the Smithsonian and you can visit him.
He's been taxidermied. And also, fun fact, Sharami had been
misgendered for a long time.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
I was gonna say that because I only ever heard
I only ever heard Sham refer two as a as
a she.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah. So in the wartime records of the US Army
Signal Corps, Sharami had been listed as a she or
a hen, which is a female pigeon. But the Smithsonian,
with the help of DNA analysis, has actually definitively found
out that Sharon a me is a hey pigeon, a
boy pigeon, a cock apparently, and that actually matches the
(33:42):
gender of his French name Sharami or Sharami.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
So I'm looking at the picture of the of of
Sharami in the and my pronunciation is not as good
as yours. But we're looking looking at the picture of
share me in in the Smithsonian here in the in
the Hall of Heroes, he's only got one leg.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Was that the injury?
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Was that like a taxi error or was that the
wound like he got a foot shot off.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
I don't think it was a taxidermy error. I think
that was a war of injury.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Very lucky that it was the other leg that got
shot off, right. Could you imagine if you finished the
mission and got the message leg shot off in the process.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
I guess, so, yeah, wow, Yeah, that's incredible. That's an
incredible story.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
And there's one pigeon managing to save the lost battalion
give their coordinates so not only can they avoid friendly fire,
but also they can be found and like recovered by
the Allied forces. I am going to transition this into
a third story here. Also at Musargan was another American
(34:41):
Army aligned animal war hero. This is I want to
talk about Sergeant Stubby. Sergeant Stubby is a pit bull
terrier and he is a stray dog. He ended up
saving American lives on the battlefield. He captured some enemy spies,
he rescued wounded soldiers, and he invented the College football
halftime show. I'll explain, yes, please do.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
One of these is not like the other, but I'm
sure they're all related somehow. Once wance, he explain it
to us.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
So picture this pitbull terrier dog, not a full pit bull.
The terrier version is much smaller, about eighteen inches long,
about thirty pounds. Picture more like a terrier. He kind
of looks like a pit bull, but he's a little
bit bigger than a Boston terrier kind of thing. When
he stands on his hind legs, he just comes up
past your knees. He's hungry, he's cold, he's alone. He's
(35:30):
wandering the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, in nineteen sixteen,
eating out of garbage cans, slipping in the rain. And
one day he kind of is just wandering along looking
for some food or a warm place to sleep, and
he walks onto the parade ground of Yale University and
he gets picked up by a young man named John
Robert Conroy. Conroy thinks, oh, this is a cute dog.
(35:52):
I'm gonna name him Stubby because he's got this little
tail and it's like a little stumpy tail, and I
think it's cute. I'm gonna call him Stubby. Conroy gives
him some food, gives him a nice place to stay.
But John Robert Conroy, he's not a Yale He's a
recruit in the one hundred and second Regiment of the
American twenty sixth Infantry Division, and he's on the campus
of Yale doing basic training because he's going to ship
(36:15):
out for World War One. I think he's probably thinking
this is maybe a short term deal to have this
little pet dog while I'm here getting ready to go
off to war. But the dog really grows on him.
He goes everywhere with the dog. He feeds Stubby, he
you know, plays with him. He teaches him how to
salute by putting a little pop up to his forehead,
which I imagine is very cute. It would definitely be,
(36:37):
you know, a YouTube video with twenty five million hits
on it if it existed right now. And then it
turns out that when it's time for Conroy and the
rest of the twenty sixth Division to ship out for
Europe to go fight in World War One, John Robert
Conroy is not ready to say goodbye to his dog.
Like I said, he's a pit bull terrier. He's not
that big, So Conroy just hides him in a duffel
(36:58):
bag and brings him onto the boat that's taken all
the soldiers over to Europe. He hides him for a
while on the ship, but eventually gets discovered and he
gets called before his commanding officer, who's pretty mad that
Conroy smuggled a dog on the boat. It's not hygienic,
it's not army procedure. And then Conray is not quite
sure what to do, so he orders Stubby to present arms,
(37:20):
and Stubby salutes and the officers just like all right, fine,
I guess he can stay present.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Pause.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, And eventually Stubby kind of wins over everybody on
the boat. The machinists made on the boat makes him
a set of dog tags just like the rest of
the soldiers.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Have, and they make him a little army jacket.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
And so like literal dog tags.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Literal dog tags. Yeah, it's come full circle, right, coming together,
We'll circle yep.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
So he deploys with the twenty sixth in France to
fight in a war, which may or may not have
been an improvement over living on the streets in New Haven, Connecticut,
but it ends up working out pretty well for Stubby.
He participates in seventeen battles along four major offensives. He
serves in Samey Hell, he serves in the marn Mus
Are Gone, the one that we were just talking about
with Sharamie. And at first he's kind of a morale
(38:09):
booster for the guys. He's this cute little dog. He's happy,
he's barking, he's playing, he's having a good time. And
the trenches at World War One were grim, right, I mean,
if you've seen nineteen seventeen or any of red all
quite on the Western Front or any of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Like, oh yeah, just rim grim.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Yeah, you're getting rained on, You're getting bombed all day long.
There's machine guns everywhere, always seems to be raining. Everything's muddy,
you're living underground and everything's just wet and smells bad,
and all of your friends are dying and it's miserable.
And having a little dog around that made everybody a
little bit happier, made everybody have like a little bit
better day than they would have normally when they were
stuck in a trench during World War One. Well, in
(38:47):
February of nineteen eighteen, the Germans launch a gas attack
on the Americans, and Stubby is gassed so hard by
chemical weapons that he almost dies. Oh no, his lugs
get burned up. He has to go to the hospital
covers because it takes more than a lung full of
poison gas to put him down. And instead of kind
of being shy or being sad or regretting his decision
(39:08):
to come and fight in a war, Stubby learned the
smell and used his super dog sniffer to in the
future worn American soldiers when a gas attack was coming.
So if a chemical attack or mustard gas or anything
like that was coming, Stubby could smell it before any
of the soldiers could, and he would run up and
(39:28):
down the line of the trench and he would bite
everybody or bark at everybody or snippet them until they
put their gas masks on. And then because they hadn't
invented dog gas masks yet, they have them now they
have dog gas masks. If you want to look it up,
it's kind of cute.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
I had no idea. Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yes, the American Army today has dog gas masks for
the German shepherds that serve in the US Army. And
it's worth looking up because it's pretty cute. They didn't
have that in nineteen eighteen, and Stubby would make sure
all of his friends put their gas masks on, and
then he would go hide under a bed somewhere and.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Waited out way to go study.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, he learned to hear the sounds of German artillery
and the yells and the sounds of German soldiers coming
over the top to launch an assault on American positions.
Anytime he thought there was going to be artillery, or
they thought that Germans were coming, or they were launching
a gas attack, he would alert all of the American
soldiers in the trench that this was coming. If you
(40:24):
were a century and you were supposed to watch the
line at night and you fell asleep on the job, Stubby.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Would bite you.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Good job study.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yes, So I like to think he started kind of
as this little morale booster, like a little cute dog
to make everybody happy. And at the end it's kind
of like Terminator too, when they keep the dog around
to let him know when there's a terminator coming, Like
he's an early warning system and it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Yeah, he's really living up to the name serget right.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Yeah, yeah, and I love that he will become a sergeant,
so he's Sergeant Stubby, And I love the idea of
the sergeant just walking down the line biting everybody that
falls asleep on the job when they should be watching
the German trenches. I mean, not only stabilizes through early
detection of attacks, but also between battles. He'd go out
into no man's land. He'd go over the top into
(41:11):
no man's land, and he would look for wounded Americans.
He'd find us soldiers and he'd either if they were
lost or if they could walk, he'd lead them back
to American lines, or he would just sit on top
of them and bark until a medic came to help them.
But Stubby is wounded in battle in April of nineteen eighteen.
He's hit by a grenade while assaulting the town of Sheepri,
(41:32):
which is a sentence I never thought I'd ever read
out loud, but he did. And he took some shrapnel
to his fore limbs, his arms, and his chest, and
he ended up having to go to the hospital for
emergency surgery. He lived, he recovered, and he returned to
Allied lines just in time to march into the liberated
town of Chateau Theory. Everybody's there. They're having a big party.
Oh you know, we've thrown the Germans out. Everybody's happy.
(41:55):
The women of the town get together with the men
of the hundred and second and stitch him a little jacket,
a little army jacket that has all of his war
medals on it, including the Purple Heart, the Republic of
France Grant war Medal, the Medal Overdone, and various campaign
medals for all of the different campaign battles that he
had fallen through.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
So he got a purple Heart and all the other
metals too.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah, but he's still not done. So in September, during
the muse Argon Offensive, he sniffed out a German spy
in American trenches, just like Voytek did. Voytek had a
little bit of an advantage in combating the enemy spy
because he had a little bit of a size and
strength advantage. But Sergeant Stubby was tenacious. Sergeant Stubby sees
(42:39):
the German spy, figures out that he's a German spy.
I don't know if you could hear him talking or whatever.
I don't know, but I don't know how he could
tell that the guy was German, but.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
He figured it out.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, yeah, but he figured it out.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
He cornered the guy and started barking at him like crazy,
and the guy was like, you shut up, dog and whatever,
stops down, boy, and Stubby keeps barking at him, barking
at him, barking at him, and then some some American
soldiers starting to move, like, oh, what's going on there?
What's going on with Sergeant Stubby? He always knows when
there's bad stuff happening. And then the spy was like,
I get to get out of here, and he turns
to run away, and Sergeant Stubby leaps up and bites
(43:14):
him on the ass and doesn't let go.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Go Stubby, So the spy is captured.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
They find some important papers on him, and they also
find that this spy had received an Iron Cross for
bravery in battle. So naturally they took the iron cross
off that guy and pinned it onto Sergeant Stubby's jacket,
so he had an iron cross as well.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Now how heavy is his jacket getting at this point?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
I oh no, there's pictures of it. I mean it's
they have photographs of Sergeant Stubby that are worth looking at.
Because he wears this little jacket with all these metals
on it, and it's pretty impressive. Capturing that spy did
earn him a battlefield promotion to sergeant, which was funny
because Conroy was only a core opal, so sergeant now
outranked his owner. After the war ended, Blackjack Pershing, who
(44:07):
was the commander of the American Expeditionary Force. General Pershing
personally awarded Sergeant's a one of a kind Dog Hero
Gold medal that was also pinned on to the jacket.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Dog Hero Gold Medal.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
It's not particularly creative, but it's the only one that
has ever been issued. It was officially issued by the
United States Military. There's only one Dog Hero Gold Medal
in circulation ever in the history of the United States Army,
and it was pinned onto Sergeant Stubby's jacket, so that
is something. Stubby survives the war and goes home, goes
back to the US with Robert Conroy, and after the war,
(44:40):
Conroy goes to law school at Georgetown and he brings
a dog with him because it's his dog. What else
you're going to need bring.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
The dog with you exactly?
Speaker 3 (44:47):
Yeah, And the.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Dog starts going to all the football games, and Sergeant
Dubby is kind of a hero. He's an American war hero,
like a legitimate American war hero. And then at halftime,
when the teams go back to their locker rooms, they
would have the dog come out onto the field. They say, oh,
now we've got a very special guest today. Here's Sergeant Stubby.
He's an American war hero. And Stubby would come out
there and they put a little football out there and
(45:08):
Stubby would push the ball around with his nose and
the crowd would go crazy and cheer, and the band
would play music and everybody be having a great time.
And Stubby's out there like barking for the crowd and
you know, running around.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
And I bet the crowd loved it.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Crowd loved it, and nobody had really done anything like
that before during a halftime. So it is possible that
that was the first halftime show in the history of
college football could be, which would.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Be kind of interesting.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Even more interesting on top of that is that a
Georgetown's mascot today is a bulldog, and there is possible
that Sergeant Stubby is the Georgetown Hoya, is the original
Georgetown Hoya.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Yeah, So what's what's Stubby's legacy.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Well, so Stubby, he does the Georgetown thing.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
Conroy ends up joining the FBI and becoming a lawyer
and work for the FBI. He lives to be ninety five.
But Sergeant Stubby passes away in nineteen twenty six at
the age of ten, well about ten. And we looked
it up and pit bull terriers usually lived between eight
and sixteen years, so ten is not bad. Been mustard
gassed by the Germans and you hit with a hand grenade. Interestingly,
(46:17):
you can now find him Taxidermid in the Smithsonian Museum
of American History in the Price of Freedom exhibit, basically
across the hall from sha Ami.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
So two of our heroes, Taxi Dermid there to receive
your homage.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Yes, in the Smithsonian.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
So yeah, so good job, Sergeant Stubby. Good job, sharemy Also,
good job, boy. Check. I mean, he's not in the Smithsonian,
but he's there in spirit.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Right yeah, yeah, yeah, And honestly, like, I think we
should all aspire to have our Taxidermid corpses on display
in the Smithsonian. I would definitely be down if they
wanted to do that for me after I died.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
That would be a very distinctive honor Ben.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Anyway, anyway, on that note, yeah, I think we're done here,
Like I think that's all we have for today. But
thank you guys as always for listening, and we'll see
you on the next one.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
I really appreciate it so on show.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Ben Thompson,
and my co.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Host, doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Writing by Me and Pat, story editing by Ian Jacobs,
Brandon Phibbs and Allie Lehmer, mixing and music and sound
design by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks
to Noel Brown at iHeartRadio. Badass of the Week is
based off my website badassodek dot com, where you can
read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
If you want to reach out with questions or ideas,
hit me.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Up at Badass podcast at Badass ofdwek dot com. If
you like the podcasts, please subscribe, follow, listen, tell your friends,
tell your enemies, and we'll be back next week with
another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast content,
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. It is May sixteenth, nineteen forty four.
Under the cover of darkness. The brave men of the
Polish second Corps storm uphill towards the mountaintop fortress of
Monte Cassino, their advance hated by the thunderous guns of
Allied artillery airplanes scream overhead, muzzle flashes, tracer fire and
(00:23):
explosions flash brilliant in the darkness.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
But the Allied guns must keep firing.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's why the Polish twenty second Transport Artillery Company is
hustling back and forth carrying heavy artillery shells from the
transport vehicles to the white hot howitzers and mortars to
keep them raining fire down on the enemy. Among this
transport crew is one particularly burly soldier, so strong he
can lug these massive shells around all by himself, a
task he completes tirelessly for hours to help his men
(00:51):
succeed in the battle. This soldier's name is Private Voytech,
and he is a bare, actual fucking bear.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And this is in fiction. Hello, and welcome back to
Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I am here as always with my co host doctor.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Pad Larish Pat. I noticed that you have a new cat. Yes, yes,
Luna is a kitten.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
She's about four months old now, and technically she belongs
to my housemate, but I'm on cat duty today. So
if you hear a little miow or something in the background,
are more likely to sound of something being knocked off
of a shelf. Yeah, that's Luna, the kitten.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Little kitty cat meowing might not work very well for
Badass of the Week, but I think if your cat
like destroyed something in the background, that could actually kind
of work for us.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yes, from the point of view of the podcast, I
think it's a great idea. From a point of view of,
you know, living in my apartment.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I was telling you about when I was in Venice
there was the Venetian guy who took his cat into
naval battles with him.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
He was one of the Doges and he.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Was fighting generally the Turks, and he used to go
into battle with them. He would dress in red and
he would bring his cat with him, and his cat
was like taxidermied in the museum, which I thought was
kind of interesting. So have you determined whether Luna is
a war cat yet or not.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Will I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna eliminate that possibility.
You should see her go after these little felt catnip
mouse toys that we thought for her. She does battle
with them. They do not last. She does not take prisoners.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I have two cats and they're like that.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
They just you give them one of these little, like fuzzy,
cute stuffed animal things, and then you wake up the
next morning and its head's been ripped off and jammed
into my shoe and like the skin it and they
eat the guts and it's like, oh my god.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
And the cat's they're sharing with you somehow, I think.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I mean, hey, look I've killed this thing for you, master, Like,
I don't know, maybe that's kind of cool. There's some
kind of there's some kind of badass aspect to that, I imagine.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, and that Venetian dude, I mean, I'm where he
and the cat had a good relationship. I mean, I'm
in my head, I'm coming up with this theory that
the cat was the real general and kind of just
driving around the human like in ratitude.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, okay, just making him point to various things on
the map, like boat go here. Yeah, we'll cross the tee.
We'll have the turks right where we want them.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, our cat, we our baby likes to play with
the cats, but like they're way bigger than him, and
he just likes to kind of. I guess they're not
way bigger than him anymore, but they used to. He's
he provokes them and they try to restrain themselves from
Mullingham and my wife. They're little house cats, right, But
my wife was like, oh, you know, there was one
time that the boy cat was getting pretty grumpy and
you could see it in his face and he was
(03:41):
really upset, but he was not attacking the baby, which
was nice because I was get in trouble he does that.
But my wife was like, I'd be really scary, like
if that thing was bigger, And I was like, we
have that. It's called a man eating tiger. Yes, and
they kill people. They're serious stuff. So I mean, I
(04:02):
think that's kind of a good lead into what we're
going to talk about today, which is kind of badass animals. So,
over the course of warfare, there have been many animals
involved in varying conflicts and battles and confrontations throughout human history,
and I want to start with one that is kind
of Anybody who has beten to my website or knows
of my website found this article somewhere. It's among the
(04:24):
most popular articles that I've ever written on the website,
which is great because it's one of my favorites also.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So today I want to talk about voytech. The bear.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I want to talk about the bear that fought for
Poland in World War Two. All right, welcome back, let's
get into it. So Poland famously had a pretty rough
World War Two. Actually, they've had a pretty rough several
(04:54):
centuries period of time because they're kind of stuck in
a very bad geographic location. People of Poland are extremely tough,
and they're extremely big and scary, and they're very good warriors,
and they have a very good warrior tradition, a very
strong military tradition. They just unfortunately always seem to be
stuck between Germany and Russia, and because moving geography is
(05:16):
not a particularly easy thing, they seem that.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
That's going to be there.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
They're a lot in life for a long time, and
in World War Two, you know, Poland pretty tough country.
They just got reunited after World War One. Russia's on
one side, Joseph Stalin. Germany's on the other side with
Adolf Hitler. They decide, hey, let's just like sign this
non aggression pack. We won't fight each other. Let's just
team up and beat up the Poles, and whoever takes
(05:40):
whatever land, that's fine, you can just take whatever, and like,
let's just get rid of these guys. And so in
nineteen thirty nine, that's what they do. They both attack Poland,
one from the east and one from the west. It's
not a great position to be in. Poland fights pretty well.
They get kind of a bad rep for some of
the things that happened because they collapse relatively quickly.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
But there's a lot of jokes that.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Are made about, oh, the Polish like attack tanks with cavalry,
and I always hate those because Poland had the best
cavalry in the world and they didn't have tanks, and
so what are you going to do?
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Right?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
You got to charge tanks with cavalry if that's all
you got, you don't really have any other options.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, you use what you got. Yeah, exactly what are
you going to do? Right? They actually held out pretty well.
They held out.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Longer than people thought they were going to and there
are a couple battles where they had some pretty heroic stands.
But I mean, what are you going to do when
you've got the Russian army on one side and the
German army at the other side. So Poland falls and
some of the Poles that were on the Russia sector
they were taken as prisoners of war and they were
sent off, of course, to Siberia and the Gulags and
(06:40):
the prisoner of war camps and all the horrible stuff
that Stalin had ready for them, and all the horrible
things that Stalin liked to do to prisoners of war.
So they go there and they're imprisoned. But eventually the
Germans turn on Stalin. So after Poland has taken, the
Germans just keep on marching and they go right into
Russia and they're crushing Russia in the early.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Days of the attack of World War two.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
They're moving very very quickly through Russia and through the
USSR and Stalin's getting nervous, and Stalin basically decrees that
all of these Polish prisoners of war should go free
now and go fight for the Allies, go take your
arms back up, and now we're going to fight the Germans.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
And these are the Poles who are in the Gulags,
enduring all of the hardships and the Gulags, and then
all of a sudden, bam you have. You know, they're
released to go fight. So just surviving the Gulag itself
is pretty badass to begin.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
With, absolutely, and a lot of people died over the
process of being transferred to the Gulags and serving a
year or so in the Gulags. Like you're looking at
like sub zero temperatures every day with substandard clothing and
you're out there with a pickaxe like a rock quarry, right,
Like it was hard work. And you know, there's a
lot written about how rough this time was, and these
(07:52):
guys were enduring these pretty terrible stuff. And then Stalin's like,
good news, guys, now you get to go charge Germans.
And the Poles they were happy to be out of
the Gulag. I bet they weren't really that excited about
serving in the Red Army. So they say, okay, we'll
fight for the Allies, but we want to serve in
the British Army, So okay, So they get put on
(08:12):
a train and they get sent down towards Palestine, which
is where the British Army is regrouping. They're fighting in
North Africa. They're fighting against Rammel, the Desert Fox. So
the British eighth Army is there and so these Poles
that get released from the gulags, they get sent down
brew Palestine into Egypt to help fight Rammel. And one
of these groups, they're called the Polish Second Corps. They're
(08:34):
a unit that forms of these former Polish soldiers who
are kind of homeless now and they're on the move.
And while they're traveling through Palestine, one of the groups
of the Polish Second Corps was the twenty second Transport
Artillery Company. These guys drive the trucks that bring ammunition
to the artillery pieces for the Polish Army. These guys
(08:56):
were driving and they saw, you know, just driving by
the side of the road. They saw this young boy.
He's carrying a bag. He looks very like malnourished, very dehydrated,
has having a bad time. He's kind of wandering around
in the desert. The Polish truck stops and these guys
get off. When they walk over and they say, hey,
you know, are you okay? Do you want some food?
You eat some water, you eat this this, give them
some chocolate, They get them some water. They don't have
(09:17):
a lot of rations, right, they just have what they
were carrying on them. But they give them some stuff
and the boy's very very grateful for it. And then
the pole say, well, what's in the bag? And the
boy opens it and it's a little brown bear cub
about the size of a dog, also extremely malnourished. It's
been being carried in a bag through the desert. The
boy is having a hard time taking care of it,
(09:38):
but it looks sick and it looks like it's not
doing too good. And these guys, you know, they think
it's cute. They think it's weird that there's a bear,
and they're.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Like, well, I think it's weird too.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, it's pretty strange thing as a boy wandering through
the desert with a bag that has a bear in it,
But that's probably a story all by itself. And they say, okay,
we'll give you what we have, but like, why don't
you give us the bear.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
We'll take care of it.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
And so the boy gives them the bear and they
nurse him with a little baby bottle of milk, and
they name him Voytech, which is a Polish name. I
spell it Voytek, but in Polish you would spell it
woj te K, which you'll see sometimes, which woj is
also pronounced Voytech. So that's just because Polish is a
(10:19):
crazy language, and I don't understand how anybody learns it.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Clearly, clearly polls managed, yes, exactly, somebody thinks anyway, So
voy Tech, however, you're spelling his name the bear, the bear.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Cope, yes, So voy Tech becomes the official mascot of
the twenty second Transport Company. He's like a little pet,
and they love him and they feed him and they
nurse him back to health, and then he gets bigger
and stronger and bigger and stronger and bigger and stronger,
and he grows to be over six feet tall and
nearly six hundred pounds.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
So now he's a big bear.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
He's a it's not grizzly bear size, but he's a
bigger than a person, five hundred pound bear. But he's
been growing up with these guys, these Polish Transport Company.
He's been sitting by the campfire with them. He's been
traveling with them. They taught him that when they ride
in their jeeps, Voytek sits in the passenger seat of
the jeep and he sticks his head out the window
(11:11):
like a puppy would, But he sits like a like
a person would sit.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
But then he sticks his head out like a puppy. Wood.
He likes to drink beer, he likes to smoke cigarettes.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Bears a pretty badass.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
I don't think he initiated the cigarette smoking, but I
think that's just a thing that everybody was doing in
World War Two. If you watch movies from the forties,
everybody's smoking and drinking all the time. Yeah, start drinking,
start drinking it, smoking minute you wake up, until the
midie you fall asleep.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
I think the general public didn't really understand the bad
effects of smoking. And also, if you're out fighting in
the trenches, you know you got your coping mechanisms.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah yeah, like yeah, even if they knew that, like
a lung cancer was a possibility going into your sixties
and seventies, there was definitely a chance you were going
to get blown up like that night. So you know,
maybe this cigarette and like this beer isn't going to
be so bad a.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Long term and the bear was one of them.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yeah, he was one of them, right, he was like
at first it was kind of like this cute little
morale mascot, and then it became one of the guys, right, like, Yeah,
he'd ride with them, he'd sleep in a tent like
they would, he'd march information with them. There's pictures of
this stuff, like the guys would wrestle with the bear,
and the bear would like play wrestle with them for fun.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
It would like drink.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Beers with them, like out of a bottle, Like you'd
hand them a beer bottle and you'd drink it. Like
Tho's pictures of this stuff, and it's really it's amazing.
It's really really funny and really cute and just unbelievable
to look at.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
So one story that comes from this.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Time is they were encamped in Palestine and there was
one day that a German agent managed to sneak into
the Polish camp at Palestine. Right, the Germans knew that
the Poles were coming, they knew they were going to
link up with the Eighth Army, and they needed to
get some agents in there to investigate to figure out
(12:53):
how many guys they had, how equipped they were, you know,
where they were moving, what their plans were when they
were going to link up with the eighth Army. And
so this agent sneaks in to the Polish camp. He
sneaks into one of the bathhouses near the barracks. He's there,
he runs the shower just to make sure that there's
a little bit of background noise to cover what he's doing.
(13:15):
He's in there, he's looking around, and he's got his
piece of paper with him.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
He's got his journal and pen.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
And he's looking out the windows. He's kind of peeking
out here and there. He's making notes on what the
Poles have.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Oh, these guys are here. I'm seeing some artillery.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
I'm seeing you know, maybe they've got some transport stuff here.
He's trying to be really sneaky. He's looking around, he's
looking around, and then he hears a very low goott
or old growl, and he turns and he sees a bear.
He sees our friend Voytech about two feet away from him,
(13:50):
six and a half he tall, five hundred pounds. Voytek
had learned to operate the hot showers and really enjoyed them.
And when he came in there and saw somebody. He
didn't like it, so he growls at this German agent.
The German agent doesn't know what to do. He screams
for help. Voy Tech clubs him with the paw. A
(14:11):
dude hits the ground. Voy Tech stands over top of
him and wars and the rest of the Polish troops
around him come running to see what's going on, and
they find this poor said German agent lying on the
floor of the pathhouse, having been clubbed upside the head
by Voytek the bear. He is immediately ready to confess
(14:32):
that he's a German agent, and not only that, he
is willing to give up all the information on who
sent him there and how he got in and any
other German agents in the area. Whatever you want me
to tell you, I will tell you, because do not
leave me alone with that bear again. And before the
Polish twenty second Transport Company has seen any action in
World War two, voy Tech is already a war hero
(14:55):
for capturing a German spy.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Good job, voy Tech. Now, I wanted to go back
to one detail, So did do I hear you write
that voy Tech, our friend voy Tech, who is a bear,
is in the showers not because he's randomly wandering around
being a bear who's randomly wandering around, but because he
was taking a hot shower that he could operate himself.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yes, voy Tech could work the baths.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Somebody showed him how and he remembered it, and he
could work the baths and the shower and he really
liked it. So he would go in there all the
time to take baths and showers and nobody complained about
him using too much hot.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Water cool cool spunite for Voytek.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
So after this, the Poles link up with the British
Eighth Army and they're going to go fight Raml in
North Africa.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
But there's one problem.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
When the Polish Second Corps, which remember has escaped the
Gulag and now just traveled all the way down through
the Middle East, they link up with the British and
now they're going to join the eighth Army. They're going
to be brought into that force. But there's a little
bit of a problem because the British Army has no
provisions for pets or mascots. They're not allowed in the
(16:06):
Eighth Army. So what do the Poles do. They've got
Voytech and he's one of the guys. They can't go
into battle without this guy.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
So what do they do.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
They enlist him in the Polish Army. They give him
a title, they give him a rank. He becomes Private
voy Tech. He gets a serial number, and he's added
to all of their official rosters, where he remains throughout
the entire rest of the war. He is officially a
member of the Polish Army. The Brits, of course, are
just like our whatever. If if you feel that strongly
about it, you can have him. The PaperWorks all in order, Yeah,
(16:35):
papers were in order. They were all filed correctly and
on time. And so when the truck pulled up and
Voytek the bear had his head out the window, nobody
said anything to him.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
So they fight through North Africa.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
The Second Court doesn't see a ton of action there,
but they the Eighth Army does defeat Rammel and push
him out of North Africa, and then they launch an
invasion of Italy. The idea is to push up through
Rome to you liberate Italy from Mussolini and the fascists
and to severely weaken the German defenses. And not only that,
but one of the big things about attacking through Italy
(17:10):
was also to force the German Army to defend the
north and the south of Europe. So attacking up through
Italy especially, they're going in in like January of nineteen
forty four, so five six months before D Day. The
idea is the Germans have to decide which coast they're
going to defend, because it was going to be a
pretty massive endeavor to try to fortify Normandy and Italy
(17:34):
at the same time. So the Polish Army moves into
Italy with the British and the Second Corps gets right
in the middle of everything at the Battle of Monte Casino,
which is the bloodiest and most brutal battle that is
fought in the Italian campaign.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
It's part of the defense that surrounds Rome.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
So if you wanted to take Rome, you had to
break through the lines, and this was a really good spot.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
To do it. However, very very heavily. For it's an
old it was built in five hundred. It was an old.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Medieval abbey that over the last thousand years had been
built and rebuilt and built and rebuilt. But it is
Monte Casino. Monte means mountain, right, It's at the top
of a mountain. It is heavily entrenched. There's no easy
way up there. You have to climb and scramble and
claw your way up against line after line of trenches
(18:24):
and machine guns and artillery. Extremely bloody battle, extremely brutal
fighting in World War Two here and the Poles are
right in the middle of it. The Second Polish Corps,
they're there in January nineteen forty four when the battle begins.
They launched one of the first assaults and they're going
to launch one of the last assaults. The final breakthrough
doesn't happen until the end of May, so they are
(18:45):
there for five months, battling the Germans day and night
on airplanes, artillery gunfire.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
There's four huge like multi division assaults on the hill.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
They just keep getting thrown back and thrown back, making
progress inch by inch.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
It's a very very difficult struggle to take this position.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
The twenty second Transport Artillery Company and Voytech.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Their job is to support the.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Polish Artillery and the eighth Army's artillery. They are a
transport company, so they drive the trucks. They load the
trucks up at the mootom with as many artillery shells
as they can load, they drive into the front lines
and they carry them to the guns, and the guns
shoot them.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
And because you have.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
These guys assaulting these positions, you need to have constant
artillery fire.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Maybe you're not going to blow up some of these
hardened positions, but you can take out mortar teams, you
can take out artillery teams. You can throw enough shells
at the defenders that maybe keep their snipers and their
machine guns heads down so they're not firing as much.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Give your guys a little bit more time to close
with them.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
It is a very important job, and it's.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Hard work because you're carrying these big, heavy artillery shells.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Back and forth all day long. The battle continues and
casualties start to mount. The Allies are making progress, but
it's slow.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
They're getting beat up.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
The Germans are countering with airplanes and artillery that are
hitting especially the back lines of the Polish forces.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
The artillery to transport.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Every man in the Polish Army along Second Corps is
called into action, and every.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Bear, including our friend voy.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Tech, including our friend voy Tech Void Tek Bear private
in the Polish Second Corps carries artillery shells from the
truck up the mountain into the guns day and night.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
To keep the guns firing.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
They train the bear to carry artillery shells, which he
can carry shells that are he walks on his hind
legs and he carries artillery shells that are so heavy
that it takes two humans to carry them. And Private
Voytech can do this, and he can walk it up
the hill and walk back to the truck, get another
artillery shell, bring it back up, bring it back and
(20:58):
he does this for days, especially at like the height
of the battle, when everybody was kind of called to
the front, he was there and he was loading the
artillery shells. And to this day the logo of the
twenty second Artillery Supply Company of the Polish Army is
a drawing of a bear carrying an artillery shell. It's
still the patch that they wear on their uniforms. The
(21:19):
big height of the fighting is in the middle of
may Voyteks. There he's loading their artillery. The artillery does
its job, the soldiers on the ground do their job,
and the second Corps these refugees from the Gulags who
had been kicked out of their homes and their home
is currently in German occupation. They lead this attack up
the hill at Monte Casino and they.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Fly a Polish flag over that abbey.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
It's one of the biggest successes that they have of
the war, and Voytek was there for it, and that's
pretty amazing. Rome falls within a month, Mussolini is deposed
and the Germans have to withdraw back out of Italy.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So what happens to Voytec then, Well, Voytek serves through
the rest of the war.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
But it's interesting because even after the war ends, there's
nowhere for the Polish to go because, okay, hooray, we've
won World War Two, we've kind of divided up the
remnants of the Third Reich, but Poland is part of
the USSR, and so these guys weren't really that excited
about going back to Poland and be back under Stalin's
(22:21):
reign because they were a little nervous that maybe they're
going to end up back into gulags again. So a
lot of these guys settle in England. England gives them
asylum to stay there. So a lot of the soldiers
who fought in the Second Corps end up living in England,
and Voytec is no exception. He's not a house pet.
So you can't just go home and live in somebody's
flat in London.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
No, especially not a flat in London. I mean, have
you seen the size of some of them. They're like
little poster stamps.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
They literally wouldn't fit in the closet there. Yeah, that's
definitely true. They put him in the Edinburgh Zoo. So
he goes and lives in the Edinburgh.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Zoo where a lot of his people from his old
unit also live in Edinburgh. And they would say that
for the next twenty or so years, former soldiers from
his unit would go to the zoo to visit him
and wave at him, and then they would jump into
the animal enclosure with him and run up and start
play wrestling with them and fighting with him, and it
would kind of horrify some of the people that were
(23:10):
there at the zoo and didn't realize what was going on,
but I'm sure Voytech appreciated it. They'd smuggle him in
cigarettes and beers and stuff, I guess, and you know,
by all accounts, he was a pretty happy dude at
the Edinburgh Zoo. He passes away of natural causes in
nineteen sixty three at the age of twenty two, which
was pretty good for a bear, especially one that's survived
(23:30):
a war and.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
All those cigarettes and booze.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, alcoholic, hard smoking, hard drinking bear. Yeah, twenty two
is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
They have statues of him now in Poland and Scotland
and England, plaques commemorating him at the Canadian War Museum
and the Imperial War Museum. It was just an amazing
story and I really encourage you to go look at
the photos of this bear. Go look up a voytech
the bear, and it's pretty amazing to watch him marching
around with the Polish Army.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I've looked at some of those photos and they range
from you to absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, Like there's some of them where it's like, oh,
he's really cute, little bear, and then there's somewhere you're like,
oh my god, he's way bigger than I thought he was.
He's four inches taller than that guy that's play wrestling with.
His arms are bigger around than that guy's torso, and.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
That's how he can carry all that artillery.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, it's a nice thing to have, and it's probably
a little demoralizing for the Germans to be looking through
their binoculars and seeing a bear loading artillery shells against you.
That's not an encouraging thing when you're entrenched trying to
defend against the overwhelming numbers.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Oh snap, So Voytek is this big over six foot tall,
you know, several hundred pounds, you know, big hercules of
a creature and small creatures, small nimble creatures can also
be badass in wars fought between humans. So I'd like
to talk about from the war before, if you rewind
(24:57):
in your head's to World War One, I want to
tell the story of cher Ami, the carrier pigeon one
lone pigeon versus German machine gunners in the rain? Can
he get home and deliver a message that could save
the lives of hundreds of American troops trapped behind German lines?
(25:23):
All right, welcome back. So it's nineteen eighteen and World
War One is raging across Europe and we're in the
Mousargun Offensive, which is in the northeastern forests of France.
We're deep in the Argun forest and over five hundred
US troops of the seventy seventh Division under Major Charles W.
(25:44):
Whittlesey thought that their flanks were being supported by other
American troops and French troops. But remember that this is
nineteen eighteen and radio and telephone communication isn't as reliable
or secure as we'd expect today. Unbeknownst to the seventy seventh,
this support on their flanks was held.
Speaker 4 (26:06):
Up, which means that they went too far into the
forest and they were trapped behind German mines. They have
no access to supplies, no access to reinforcements, their ammunitions
running out, foods running out, even the.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Water is running out. Nearby, there's a burbling stream of
fresh water, but if you want to get to it,
you have to clawl out under fire to get fresh water.
And on top of that, they're not only in danger
from the Germans, but also from the other Allied troops
who didn't know that they were there. So there's a
(26:43):
lot of friendly fire, and there's nothing friendly about it.
It's American, I mean, the consequences are not at all friendly.
American heavy artillery by accident killed thirty men of the
seventy seventh, and other men of the seventy seventh are
dying not just from this friendly fire but also from
German fire. And also just from the hardship of being
cut off from reliable supplies and water.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
So I I think I've heard this story before. This
is the Lost Battalion range.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
This is totally the Lost Battalion. Yeah, and this is
how lost they are. They know where they are, but
other people don't know where they are, so I wouldn't
call them lost, I'd call them misplaced. So they need
to let the other Americans and the French know where
they are so they can stop inadvertently whooping their asses.
(27:27):
And Major Whittlesey in charge of the seventy seventh, he
sends runners and they're killed or captured by the Germans. Okay, yes,
there are other forms of communication that exist, but they're
not as available as you might like. Radio is too fragile,
the wires are too delicate and get broken or even cut.
(27:47):
And also, our guys, the Lost Battalions were out of
radio range anyway, and telephones just did not They didn't
have telephones set up. But Major Whittlesey is trying really
hard to find a way to get a message out
to the Allies. Hey, where this seventh. We're here, these
are our coordinates. Please stop shooting us. That's a reasonable request. Right, Well,
this is nineteen eighteen, and back in those days, carrier
(28:10):
pigeons were still a thing, and the Pigeon Fancier Society
in Britain had actually been raising and training carrier pigeons,
some of them actually they'd gotten from France, and they
had been training and raising carrier pigeons, which they then
gave to the American Army, the US Army, to use
(28:30):
as a form of communication.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
I love the carrier pigeons just it seems so medieval, right,
It's like Sender Raven, you know, like it's amazing that
they have machine guns and submarines and airplanes in this
war and they're still sending birds with little messages attached
to them.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Yeah, totally. And I mean, Ben, you said medieval. We
actually have sources attesting to the use of carrier pigeons
or you know, some sort of homing pigeon, even back
to ancient times. There are probably several cultures that had
figured this out. I can give you a source, a
Roman source from Frontinas. Apparently Hirsh's, one of Julius Caesar's lieutenants,
(29:11):
used pigeons. He would keep them in the dark and
he would keep them starved, so he'd be super motivated
to take a message out. But anyway, anyway, I digress.
The seventy seventh Battalion, the Lost Battalion is undaunted. They
have pigeons, and so Major Willisy and his staff, presumably
someone there has really really really good handwriting and very
(29:33):
good fine motor coordination, they write out the little message,
Hey we're here, We're at these coordinates, please stop shooting us,
Love the seventy seventh and roll it up, stick it
out little canster, stick it on the edge, stick it
on the leg of a pigeon, and they send the
pigeon out. And keep in mind that this is not
Central Park. This is not just a pigeon flying around
(29:53):
minding his own business, maybe like eating a cheese doodle,
maybe pooping on a statue. This is a pigeon flo
buying out under artillery fire. So this is not an
easy journey. And also people know about carrier pigeons, and
so German machine gunners are trained and ordered to shoot
(30:14):
down pigeons on site. Sucks to be an ordinary pigeon
minding your own business, and it particularly sucks to be
a carrier pigeon because the Germans are gunning for you.
So Major Riddlesey sends out a pigeon. Is it going
to make it? You know? The men of the seventy
seven are like looking with their binoculars. Shot dope, They
(30:35):
shot that down. He sends out another pigeon, shot down,
sends out another pigeon. Doesn't make it, and this happens.
Pigeon after pigeon falls to German fire. There's one pigeon left, Shelley.
It means a dear friend, all of our hopes are
riding on you. They write out in their teeniest, tiniest
(30:56):
hand writing thinnest midpen. They write out a little message
and roll it up. They put it in the little canister.
That ties the little canister to Chepan's leg, and they
release our dear friend Cheva. And he said, so he flies.
It's raining, and it's raining like literal rain. In addition
to raining bullets, Cherami flies.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
He dodges bullet, here, robes a bolt there, bang go bang.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
All of this stuff has gone on around him. And
he flies and he flies and he goes ahead.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
He's hit.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
He falls. Major Wibberlesey's looking through his binoculars. My god,
this poor pigeons on the ground. What's going to happen now?
He just can't take his eyes away. Oh wait, he
sees something stirring. Cherami is not dead. This pigeon, this
(31:53):
badass pigeon, picks himself up canister still strapped to his leg,
and launches himself back up into the air in the rain,
in the artillery fire, and he keeps flying, and our
dear little friend Shaam covers twenty five miles and a
half an hour and gets the message through. Finally, the
American and the French stop accidentally shooting the seventy seventh,
(32:18):
and they the seventy seventh, what's left of them at
this point. The seventy seventh yet rescued, They get to
come back. And not everyone in the seventy seventh has survived,
but the one hundred and ninety four men who were
still alive at the time Sharemi delivered his message owe
their life. They owe their rescue and their life to
this undaunted little pigeon and his ability to deliver the message. Wow,
(32:40):
and that's our guy, that's our little that's our little pigeon.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
He lived, he survived, he survived, He survived.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Yeah, yeah, he flew a total of twelve missions, which
apparently is high. Apparently that's a high number of missions.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
If he flew twenty five bomber missions in World War Two,
you got to retire, right, Twelve seems pretty good.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Yeah, very honorable discharge. And so how is Sheremi commemorated today? Well,
sharam is in the Smithsonian and you can visit him.
He's been taxidermied. And also, fun fact, Sharami had been
misgendered for a long time.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
I was gonna say that because I only ever heard
I only ever heard Sham refer two as a as
a she.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah. So in the wartime records of the US Army
Signal Corps, Sharami had been listed as a she or
a hen, which is a female pigeon. But the Smithsonian,
with the help of DNA analysis, has actually definitively found
out that Sharon a me is a hey pigeon, a
boy pigeon, a cock apparently, and that actually matches the
(33:42):
gender of his French name Sharami or Sharami.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
So I'm looking at the picture of the of of
Sharami in the and my pronunciation is not as good
as yours. But we're looking looking at the picture of
share me in in the Smithsonian here in the in
the Hall of Heroes, he's only got one leg.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Was that the injury?
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Was that like a taxi error or was that the
wound like he got a foot shot off.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
I don't think it was a taxidermy error. I think
that was a war of injury.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Very lucky that it was the other leg that got
shot off, right. Could you imagine if you finished the
mission and got the message leg shot off in the process.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
I guess, so, yeah, wow, Yeah, that's incredible. That's an
incredible story.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
And there's one pigeon managing to save the lost battalion
give their coordinates so not only can they avoid friendly fire,
but also they can be found and like recovered by
the Allied forces. I am going to transition this into
a third story here. Also at Musargan was another American
(34:41):
Army aligned animal war hero. This is I want to
talk about Sergeant Stubby. Sergeant Stubby is a pit bull
terrier and he is a stray dog. He ended up
saving American lives on the battlefield. He captured some enemy spies,
he rescued wounded soldiers, and he invented the College football
halftime show. I'll explain, yes, please do.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
One of these is not like the other, but I'm
sure they're all related somehow. Once wance, he explain it
to us.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
So picture this pitbull terrier dog, not a full pit bull.
The terrier version is much smaller, about eighteen inches long,
about thirty pounds. Picture more like a terrier. He kind
of looks like a pit bull, but he's a little
bit bigger than a Boston terrier kind of thing. When
he stands on his hind legs, he just comes up
past your knees. He's hungry, he's cold, he's alone. He's
(35:30):
wandering the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, in nineteen sixteen,
eating out of garbage cans, slipping in the rain. And
one day he kind of is just wandering along looking
for some food or a warm place to sleep, and
he walks onto the parade ground of Yale University and
he gets picked up by a young man named John
Robert Conroy. Conroy thinks, oh, this is a cute dog.
(35:52):
I'm gonna name him Stubby because he's got this little
tail and it's like a little stumpy tail, and I
think it's cute. I'm gonna call him Stubby. Conroy gives
him some food, gives him a nice place to stay.
But John Robert Conroy, he's not a Yale He's a
recruit in the one hundred and second Regiment of the
American twenty sixth Infantry Division, and he's on the campus
of Yale doing basic training because he's going to ship
(36:15):
out for World War One. I think he's probably thinking
this is maybe a short term deal to have this
little pet dog while I'm here getting ready to go
off to war. But the dog really grows on him.
He goes everywhere with the dog. He feeds Stubby, he
you know, plays with him. He teaches him how to
salute by putting a little pop up to his forehead,
which I imagine is very cute. It would definitely be,
(36:37):
you know, a YouTube video with twenty five million hits
on it if it existed right now. And then it
turns out that when it's time for Conroy and the
rest of the twenty sixth Division to ship out for
Europe to go fight in World War One, John Robert
Conroy is not ready to say goodbye to his dog.
Like I said, he's a pit bull terrier. He's not
that big, So Conroy just hides him in a duffel
(36:58):
bag and brings him onto the boat that's taken all
the soldiers over to Europe. He hides him for a
while on the ship, but eventually gets discovered and he
gets called before his commanding officer, who's pretty mad that
Conroy smuggled a dog on the boat. It's not hygienic,
it's not army procedure. And then Conray is not quite
sure what to do, so he orders Stubby to present arms,
(37:20):
and Stubby salutes and the officers just like all right, fine,
I guess he can stay present.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Pause.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, And eventually Stubby kind of wins over everybody on
the boat. The machinists made on the boat makes him
a set of dog tags just like the rest of
the soldiers.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Have, and they make him a little army jacket.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
And so like literal dog tags.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Literal dog tags. Yeah, it's come full circle, right, coming together,
We'll circle yep.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
So he deploys with the twenty sixth in France to
fight in a war, which may or may not have
been an improvement over living on the streets in New Haven, Connecticut,
but it ends up working out pretty well for Stubby.
He participates in seventeen battles along four major offensives. He
serves in Samey Hell, he serves in the marn Mus
Are Gone, the one that we were just talking about
with Sharamie. And at first he's kind of a morale
(38:09):
booster for the guys. He's this cute little dog. He's happy,
he's barking, he's playing, he's having a good time. And
the trenches at World War One were grim, right, I mean,
if you've seen nineteen seventeen or any of red all
quite on the Western Front or any of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Like, oh yeah, just rim grim.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Yeah, you're getting rained on, You're getting bombed all day long.
There's machine guns everywhere, always seems to be raining. Everything's muddy,
you're living underground and everything's just wet and smells bad,
and all of your friends are dying and it's miserable.
And having a little dog around that made everybody a
little bit happier, made everybody have like a little bit
better day than they would have normally when they were
stuck in a trench during World War One. Well, in
(38:47):
February of nineteen eighteen, the Germans launch a gas attack
on the Americans, and Stubby is gassed so hard by
chemical weapons that he almost dies. Oh no, his lugs
get burned up. He has to go to the hospital
covers because it takes more than a lung full of
poison gas to put him down. And instead of kind
of being shy or being sad or regretting his decision
(39:08):
to come and fight in a war, Stubby learned the
smell and used his super dog sniffer to in the
future worn American soldiers when a gas attack was coming.
So if a chemical attack or mustard gas or anything
like that was coming, Stubby could smell it before any
of the soldiers could, and he would run up and
(39:28):
down the line of the trench and he would bite
everybody or bark at everybody or snippet them until they
put their gas masks on. And then because they hadn't
invented dog gas masks yet, they have them now they
have dog gas masks. If you want to look it up,
it's kind of cute.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
I had no idea. Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yes, the American Army today has dog gas masks for
the German shepherds that serve in the US Army. And
it's worth looking up because it's pretty cute. They didn't
have that in nineteen eighteen, and Stubby would make sure
all of his friends put their gas masks on, and
then he would go hide under a bed somewhere and.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Waited out way to go study.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, he learned to hear the sounds of German artillery
and the yells and the sounds of German soldiers coming
over the top to launch an assault on American positions.
Anytime he thought there was going to be artillery, or
they thought that Germans were coming, or they were launching
a gas attack, he would alert all of the American
soldiers in the trench that this was coming. If you
(40:24):
were a century and you were supposed to watch the
line at night and you fell asleep on the job, Stubby.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Would bite you.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Good job study.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yes, So I like to think he started kind of
as this little morale booster, like a little cute dog
to make everybody happy. And at the end it's kind
of like Terminator too, when they keep the dog around
to let him know when there's a terminator coming, Like
he's an early warning system and it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Yeah, he's really living up to the name serget right.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Yeah, yeah, and I love that he will become a sergeant,
so he's Sergeant Stubby, And I love the idea of
the sergeant just walking down the line biting everybody that
falls asleep on the job when they should be watching
the German trenches. I mean, not only stabilizes through early
detection of attacks, but also between battles. He'd go out
into no man's land. He'd go over the top into
(41:11):
no man's land, and he would look for wounded Americans.
He'd find us soldiers and he'd either if they were
lost or if they could walk, he'd lead them back
to American lines, or he would just sit on top
of them and bark until a medic came to help them.
But Stubby is wounded in battle in April of nineteen eighteen.
He's hit by a grenade while assaulting the town of Sheepri,
(41:32):
which is a sentence I never thought I'd ever read
out loud, but he did. And he took some shrapnel
to his fore limbs, his arms, and his chest, and
he ended up having to go to the hospital for
emergency surgery. He lived, he recovered, and he returned to
Allied lines just in time to march into the liberated
town of Chateau Theory. Everybody's there. They're having a big party.
Oh you know, we've thrown the Germans out. Everybody's happy.
(41:55):
The women of the town get together with the men
of the hundred and second and stitch him a little jacket,
a little army jacket that has all of his war
medals on it, including the Purple Heart, the Republic of
France Grant war Medal, the Medal Overdone, and various campaign
medals for all of the different campaign battles that he
had fallen through.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
So he got a purple Heart and all the other
metals too.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah, but he's still not done. So in September, during
the muse Argon Offensive, he sniffed out a German spy
in American trenches, just like Voytek did. Voytek had a
little bit of an advantage in combating the enemy spy
because he had a little bit of a size and
strength advantage. But Sergeant Stubby was tenacious. Sergeant Stubby sees
(42:39):
the German spy, figures out that he's a German spy.
I don't know if you could hear him talking or whatever.
I don't know, but I don't know how he could
tell that the guy was German, but.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
He figured it out.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, yeah, but he figured it out.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
He cornered the guy and started barking at him like crazy,
and the guy was like, you shut up, dog and whatever,
stops down, boy, and Stubby keeps barking at him, barking
at him, barking at him, and then some some American
soldiers starting to move, like, oh, what's going on there?
What's going on with Sergeant Stubby? He always knows when
there's bad stuff happening. And then the spy was like,
I get to get out of here, and he turns
to run away, and Sergeant Stubby leaps up and bites
(43:14):
him on the ass and doesn't let go.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Go Stubby, So the spy is captured.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
They find some important papers on him, and they also
find that this spy had received an Iron Cross for
bravery in battle. So naturally they took the iron cross
off that guy and pinned it onto Sergeant Stubby's jacket,
so he had an iron cross as well.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Now how heavy is his jacket getting at this point?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
I oh no, there's pictures of it. I mean it's
they have photographs of Sergeant Stubby that are worth looking at.
Because he wears this little jacket with all these metals
on it, and it's pretty impressive. Capturing that spy did
earn him a battlefield promotion to sergeant, which was funny
because Conroy was only a core opal, so sergeant now
outranked his owner. After the war ended, Blackjack Pershing, who
(44:07):
was the commander of the American Expeditionary Force. General Pershing
personally awarded Sergeant's a one of a kind Dog Hero
Gold medal that was also pinned on to the jacket.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Dog Hero Gold Medal.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
It's not particularly creative, but it's the only one that
has ever been issued. It was officially issued by the
United States Military. There's only one Dog Hero Gold Medal
in circulation ever in the history of the United States Army,
and it was pinned onto Sergeant Stubby's jacket, so that
is something. Stubby survives the war and goes home, goes
back to the US with Robert Conroy, and after the war,
(44:40):
Conroy goes to law school at Georgetown and he brings
a dog with him because it's his dog. What else
you're going to need bring.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
The dog with you exactly?
Speaker 3 (44:47):
Yeah, And the.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Dog starts going to all the football games, and Sergeant
Dubby is kind of a hero. He's an American war hero,
like a legitimate American war hero. And then at halftime,
when the teams go back to their locker rooms, they
would have the dog come out onto the field. They say, oh,
now we've got a very special guest today. Here's Sergeant Stubby.
He's an American war hero. And Stubby would come out
there and they put a little football out there and
(45:08):
Stubby would push the ball around with his nose and
the crowd would go crazy and cheer, and the band
would play music and everybody be having a great time.
And Stubby's out there like barking for the crowd and
you know, running around.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
And I bet the crowd loved it.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Crowd loved it, and nobody had really done anything like
that before during a halftime. So it is possible that
that was the first halftime show in the history of
college football could be, which would.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Be kind of interesting.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Even more interesting on top of that is that a
Georgetown's mascot today is a bulldog, and there is possible
that Sergeant Stubby is the Georgetown Hoya, is the original
Georgetown Hoya.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Yeah, So what's what's Stubby's legacy.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Well, so Stubby, he does the Georgetown thing.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
Conroy ends up joining the FBI and becoming a lawyer
and work for the FBI. He lives to be ninety five.
But Sergeant Stubby passes away in nineteen twenty six at
the age of ten, well about ten. And we looked
it up and pit bull terriers usually lived between eight
and sixteen years, so ten is not bad. Been mustard
gassed by the Germans and you hit with a hand grenade. Interestingly,
(46:17):
you can now find him Taxidermid in the Smithsonian Museum
of American History in the Price of Freedom exhibit, basically
across the hall from sha Ami.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
So two of our heroes, Taxi Dermid there to receive
your homage.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Yes, in the Smithsonian.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
So yeah, so good job, Sergeant Stubby. Good job, sharemy Also,
good job, boy. Check. I mean, he's not in the Smithsonian,
but he's there in spirit.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Right yeah, yeah, yeah, And honestly, like, I think we
should all aspire to have our Taxidermid corpses on display
in the Smithsonian. I would definitely be down if they
wanted to do that for me after I died.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
That would be a very distinctive honor Ben.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Anyway, anyway, on that note, yeah, I think we're done here,
Like I think that's all we have for today. But
thank you guys as always for listening, and we'll see
you on the next one.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
I really appreciate it so on show.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Ben Thompson,
and my co.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Host, doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Writing by Me and Pat, story editing by Ian Jacobs,
Brandon Phibbs and Allie Lehmer, mixing and music and sound
design by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks
to Noel Brown at iHeartRadio. Badass of the Week is
based off my website badassodek dot com, where you can
read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
If you want to reach out with questions or ideas,
hit me.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Up at Badass podcast at Badass ofdwek dot com. If
you like the podcasts, please subscribe, follow, listen, tell your friends,
tell your enemies, and we'll be back next week with
another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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