Voytek, Cher Ami, and Sergeant Stubby

Me and Pat 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.

The original article for Voytek, as well as several photos of the bear, can be found here. Cher Ami does not have an article (I briefly mention him in the first Badass book), but Sergeant Stubby’s article can be found here.

—

Episode Transcript:

It is May 16, 1944. Under the cover of darkness, the brave men of the Polish Second Corps storm uphill towards the mountaintop fortress of Monte Cassino, their advance aided by the thunderous guns of Allied artillery. Airplanes scream overhead. Muzzle flashes, tracer fire, and explosions flash brilliant in the darkness.

But the Allied guns must keep firing. That’s why the Polish 22nd 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 all by himself – a task he completes tirelessly, for hours, to help his men succeed in the battle. This soldier's name is Private Voytek. And he is a bear.

Like, an actual fucking bear.

And this isn't fiction.

Ben: Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week! My name is Ben Thompson. I'm here, as always, with my co-host, Pat Larash. Pat, I noticed you have a new cat!

Pat [00:01:18] Yes. Luna is a kitten. 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 meow or something in the background, or more likely, the sound of something being knocked off of a shelf. Yeah, that's Luna, the kitten.

Ben [00:01:35] A 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.

Pat [00:01:44] Yes. And from the point of view of the podcast, I think it's a great idea. From the point of view of, you know, living in my apartment, I don't know.

Ben [00:01:52] I was telling you about when I was in Venice, there was the Venetian guy who took his cat into naval battles with him. He was one of the Doges, and he was fighting, generally, the Turks. And the cat used to go into battle with him. 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?

Pat [00:02:14] Well, I'm not going to eliminate that possibility. You should see her go after these little felt catnip mouse toys that we have for her. She does battle with them. They do not last. She does not take prisoners.

Ben [00:02:27] I have two cats and they're like that. They just give them one of these little, like, fuzzy, cute stuffed animal things. And then you wake up the next morning and it's head's been ripped off, it's jammed into my shoe, and they skin it and they eat the guts and it's like… Oh my God.

Pat [00:02:43] And the cats, they're sharing with you somehow, I think.

Ben [00:02:47] I guess, 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.

Pat [00:02:57] And that Venetian dude. I mean, I'm sure he and the cat had a good relationship. 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 Ratatouille.

Ben [00:03:09] Yeah, like, just. Just just making him point to various things on the map. Like, yo, you go here.

Pat [00:03:15] Yeah, Yeah.

Ben [00:03:17] We'll cross the T. We'll have the Turks right where we want them.

Pat [00:03:20] Sure. Yeah.

Ben [00:03:21] Our baby likes to play with our cats, but, like, they're way bigger than him. He he provokes them and they try to restrain themselves from mauling him.

There was one time that the boy cat was getting pretty grumpy and you could see it in his face and he was really upset, but he was not attacking the baby. My wife was like, “it’d be really scary if that thing was bigger”. And I was like, “we have that. It's called a man eating tiger, and they kill people”. It is serious stuff.

So, I mean, I think that's kind of a good lead into what we're going to talk about today, which is 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 the… well, anybody who has been to my website or knows of my website found this article somewhere. It's it's among the most popular articles that I've ever written on the website, which is great because it's it's one of my favorites also. So today I want to talk about Voytek the Bear. I want to talk about the bear that fought for Poland in World War Two.

So Poland famously had a pretty rough World War II. Actually, they've had a pretty rough several centuries period of time because they're kind of stuck in a very bad geographic location. The 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 and a very strong military tradition. They just, unfortunately, always seem to be stuck between Germany and Russia. And because moving geography is not a particularly easy thing, they seem that that's going to be their their 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 is on the other side with Adolf Hitler. They decide, hey, let's just like sign this non-aggression pact. We won't fight each other. Let's just team up and beat up the Poles. And whoever takes whatever land, that's mine, you can just take whatever, and, like, let's just get rid of these guys. And so in 1939, that's what they do.

They 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 rap for some of the things that happen because they collapse relatively quickly. But there's a lot of jokes that are made about, oh, the Polish like attacked tanks with cavalry. And they 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? Right. You've got to charge tanks with cavalry, if that's all you got. You don't really have any other options.

Pat [00:06:13] Yeah. You use what you got.

Ben [00:06:15] Yeah, exactly. What are you going to do? Right. They actually held up pretty well. They held out longer than people thought they were going to. And there are a couple of 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 the prisoner of war camps and all the horrible stuff that 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 is taken, the Germans just keep on marching and they go right into Russia and they're crushing Russia. In the early days of the attack of World War Two, 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. We're going to fight the Germans.

Pat [00:07:19] 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 know, they're released to go fight. So just surviving the gulag itself is pretty badass to begin with.

Ben [00:07:32] 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 subzero temperatures every day with substandard clothing and you're out there with a pickaxe in a rock quarry, right? It was a hard work. And, you know, there's a lot written about how rough this time was. And these guys were enduring this pretty terrible stuff. And then Stalin's like, good news, guys. Now you get to go charge Germans! And the Poles, they weren’t happy to be in the gulags.

Pat [00:08:02] Yeah, I bet they weren't.

Ben [00:08:02] So 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 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 Rommel, the Desert Fox. So the British eighth Army is there. And so these Poles that get released from the gulags, they get sent down through Palestine into Egypt to help fight Rommel. And one of these groups, they're called the Polish Second Corps. They're a unit that forms of these former Polish soldiers who are kind of homeless now. And they're they're on the move. And while they're traveling through Palestine, one of the one of the groups of the Polish Second Corps was the 22nd Transport Artillery Company. These guys drive the trucks that bring ammunition to the artillery pieces for the Polish army. These guys 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. He’s 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 ok? They give him some food and some water and some chocolate. They don't have a lot of rations, right? They just have what they were carrying on them. But they give him some stuff and and the boy’s very, very grateful for it. And then the Poles say, well, what's 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 being carried in a bag through the desert. The boy is having a hard time taking care of it, 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.

Pat [00:09:45] I think it's weird, too.

Ben [00:09:46] Yeah, it's pretty strange. A boy wandering through the desert with a bag that has a bear in it, 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? We'll take care of it. And so the boy gives them the bear and they they nurse him with a little baby bottle of milk and they name him Voytek, which is a Polish name. I spell it Voytek, but in Polish you would spell it Wojtek, which you'll see sometimes, because Wojtek is also pronounced Voytek. That's because Polish is a crazy language and I don't understand how anybody learns it correctly.

Pat [00:10:23] Clearly the Poles manage.

Ben [00:10:25] Exactly. So somebody does, yeah.

Pat [00:10:27] Anyway, so Voytek, however you are spelling his name. The bear. The bear cub.

Ben [00:10:31] Yes. So Voytek becomes the official mascot of the 22nd 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 600 pounds. So now he's a big bear. He's a isn't a grizzly bear size, but he's a bigger than a person. He’s a 500 pound bear. But he's been grown up with these guys from his 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 like a puppy would. He sits like a person would sit, but then six his head like a puppy would. He likes to drink beer. He likes to smoke cigarettes.

Pat [00:11:18] Cigarette Bears are pretty badass.

Ben [00:11:19] Yeah, 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. You start drinking, you start drinking and smoking. Minute you wake up until the minute you fall asleep.

Pat [00:11:33] Yeah, 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.

Ben [00:11:44] Yeah, Like, yeah, even if they knew that lung cancer was a possibility going into your sixties and seventies, there was definitely a chance you were going to get blown up that night. So, you know, maybe this cigarette and like this beer isn't going to be so bad at long term.

Pat [00:11:59] And the bear was one of them.

Ben [00:12:00] Yeah, he was one of them, right? At first it was kind of like this cute little moral mascot. And then it became one of the guys. He'd ride with them. He'd sleep in a tent like they would. He'd march in formation with them. There's pictures of this stuff. Like the guys would wrestle with the bear, and the bear would play wrestle with them for fun. He would drink beers with them, like out of a bottle. Like you'd hand him a beer bottle and drink it. There’s pictures of the stuff. And it's really it's amazing. It's really, really funny and really cute and just unbelievable to look at.

So one story that comes from this time is they were encamped in Palestine and there was one day that a German agent managed to sneak into the Polish camp in 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 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. He's in there, he's looking around and he's got his piece of paper with them. He's got his journal and pen, and he's he's looking out the windows. He's kind of peeking out here and there. He's making notes on what the Poles have. These guys are here. I'm seeing some artillery and 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 guttural growl and he turns and he sees up there. He sees our friend Voytek, about two feet away from him, six and a half feet 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 shifty, 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. Voytek clubs him with a paw. The dude hits the ground, Voytek stands over top of him and ROARS. And the rest of the Polish troops around him come running to see what's going on. And they find this poor, sad German agent lying on the floor of the bathhouse, having been clubbed upside the head by Voytek, the bear. He is immediately ready to confess 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 22nd Transport Company has seen any action in World War Two, Voytek is already a war hero for capturing a German spy.

Pat [00:14:56] Good job, Voytek! Now, I wanted to go back to one detail: Did I hear you right? That Voytek, our friend Voytek, who is a bear, wasin 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?

Ben [00:15:19] Yes, Voytek could work the baths. 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 water.

Pat [00:15:35] Cool.

Ben [00:15:37] Yes. So after this, the Poles link up with the British Eighth Army and they're going to go fight Rommel in North Africa. But there's one problem. 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 Eighth Army.

So what do the Poles do? They've got Voytek and he's one of the guys. They can't go into battle without this guy. So what do they do? They enlist him in the Polish army. They give him a title. They give him a rank. He becomes Private Voytek. 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, whatever. If that's if you feel that strongly about it, you can have him.

Pat [00:16:33] The paperwork's all in order.

Ben [00:16:34] Yeah, papers were in order. They were all filed correctly and on time. And so when the truck pulled up and the bear had his head out the window, nobody said anything to him.

So they fight through North Africa. The Second Corps doesn't see a ton of action there, but the Eighth Army does defeat Rommel and push him out of North Africa, and then they launch an invasion of Italy. The idea is to push up through Rome, to 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 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 1944. So five, six months before D-Day. The idea is the Germans have to decide which coast they're going to defend because that was going to be a pretty massive endeavor to try to fortify Normandy and Italy 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 Cassino, which is the bloodiest and most brutal battle that is fought in the Italian campaign. It's part of the defense that surrounds Rome. So if you wanted to take Rome, you had to break through the lines. And this was a really good spot to do it. However, very, very heavily fortified. It's an old was built in 500 AD. It was an old medieval abbey that over the last thousand years had been built and rebuilt and built and rebuilt. But it is Monte Cassino. Monte means mountain, right? It's at the top of a mountain. It is heavily entrenched. There is no easy way up there. You have to climb and scramble and claw your way up against line after line of trenches 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 1944. When the battle begins, they launch 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're there for five months battling the Germans day and night. Airplanes, artillery, gunfire. There's four huge multi division assaults on the hill. They just keep getting thrown back and thrown back, making progress inch by inch. It's a very, very difficult struggle to take this position. The 22nd Transport Artillery Company and Voytek, their job is to support the 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 ammo dump with as many artillery shells as they can load. They drive them to the front lines and they carry them to the guns and the guns shoot them. And because you have these guys assaulting these positions, you need to have constant artillery fire, right? 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 it keeps their snipers and their machine gunners heads down so they're not firing as much. Give your guys a little bit more time to close with them. It is a very important job and it's hard work because you're carrying these big, heavy artillery shells back and forth all day long.

The battle continues and casualties start to mount. The allies are making progress, but it's slow. They're getting beat up. Germans are countering with airplanes and artillery that are hitting especially the back lines of the Polish forces, the artillery to transport every man in the Polish army along. Second Corps is called into action. And every bear.

Pat [00:20:22] Including our friend Voytek.

Ben [00:20:24] Including our friend Voytek.

Voytek, the Bear Private in the Polish Second Corps, carries artillery shells from the truck up the mountain to the guns day and night to keep the guns firing. They trained 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 Voytek 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 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 22nd 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 big height of the fighting is in the middle of May. There he is loading the 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 Cassino, and they fly a Polish flag over that abbey. It's one of the biggest successes that they have of the war. And Voytek was there for it. And it's pretty amazing. Rome falls within a month, Mussolini is deposed and the Germans have to withdraw back out of Italy.

Pat [00:21:55] So what happens to Voytek then?

Ben [00:21:57] Well, Voytek serves through the rest of the war. 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 of the Third Reich, but now 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 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's a lot of the soldiers who fought in the second quarter end up living in England, and Voytek is no exception. But he’s not a house pet. So you can't just go home and live in somebody's flat in London.

Pat [00:22:38] No, especially not a flat in London. I mean, have you seen the size of some of them? They're like little postage stamps.

Ben [00:22:43] He literally wouldn't fit in a closet. Yeah, that's that's definitely true. They put him in the Edinburgh Zoo, so he goes and lives in the Edinburgh Zoo, where a lot of his people from his old unit also live in Edinburg, and they would save it for the next, you know, 20 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 there at the zoo and didn't realize what was going on. But I'm sure Voytek appreciated it. They'd smuggle him in cigarettes and beers and stuff, I guess. And, you know, by all accounts, he was he was a pretty happy dude at the at the Edinburg Zoo. He he passes away of natural causes in 1963 at the age of 22, which was pretty good for a bear, especially one that's survived a war.

Pat [00:23:31] And all those cigarettes and booze.

Ben [00:23:33] Yeah, alcoholic, hard-smoking, hard-drinking bear. Yeah. 22 is pretty good. They have statues of them now in Poland and Scotland and England. Plaques commemorating him at the Canadian War Museum and the Imperial War Museum. It's just an amazing story. And I really encourage you to to go look at the photos of this bear. Go look up, Voytek the Bear. It's pretty amazing to watch him marching around with the Polish army.

Pat [00:23:56] Yeah, I've looked at some of those photos and they range from cute to absolutely amazing.

Ben [00:24:02] Yeah. Like there's some of them where it's like, “Oh, he's really cute little bear”. And then there's some where 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 him. His arms are bigger around than that guy's torso.”

Pat [00:24:16] And that's how he can carry all that artillery.

Ben [00:24:18] 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. Yeah.

Pat [00:24:33] Oh, snap.

So Voytek is this big, over six foot tall, you know, several hundred pound, you know, big Hercules of a creature, but 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, you know, rewind in your heads to World War One, I want to tell you 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?

So it's 1918 and World War One is raging across Europe and we're in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which is in the northeastern forests of France, deep in the Argonne Forest. And over 500 U.S. troops of the 77th Division under Major Charles W. Whittlesey thought that their flanks were being supported by other American troops and French troops. But remember that this is 1918 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 up, which means that they went too far into the forest and they are now trapped behind your mines. They have no access to supplies, no access to reinforcements, their ammunition’s running out, food's running out. Even the water is running out. Nearby, there's a burbling stream of fresh water. But if you want to get to it, you have to crawl 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 lot of friendly fire. There's nothing friendly about it. It's American, I mean, but the consequences are not at all friendly. American heavy artillery by accident. Killed 30 men of the 77th. And other men in the 77th are dying not just from this friendly fire, but also from German fire. And also just from the hardships of being cut off from reliable supplies and water.

Ben [00:27:03] I think I've heard this story before. This is the Lost Battalion.

Pat [00:27:06] This is totally the Lost Battalion. 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 call them misplaced.

So they need to let the other Americans and the French know where they are so they can stop inadvertently whipping their asses. And Major Whittlesey, here, in charge of the 77th, 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. And also, our guys, the Lost Battalion, 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, we're the 77th. We're here. These are our coordinates. Please stop shooting us. That's a reasonable request, right?

Well, this is 1918, and back in those days, carrier pigeons were still a thing. And the Pigeon Fanciers Society in Britain had actually been raising and training carrier pigeons. Some of them they actually had gotten from France, and they had been training and raising carrier pigeons, which they then gave to the American Army, the U.S. Army, to use as a form of communication.

Ben [00:28:33] I love the carrier pigeons. Just it seems so medieval, right? It's like “send a raven”, you know. I think it's amazing that they they have machine guns and submarines and airplanes in this war, and they're still sending birds with little messages attached to them.

Pat [00:28:48] Yeah, totally. And I mean, and you said medieval, we actually have sources attesting to the use of carrier pigeons or 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. Apparently, Hirtius, one of Julius Caesar's lieutenants, used pigeons. He would keep them in the dark and he would keep them starved and be super motivated to take a message out. But anyway, anyway, I digress.

The 77th Battalion, the Lost Battalion, is undaunted. They have pigeons. And so Major Whittelsey and his staff, presumably someone there, has really, really, really good handwriting. Very good fine motor coordination. They write out a little message, “Hey, we're here where these coordinates. Please stop shooting us. Love, the 77th” and roll it up. Stick it in that little canister. 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 minding its own business. Maybe like eating a cheese doodle, maybe pooping on a statue. This is a pigeon flying 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 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 Whittelsey sends out a pigeon. Is it going to make it? The men of the 77th, they're like looking with their binoculars. Shoot. They shot that down. He sends out another pigeon, shot down, sends out another pigeon, doesn't make it. Pigeon after pigeon falls to German fire. There's one pigeon left, Cher Ami. It means dear friend. All of our hopes are riding on you. They write out in their teeniest, tiniest handwriting. They write out a little message. They put it in the little canister, then tie the little canister his leg and to release our dear friend.

He flies. It's raining, and it's raining like literal rain in addition to raining bullets. Cher Ami flies. He dodges bullets here. He dodges bullets there. All of this stuff has gone on around him. And he flies and he flies and he's hit! He falls. Major Whittelsey is looking through his binoculars. Four pigeons on the ground. What's going to happen now? He just can't take his eyes away. Oh, wait! He sees something stirring. Cher Ami is not dead. This pigeon, this badass pigeon, picks himself up, canisters 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 Cher Ami covers 25 miles in half an hour and gets the message through. Finally, the American and the French stop accidentally shooting the 77th and the 77th, what's left of them at this point, the 77th get rescued. They get to come back, and not everyone in the 77th has survived, but the 194 men who were still alive at the time Cher Ami delivered his message owe him their life. They owe their rescue in their life to this undaunted little pigeon and his ability to deliver the message. Wow. And that's our guy. That's our little special little pigeon.

Ben [00:32:43] He lived. He survived it.

Pat [00:32:46] He survived. Yeah. He flew a total of 12 missions, which apparently is high. Apparently, that's a high number of missions.

Ben [00:32:54] If you flew 25 bomber missions in World War Two you got to retire. 12 seems pretty good.

Pat [00:33:00] Yeah, very honorable discharge. And so how is Cher Ami commemorated today? Well, Cher Ami is in the Smithsonian, and you can visit him. He's been taxidermied. And also fun fact, Cher Ami had been misgendered for a long time.

Ben [00:33:17] I was going to say that because I only ever heard Cher Ami referred to as a as a she.

Pat [00:33:21] Yeah. So in the war time, records of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Cher Ami 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 showing him he is a he pigeon, a boy pigeon, a cock, apparently. And that actually matches the gender of his French name, Cher Ami.

Ben [00:33:45] So I'm looking at the picture of the pit of of Cher Ami — and my pronunciation is not as good as yours — but we’re looking at the picture of Cher Ami in the in the Smithsonian here in the in the Hall of Heroes. He's only got one leg. Was that the injury? Was that like a taxidermy error or was that the wound like he got a foot shot off?

Pat [00:34:03] I don't think it was a taxidermy error. I think that was a work injury.

Ben [00:34:07] Very lucky that it was the other leg that got shot off, right? Could you imagine if he finished the mission and got the message leg shot off on the way?

Pat [00:34:15] I guess so, yeah. Wow.

Ben [00:34:17] Yeah. That's incredible. That's an incredible story. 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 recovered by the allied forces.

I am going to transition this into a third story here. Also at the Meuse-Argonne was another American Army aligned animal war hero. I want to talk about Sergeant Stubby.

Sergeant Stubby is a pit bull terrier and he's 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.

Pat [00:35:01] Yes, please do. One of these is not like the other, but I'm sure they're all related somehow. Why don’t you to explain it to us?

Ben [00:35:08] So picture this pit bull terrier dog, not a full pit bull. The terrier version is much smaller, about 18 inches long, about 30 pounts. 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. And 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 wandering the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1916, eating out of garbage cans, sleeping 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. I'm going to name him Stubby because he's got this little stumpy tail, and I think it's cute. I'm going to call him Stubby. Conroy, gives him some food, gives him a nice place to stay. But John Robert Conroy, he's not a Yalie. He's a recruit in the 102nd Regiment of the American 26th Infantry Division, and he's on the campus of Yale doing basic training because he's going to ship 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 plays with them. He teaches him how to salute by putting a little paw to his forehead, which I imagine is very cute. It would definitely be, you know, a YouTube video with 25 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 26th 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 them in a duffel bag and brings them on to the boat that's taking all the soldiers over to Europe. He hides them for a while on the ship, but eventually gets discovered and he gets called before his commanding officer, who's pretty mad. Conroy smuggled the dog on the boat. It's not hygienic. It's not army procedure. And then Conroy is not quite sure what to do. So he orders Stubby to present arms and stubby salutes. And the officer is just like, All right, fine. I guess he can stay.

Pat [00:37:28] Present Paws.

Ben [00:37:29] Yeah. And eventually, Stubby kind of wins over everybody on the boat. The machinist’s mate on the boat makes him a set of dog tags just like the rest of the soldiers have. And they make him a little army jacket.

Pat [00:37:38] And so, like, literal dog tags.

Ben [00:37:40] Literal dog tags. Yeah, it's. It's. It's come full circle. Right. Coming together.

Pat [00:37:44] Full circle. Yep.

Ben [00:37:46] So he deploys with the 26th 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 17 battles along four major offensives. He serves in Saint-Michel. He serves in the Marne. Meuse-Argonne, the one that we were just talking about with Cher Ami. And at first, he's kind of a morale booster for the guys. He's this cute little dog. He's happy, He's. He's barking, he's playing. He's having a good time in the trenches at World War One. Which were grim, right? I mean, if you've seen 1917 or any read All Quiet on the Western Front or any of this stuff.

Pat [00:38:22] Oh yeah. Just awful.

Ben [00:38:24] Yeah. You're getting rained on, you're getting bombed all day long. There's machine guns everywhere. It 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 it made everybody a little bit happier. I 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 February of 1918, the Germans launch a gas attack on the Americans, and Stubby is gassed so hard by chemical weapons that he almost dies.

Pat [00:38:56] Oh, no.

Ben [00:38:57] His legs get burned up. He has to go to the hospital. He recovers, 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 to come fight in a war, Stubby learned the smell and used his super dog sniffer to in the future warn 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 down the line of the trench and he would bite everybody or bark at everybody or snip at them until they put their gas masks on. And then because they hadn't invented gas masks yet, they have them now they have gas masks. If you want to look it up, it's it's kind of cute.

Pat [00:39:42] I had no idea. Wow.

Ben [00:39:44] Yes. The American Army today has dog gas masks for the German shepherds that serve in the in the US army. And it's it's worth looking at because it's pretty cute. They didn't have that in 1918. 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 wait it out.

Pat [00:40:00] Way to go Stubby.

Ben [00:40:01] 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 the 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 were a century and you were supposed to watch the line at night and you fell asleep on the job, Stubby would bite you.

Pat [00:40:30] Good job, Stubby.

Ben [00:40:33] So I like to think he started kind of as this little morale booster, like little cute dog to make everybody happy. And at the end, it's kind of like Terminator 2 and they keep the dog around to let them know when there's a Terminator coming. Like he's an early warning system. And it's it's pretty awesome.

Pat [00:40:47] Yeah, he's really living up to the name Sarge, right?

Ben [00:40:49] 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 that that falls asleep on the job when they should be watching the German trenches.

But he not only saved lives through early detection of attacks, but also between battles. He'd go out into no man's land. He'd go over the top in the no man's land, and he would look for wounded Americans. He'd find U.S. 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 1918. He is hit by a grenade while assaulting the town of Schieprey. Which is a sentence I never thought I'd ever read out loud. But he did. And he took some shrapnel through his forelimbs, his arms and his chest. And he ended up having to go to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Pat: He lived?

Ben: Yes, He recovered and he returned to two allied lines just in time to march into the liberated town of Chateau Thierry. Everybody's there. They're having a big party. You know, we've thrown the Germans out. Everybody's happy. The the women of the town get together with the men of 102nd, and they 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, Grand War Medal, the Medal of Verdun, and various like campaign medals for all of the different campaign battles that he had fought through.

Pat [00:42:15] So he got a Purple Heart and all of the other medals, too. Yeah.

Ben [00:42:18] And he's still not done. So in September, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, he sniffed out a German spy in American trenches, just like Voytek did. Voytek had a little bit of an advantage in 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 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 he.

Pat [00:42:48] Figured it out. Yeah.

Ben [00:42:49] Yeah, but he figured it out. He cornered the guy and started barking at him like crazy. And the guy was like, “Will you shut up dog? What? 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? Sergeant Stubby? He always knows when there's bad stuff happening.” And then the spy was like, I got to get out of here. And he turns to run away. And Sergeant Stubby leaps up and bites him on the ass and doesn't let go.

Pat [00:43:16] Who wants to go against Stubby?

Ben [00:43:21] So the spy is captured. 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 now.

Pat [00:43:38] How heavy is his jacket getting at this point?

Ben [00:43:41] I don't know. There's pictures of it. I mean, it's they have photographs of of Sergeant Stubby that are worth looking at because he wears this little jacket with all these medals on it. And it's it's pretty impressive. Capturing that spy did earn him a battlefield promotion to Sergeant, which was funny because Conroy was only a corporal. So Sergeant Stubby now outranked his owner. After the war ended, Black Jack Pershing, who was the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General Pershing, personally awarded Sergeant Stubby a one of a kind Dog Hero Gold Medal that was also pinned on to the jacket.

Pat [00:44:16] Dog Hero Gold Medal.

Ben [00:44:18] It's it's not a particularly creative name, 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 on to sergeant his jacket. So that is something.

Stubby survives the war and goes home, goes back to the U.S. with Robert Conroy. And after the war, Conroy goes to law school at Georgetown and he brings the dog with him because it's his dog. What else are you going to do? And the dog starts going to all the football games, and Sergeant Stubby 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’d 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 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 would be you having a great time and and Stubby’s out there like barking for the crowd and, you know, running around.

Pat [00:45:20] And I bet the crowd loved it.

Ben [00:45:21] The 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 be kind of interesting. Even more interesting on top of that is that a Georgetown's mascot today is a bulldog, and it is possible that Sergeant Stubby is the Georgetown Hoya, The original Georgetown Hoya. Yeah.

Pat [00:45:47] So what's Stubby’s legacy?

Ben [00:45:50] Well, so Stubby, he does the Georgetown thing. Conroy ends up joining the FBI and becoming a lawyer. Worked for the FBI. He lives to be 95. But Sergeant Stubby passes away in 1926 at the age of ten, about ten. And we looked it up and and pit bull terrier is usually lived between eight and 16 years, so ten is not bad. He’d been mustard gassed by the Germans and hit with a hand grenade. Interestingly, you can now find him taxidermied in the Smithsonian Museum of American History in the Price of Freedom exhibit, basically across the hall from Cher Ami.

Pat [00:46:25] So two of our heroes taxidermied there to receive your homage in the Smithsonian. So yeah. So good job, Sergeant Stubby. Good job, Cher Ami. Also good job, Voytek. I mean, he's not in the Smithsonian, but he's there in spirit, right?

Ben [00:46:40] Yeah. And honestly, like, I think we should all aspire to have our taxidermied corpses on display in the Smithsonian. I would definitely be down if they wanted to do that for me after I died.

Pat [00:46:50] That would be a very distinctive honor.

Ben [00:46:54] And 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 will we'll see you on the next one.

Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as 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 podcasts.