533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis

0:00Music

0:10We were making our way through the deserted fields looking for stray hens and eggs when a nearby artillery unit opened fire. We went to look and found a battery of Polish gunners setting up for a barrage. The gun site was hidden in a clearing within a large wood. As we watched, suddenly out of the wood came a large bear walking on its hind legs. It seemed to be carrying something. Both Vincent and I shouted a warning to the gunners that a bear was going towards them, but nobody responded. The bear went up to the trail legs of the artillery gun and placed a shell on the ground. The bear then went back into the wood and reappeared with another shell.

0:53By this time, we'd realised that the bear was tame and most likely a circus bear. We just went on our way. That was John Clarke. And in April 1944, he was serving with a black watch in the Monte Cassino campaign, one of the most celebrated campaigns of the Second World War, the Battle for Italy. And he is remembering an incident near the village of Aquafondata, which is six miles from Monte Cassino. And he and his comrade Vincent were foraging for food. And that story, Tom, which you have quoted, it's actually quoted by Eileen Orr in her book Wojtek the Bear, Polish War Hero. and as you say in your notes it's like an armored bear from philip pullman's stories the last episode we were talking about the fate of poland we talked a lot about dancing gdansk there's a brilliant museum of the second world war in gdansk and as is my want when i went there with sambro jr we went to the shop to look for merch and they didn't have very much i have to say but what they did have was dozens of copies of a children's book in polish about this bear Wojtek who is an absolute folk hero in poland isn't he and a symbol of polish resistance and polish heroism in the second world war and i think every polish friend i've got has said do you know the story of Wojtek so particular shout out if she's listening to this to Bozena who first mentioned Wojtek to us and in fact gave us a children's book about it maybe it was the one that you saw in the shop in Gdansk.

2:29And this is about a bear, but important to emphasize that it's about a Polish bear. So in the account that you read about those British officers walking the battlefield of Monte Cassino, the bear is helping Polish gunners. And these Polish gunners are fighting on the British side against the Germans. And so in a sense, this is what I said at the end of our our previous series that we wanted to give a kind of coda to that story terribly dark bleak somber story but I guess this is also a palate cleanser it's a way of kind of plunging back into the heart of darkness but coming out perhaps the other side and I think I mean I don't want to speak for Polish people maybe they can correct me but I think that is that is a huge part of why the incredible story of Wojtek, the bear who basically becomes a Polish soldier, why it has the kind of resonance that it does.

3:30So before we come to Wojtek, we've also done a number of episodes on famous animals in history. So we've done dogs, we've done monkeys, and we have actually already had a number of bears on The Rest is History. So we did an episode on the inauguration of the Colosseum in AD 80, and that featured a bear from Caledonia. There's the polar bear that was given to Henry III by the King of Norway in 1252, and which was kept in the Tower of London. And then there was Lord Byron, who kept a bear when he was a student at Trinity, because he'd been told he couldn't have a dog. So he wrote in his diary, I've got a new friend, the finest in the world.

4:12When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him. And my reply was he should sit for a fellowship. So Byron and his bear. None of these were military bears. None of these were fighting bears. And Wojtek is a fighting bear. Wojtek is a military bear. There are actually other examples of bears who served as mascots in war. Probably the most famous of these is an American black bear who was called Winnipeg. And Winnipeg came into the possession of a guy who originally had come from Birmingham. So he was a Brummie who'd emigrated to Canada. And he'd settled in Winnipeg in Manitoba.

4:47And there he'd become a vet. And then in 1914, war broke out. and the news came to Canada, you know, Dominion in the British Empire. So lots of Canadians signed up to fight for king and country. And Harry Colborne, he got the train from Winnipeg to get shipped for Britain. And at a station in Ontario, he got off the platform and there for reasons that are not entirely clear, because it seems quite an odd thing to be for sale, but he gets an orphaned bear cub. And because he's already feeling homesick for his native town of Winnipeg, he calls this bear Winnie, takes him, this orphan bear with him to Britain, trains with the Canadian unit that he signed up to.

5:33And then in December 1914, he crosses the channel to go and fight on the Western Front. And he can't take this orphan bear with him. So he donates it to the London Zoo. so Winnie becomes one of the star attractions in London Zoo and Winnie is there the whole way through the First World War and stays there after the First World War and in 1924 a writer called A.A. Milne takes his son who's a little boy called Christopher Robin to see Winnie this Canadian black bear and christopher robin is you know thinks this bear is wonderful goes back home and changes the name of his teddy bear from edward bear to winnie the pooh that's winnie the pooh winnie the pooh was this uh yeah wow that's amazing but the real winnie the pooh as in winnipeg never saw action is that right doesn't see there's a big difference with boytech okay so there is another famous bear that does see action because this is a bear who gets taken up in the Korean War by a US paratrooper unit.

6:45And she's bought as a cub from a Japanese zoo, say right at the beginning of the Korean War in 1953. And the paratroopers, you know, they go to Korea and they take her up in planes and make her do paratroop jumps. God, that's a shock for a bear. I mean, does she do it? Does she like it? Well, she hates it. I mean, she absolutely hates it. I mean, you know, you're a bear and you're being chucked out of a plane. Of course you're going to hate it. And on her second jump, understandably, she's so upset that she starts biting the soldiers as they try to push her out. And then on her fourth attempt, she actually, she chews up the boot of a soldier.

7:20But they keep doing it. They keep chucking her out of the plane with her parachute. And she ends up garlanded with honours. So she wins a parachutist badge. She wins a Purple Heart. She wins a Korean service medal. But I think it's fair to say that she's not an enthusiastic paratrooper. She doesn't enjoy it. And in 1954, so she's only seized a year's service. She's discharged and sent to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. So we could have gone to Lincoln Park Zoo when we were in America, couldn't we? We were in Chicago. Yeah, we never did. So those, I guess, are the two bears who serve as mascots and who have kind of won a certain measure of fame.

7:58But Wojtek's story is a different order. I think it's the strangest, it's the most moving, and it's definitely the most historically resonant of any bear, not just a military bear, but any bear in history. Because Wojtek isn't just a mascot. He's literally enrolled in the Polish army as a private for reasons that we'll come to. And rises, right? And is promoted. Probably gets promotion to a corporal. There's kind of debate about this, but I think almost certainly becomes a corporal in the Polish army. And the reason that it's a moving story is that Wojtek, who is, again, like the two previous bears that we talked about, is born as a cub.

8:40He grows up and he provides an emotional focus for soldiers who had been uprooted from their homeland. Many of them lost their families, had suffered unspeakable traumas. And this bear provided them with a focus for kind of wellsprings of love that perhaps otherwise wouldn't have had a focus. And I think that this is a huge part of why Wojtek is so famous and celebrated in Poland. But I have to say, there's also a personal link for me, because as we will find out, Wojtek ends up very close to the banks of the Tweed. Right, where you've got your house. My Scottish estate. Yes. So, I mean, it's kind of mad to say this about, you know, a bear, but I think his story really does provide a window onto the kind of the miseries of Polish history in the 1940s.

9:35But it is also, it's a kind of charming story at the same time. And it's one that has a, it feels like it has a kind of personal connection to me. So it's, it's a story I've wanted to do for a very, very long time. All right, let's put it back into the context. Let's pick up in a way from where we ended that series. So Poland was defeated swiftly by the Nazis. Warsaw was taken and then Poland was divided up and Poland vanishes from the map of Europe. But of course, a lot of the Polish army have escaped, haven't they? They crossed the border into Romania. And a lot of Poles who are scattered are determined to continue the struggle, aren't they?

10:12They have not yet given up their government in exile and so on. So how does Wojtek sort of fit into that story? Okay, so as you say, Poland is defeated. It's carved up. It vanishes from the map. But there are Poles who want to continue the fight. And basically there are three ways in which Poles are able to do this. And the first, and I guess the most dangerous, is to continue the fight in Poland itself. And as you said in the previous episode, the German occupying forces have targeted the Polish elites for complete elimination. And their aim is to reduce the mass of the Polish population to kind of helitage, to the status of the helots that the Spartans used as their slave labor.

10:56That's what the Germans want to make the Poles become. And so effectively for lots of Polish young men, they feel that resistance, I mean, why wouldn't you resist? Because the alternative is either enslavement or extermination. And this is something that they are kind of facing up to very, very early on. So in April 1940, forced conscription in Germany is introduced. Polish young men are kind of rounded up and taken as slave labor into Germany. And so rather than submit to that, lots of Poles take to the forests. And this is the genesis of the Polish resistance. Yeah, of course. It's like something out of medieval history.

11:38They're centered in the vast woods and forests that spread over much of Poland. And by 1943, the Polish resistance numbers almost half a million. which is by far the largest resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe. But its ultimate fate is miserable because it's destroyed by the Germans. I mean, this is kind of the embroiled in the Warsaw Rising and all that. And then, of course, by the Soviets who are invading and who are not friends of the Polish resistance, want to see it wiped out. Yeah, that's a terrible story. And I'm sure one day we'll come to that awful story. The other option, if you have managed to get outside Poland, is to continue the fight by signing up, perhaps with the French, and then after the fall of France with Britain.

12:22And the Polish forces in Britain come to number almost 80 ,000. So we talked yesterday about how lots of Polish pilots fight for the RAF in the Battle of Britain, perform heroically. Polish sailors join the Royal Navy. Churchill admires them hugely. I think that they garner a great deal of sympathy in Britain, both for the fate of their country, for the evident heroism with which they're defending Britain, and I suspect a measure of guilt at the failure of Britain to come to Poland's rescue. And these soldiers are stationed, lots of them are stationed in Scotland. They're posted along the eastern Scottish coastline to ward off a possible invasion from Norway.

13:12And one of the places where a camp is set up is above the Tweed, just downriver from Berwick. And this camp is called Winfield Camp. It's a centre for lots of Poles there. So there is, of course, a third reservoir of potential soldiers that is waiting to be tapped on when the Soviet Union enters into alliance with Britain in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, which in turn means that the Poles and the Russians are then fighting on the same side. But before that, the fate of Poles in Soviet-occupied Poland is pretty much as grim as it had been for the Polish elites in Germany, because the Soviets want to eliminate them just as much as the Germans do.

13:57And you described how, in your Bravora, the episode that you did before this, how the Soviet forces had invaded Poland on the 17th of September 1939 in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It comes as a total surprise to the Poles, to the Western allies. The Polish forces are already disintegrating and this just completes that process. 200 ,000 prisoners of war are taken. 15 ,000 of these are officers and these are taken to three camps in Russia and Ukraine and then they vanish and no one is really sure what happens to them. And the truth is only discovered later in the war, in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, when the Germans are invading, going into Russia, into Ukraine, and in a forest called Katyn, they discover the corpses of 5 ,000 murdered Polish officers.

14:53And the Germans, the Germans with supreme hypocrisy, trumpet this as an example of Soviet war crimes, which of course it is, but it ignores the fact that the Germans are committing even worse crimes. And these officers who were found in Katyn, they'd been killed in March 1940, along with all the other Polish officers on Stalin's personal orders. But it's not just, as we said, it's not just the officers who are dispatched. So in February 1940, the Soviet authorities had begun the kind of mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population, And the NKVD, which is the kind of the predecessor of the KGB, had begun herding up Polish families, taking them to railway stations, cramming them into cattle wagons, sending them off eastwards towards Siberia.

15:43and these are scenes that are very reminiscent of the fate of jews in occupied nazi europe who are being rounded up and put in cattle wagons unheated women children as well as men uh no food no drink freezing cold um and it's been estimated that by early 1941 about one and a half million poles have been driven into exile and that of these by the summer of 1941 between the third and a half of all these Poles who've been deported are dead either from malnutrition or from the cold or from exhaustion or of course from disease. So it's the same process of genocidal expulsions that you're seeing in Nazi Germany and which are much better known.

16:31But then it all changes of course in the summer of 1941 because on the 22nd of June Hitler launches Operation Barbarossa. And suddenly the Soviet Union goes from being effectively Hitler's ally to Britain's ally, doesn't it? And that changes the whole story for the Poles who are in the Soviet Union. Yes. So there's a Polish government in exile by this point in London, which means that they're unable really to resist British pressure. And Britain wants this Polish government in exile essentially to ally itself to the Soviet Union, which, of course, is really tough for the Poles to do. I mean, you know, the Soviet Union has dismembered their country, stabbed them in the back, deported millions of their fellow citizens.

17:18But they do it. And one of the reasons that they do it is they see that this is a way to secure the release of the Poles who have been kept prisoner in the Soviet Union. And among these prisoners is one of the very few Polish officers who had been deported to have survived Soviet captivity. And this is a man called Vladislav Anders. And he had spent, so he hadn't been taken into a wooden shot. He'd been taken to the Lubyanka, the NKVD prison, and he'd spent months there, kind of horrendous experience of imprisonment. But then he's released. And initially he he thinks if I'm going to carry on the fight against the Germans and I'm going to have to do it with the Red Army.

18:00But he realizes very rapidly that Stalin is not going to allow an autonomous Polish military force to assemble in the Soviet Union. You know, the risk in Stalin's opinion is too great. And so therefore Anders starts thinking, well, we should try and get these guys out of the Soviet Union altogether and see if we could maybe fight with the British. And Stalin is also very keen to see the back of them. And so Stalin and Anders agree that Stalin will allow Polish prisoners to travel down to the Caspian Sea, to sail across the Caspian Sea and land in Iran. and the reason for that is that there is a British military presence in Iran because at this time Iran is under joint Soviet, US and British occupation and specifically the rendezvous is a port called Parlevi on the Caspian Sea that I gather is now called Bandar A.

19:03Anzali and throughout the spring and summer of 1942 over 100 ,000 poles and this includes women and children are ferried across the Caspian Sea. They've traveled all the way across the Soviet Union from the camps that they were being kept in. They've traveled there and they're now being ferried across the Caspian Sea. And they arrive in Parlevi and they're in a terrible condition. They're hunger ravaged, they're disease ridden, they're shattered, they've traveled vast, vast distances. And I think British officers looking certainly at the men think, oh god i mean how are we ever going to get these people into a condition to fight but the british have brought food medicine ambulances and although lots of poles do die there are also lots who then start on the road to recovery and civilians are sent to camps outside tehran and esfahan in in iran and then they are sorted out and they're sent onwards to various territories within the british empire.

20:06So Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, Kenya, and lots of these Poles. I mean, actually, they kind of end up settling in these various countries and staying there for good. But the plan for the young men, these Poles who have come to join the British to fight the Nazi enemy, the plan for them is to send them from Iran through Iraq to Palestine to train them, to get them ready to join British forces and if needs be to join the fight against Rommel, who at the time is kind of advancing across North Africa towards Egypt. And this force of Poles, they can't call it the First Polish Corps because the First Polish Corps is, you know, that's the body of Poles who are stationed in Britain.

20:54So they become the Second Polish Corps and the nickname that they get given is the Anders Army. Brilliant. I have to say, I've actually got two different friends who have grandparents, I think, who were involved in that movement of people. So I've got a friend called Matt Kelly, who's a historian, and my friend Anna as well. And they are unbelievable stories. I mean, these people who were deported east from the Polish borderlands, they went to Russia, then crossing the Caspian Sea, going across Iran, going across the Middle East, and then often people would end up in, some people ended up in Africa, some people ended up in Britain.

21:30I mean it is mind-boggling It's like something from a science fiction book or something And so little known in this country, isn't it? Yeah, although there's actually quite a few people in Britain There's a kind of Anglo-Polish community With roots in this movement of people In this mass migration But anyway, it's an incredible story And this is the point where Wojtek enters the story When the bear finally appears So how does the bear turn up? I mean it has the force of a kind of folk tale, I think and as with a folktale there are various accounts of exactly how Wojtek comes to to be a part of this movement of Polish troops to Palestine but I think the basic outline is clear so there's a group of Polish soldiers maybe officers maybe private soldiers accounts differ and they're in the wilds outside Tehran and there they meet a young Iranian boy and he has a sack tied around his neck and he opens up the sack and inside it there is a tiny bear cub and the boy tells the poles that the mother of this cub had been shot by hunters and the cub had been abandoned and the boy had found it and it's something that he can sell because it's the customary fate of abandoned cubs to be sold to trainers who will raise them as dancing bears right and it's to be a dancing bear is hideous i mean you're you're chained you're kind of whipped you're prodded uh you have a miserable life so the poles know this and obviously have a sense of fellow feeling for an animal that has suffered bereavement and faces a terrible future so they they buy it from um from the from the boy uh either with what with food probably barter or food or you know maybe they've got a few a few coins anyway they they come into possession of this bear cub and what happens next uh various stories so one story says that uh this this cub is bought by a polish officer who gives it to the niece of another officer and this niece is called irena and she looks after the cub for three months in the the civilian transit camp where she's been stationed and And the bear is kind of very mischievous, full of fun.

23:47It's clearly not a good place for a kind of wild animal to be kept. And so Irina gives it to the army as a mascot. And the bear ends up being given by a lieutenant in Anders' army to Polish soldiers in the second transport company. And these have already reached a base at Ghedra in Palestine. So that's one account. Another account, and this is the one you'll get in Eileen Orr's book, which is a wonderful account of Wojtek. And she says that actually it was Polish privates in the second transport company had come into possession with Wojtek right from the beginning, that they were the ones who had negotiated with this Iranian boy and that they had kept the bear with them as they traveled to Palestine because they weren't really allowed to have a bear with them.

24:35and when the commanding officer is told, we're really sorry, sir, we've got this bear cub, he allows them to keep it because he recognises that it's really good for their morale, that the soldiers are devoted to the cub and that it's kind of raised their spirits. And it's these guys in the second transport company who give the bear its name, right, which is Wojtek, which is a sort of diminutive of Wojciech, which is a proper Polish name. So the bear is variously known, I think, by Poles as Wojciech or Wojtek. So Wojciech is the formal, Wojciech is the informal, and it means happy warrior. And in due course, Wojciech grows up to full size.

25:15He's an absolutely enormous bear. And then another Wojciech joins the company. And so the bear is called Big Wojciech and the soldier is called Little Wojciech. So his full name is Big Wojciech. But as a cub, Wojtek is given a kind of carer one of the Polish soldiers in in the second transport company and this is a guy called Peter Prendis and most of the soldiers in second transport company are young they're kind of teenage or early 20s but Peter is he's 46 and he's probably the oldest soldier in the company and that is why he is given responsibility for the bear it's thought that he is he's the guy who will prove the best parent but actually the role that peter plays is not that of a father but of a mother um daddy bears i gather do not bring up their babies yeah they're probably not close to that yeah cubs are raised solely by their mothers and so peter comes to be nicknamed by his comrades mummy bear and i mean you read the accounts of it and voitek he's a little cub he might get frightened he might get scared whenever he does he runs to peter and peter picks him up in his arms and cradles him cuddles him gives him his finger for yeah for voitek to kind of suck on um yeah it's all very sweet but then gradually of course um voitek starts to grow up and he he's you know he's a great laugh is he yeah bears are like that though aren't they he loves it so there's um initially there's there's great fun and games with the dalmatian that's owned by uh the by the british liaison officer he is uh he's always climbing trees and then finding that he can't he can't climb down so he just drops down and falls on passing soldiers and it's all great fun yeah and um he's he's um well i'm not going to call him a perv because of course he's a bear but he's very keen on stealing um the underwear of polish female soldiers so to quote eileen or the women part of a Polish signals unit were furious because after months of living rough in their isolated camp in the dusty desert they had only recently taken a rare trip to Tel Aviv to acquire the much cherished underwear and Peter has to go and get it back get get the underwear back what's he doing with it what interest does he have trying it on yeah who knows I don't know the thing he really loves is swimming and this is obviously a problem yeah if you're in a kind of dusty, parched land in Palestine.

27:48So whenever he finds water, whenever he finds a kind of river or pond or mud or whatever, he'll kind of roll in it. And the larger he gets, the more his use of water has to be rationed, because, of course, it's a very precious commodity. And so he's always trying to sneak into the shower hut. This is another example of his mischievous nature. Right. And on one occasion he does this and he finds that there's an Arab spy in the corner. So he's cornered. So his reward for this is he gets an extra long shower plus lots of fruit and beer. And beer. So he's tanked up half the time. So he loves beer and he loves cigarettes and he loves coffee.

28:26The cigarettes have to be lit, but he won't smoke them. He eats them. But I think the reason for this is that at no point does it cross Wojtek's mind that he's a bear. He assumes that he is a Polish soldier. I mean, he has no reason to think otherwise. He's been brought up by them. He lives among them. He adopts their habits. And he marches with them. He kind of learns to kind of salute. I mean, he does this without being instructed. He just kind of picks up on it. Right. Everyone else is doing it. You do it, right? You do it. And so you can see why he would become a massive, massive favourite, not just with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, as the 2nd Transport Company has now become, but with the whole of Anders' army, the whole of the second Polish corps, obviously really, really good for their morale.

29:17You can completely see why officers are going, yeah, let's keep this bear. It's good. Well, maybe not if your underwear has been stolen and he's trying to get into the shower with you. Yeah, maybe not. But I think in general, very good for morale. But then in December 1943, there is a crisis because Wojtek and his company are moved to Egypt, to Alexandria. And the reason for that is that by this point, Rommel is, you know, he's gone. and the British have invaded Sicily and going up Italy and they need the Poles to help them in this terrible war. And the crisis is that soldiers are forbidden to transport pets or mascots.

29:54There is no room in the transport ship for such animals. So their solution to this is to draft Wojtek officially into the Polish army as a private. And the British authorities approve this. They stamp Wojtek's military papers. He is now enrolled as a Polish soldier officially. And on the 13th of February, 1944, Wojtek and his comrades, they're in Alexandria. They board a troop ship and they set sail westwards across the Mediterranean. And their destination, Dominic, is Taranto. And from there, Monte Cassino. Crikey, what a cliffhanger. So let's take a break and we will return with Wojtek's heroism at the Battle for Monte Cassino.

30:41General Oliver Lees had earmarked the Poles for the key role of capturing the Monte Cassino Massif. He had sensed a fire and a pride in the bellies of the Poles that suggested they might be more willing to take on this toughest of nuts than other units in 8th Army. Visiting General Wladyslaw Anders, the Polish Corps commander on 24th March, Lees coated his proposal in very clear terms, that what he was offering would be immeasurably challenging, but was also a singular honour and indicative of the respect he had for the general and his men. Anders was well aware that the Abbey had not been taken in two months of bitter fighting and that it had eluded the efforts of battle-hardened and highly experienced troops.

31:27I realised that the cost in lives must be heavy, he later wrote. But I realised too the importance of the capture of Monte Cassino to the allied cause, and most of all, to that of Poland. So that was the immortal prose of James Holland, brother of the lesser known Holland podcasting star. And that's from James's book, Casino 44, Five Months of Hell in Italy. And that reminds us, actually, Monte Cassino is not just any battle of the Second World War. It is regarded as one of the most difficult because it's the hinge of a German defensive line called the Gustav Line. And the Allies have to break it to get to Rome.

32:11And on the summit of Monte Cassino is this monastery that was founded by St. Benedict, Tom. Yes. So one of the most celebrated monasteries in the whole of Latin Christendom, founded in AD 529, it had been rebuilt and rebuilt, kind of had this glorious heyday in the 11th and 12th centuries. 14th century, there'd been an earthquake, it'd been rebuilt again. so it's a great emblem of the the kind of the the ability of the catholic church to rise above all the disasters that could be thrown at it and now it is in the eye of this terrible storm because the allies have to knock it out essentially because the germans have occupied it and the allies feel that they have to destroy the german positions if they're going to have a hope of breaking through and getting on to Rome.

33:01And we actually spoke to my brother in an earlier episode about the buildup to the Battle of Monte Cassino. But Wojtek arrives right in the middle of it as it's kind of reaching this terrible climax. And as you said in my brother's reading, Anders and his army are given the opportunity to storm Monte Cassino, to capture it. And, And this is a mark of great honour because, as my brother says, it's the toughest of nuts. And there have previously been three attempts to take the monastery. It's failed. The monastery itself has been bombed completely into rubble, which actually means that it's now harder to take because there are more places to kind of hide.

33:43Three offensives have failed. The Poles will now take part in the fourth offensive, Operation Diadem, and in fact will kind of spearhead it. So the task of the Poles is to capture a mountain that has defied all the previous Allied troops. So, you know, they've smashed themselves against it and broken against it. So can the Poles do it? So 24th of April 1944, they start moving up the foothills to take up positions for the final assault. and it is the job of Wojtek's company to keep the Polish artillery supplied with shells, with ammunition as the Poles make their advance towards Monte Cassino, so inching forwards.