Hidden History: Australia’s great military humiliation
When thinking about the military conflicts that scarred the globe in between the two World Wars, what comes to mind are bloody, cruel affairs like the Spanish and Russian Civil Wars, or the military invasion of China by Japan. Rarely would one’s mind wander to Australia, who in 1932 suffered one of its only military defeats in the country’s history at the hands of a bird.
In autumn of 1932, Australia found itself in crisis: a crop shortage was imminent, its “Wheat Belt” in the Western Territories were under siege—not by revolutionaries or rivals, but by emus who that year had migrated by the tens of thousands into newly-settled farmland, tearing up acres of crops meant to feed the people of Australia. The government’s response? Send an armed, military force to put a stop to this emu incursion once and for all.
By Oct. the army’s Seventh Heavy Artillery Division was deployed to the Western Territories armed with trucks, landmines, and World War I “Lewis” machine guns with the mission of protecting the nation’s farms from their feathered foes.
Almost immediately, however, the carefully planned military operation found itself flailing, struggling to report success among the throes of open conflict with its cassowary combatants. Delayed initially by heavy rains, the soldiers assigned to the operation didn’t arrive at the Wheat Belt until mid-Nov., resulting in the continued destruction of essential crops across the territory’s farmland by the roving bands of birds, the largest of which numbered some twenty thousand. Finally arriving to defend the homesteads, the soldiers resolved to set up defensive trenches around the outskirts of major farms, planting machine gun nests every half mile or so.
When the first of the emus approached, the guns were unleashed climatically resulting in very few dead emus. As it turned out, these flightless fiends were extremely resistant to gunfire, and despite their large size, were able to very effectively bob and weave around the fire of the soldiers, scattering before taking losses, and traveling along farm lines until finding an undefended field to ravage.
Undeterred, the soldiers set to mounting their machine guns on trucks in order to chase down and slaughter the birds, only to find the emu flocks capable of quickly adapting to the danger—apparently to the extent of learning how sharply a truck could turn, and simply outmaneuvering the soldiers at every encounter.
The commanding officer of the operation, Major Gwynydd Meredith, commented: “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it could face any army in the world ... They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”
In the end, a month of fighting later, some 200 emu birds had been killed, and a dozen soldiers wounded. The emus simply migrated on, but the military was humiliated and the public had a field day with “The Emu War”: an apparent total defeat of the military, by a handful of flightless birds.
Thumbnail Photo via Pexels