The Emu War: Tanks With Feathers Outsmart Machine Guns In The Outback

In 1932, the Commonwealth of Australia sent themselves directly into the pages of history when they declared their emu war. Yes, the flightless birds from the Land Down Under. Read on to find out more.

Hard Times For Farmers

Australia wasn’t an easy place to be a farmer. After World War I, the government settled thousands of returning veterans on land in Western Australia.

Per The Science Survey, by 1932, the Great Depression hit hard, and a severe drought attracted 20,000 emus straight to the wheat fields.

Fencing didn’t help. The emus simply bashed them down and poured into the wheat fields. Desperate farmers could only watch, which is when Defence Minister Sir George Pearce stepped in.

He dispatched Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, along with Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O’Halloran.

The Australian army brought two Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The emus just brought themselves.

The War – How It Went

Operation Emu was a failure. Ambushes barely dented the size of the flock, as the birds quickly learned diversionary tactics and scattered before machine-gun fire.

Per History Hit, Major Meredith was left flustered by his opponent, famously saying:

If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world…They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.

Tactics in the Field

The soldiers even tried strapping a Lewis gun onto the back of a moving truck. It failed miserably; the truck couldn’t keep up with the birds on the rough terrain, and the bumpy ride made aiming impossible.

After weeks of the emu war campaign that looked increasingly bad for the military, accounting revealed the ratio of expended rounds to emu deaths was embarrassingly low. Major Meredith withdrew his forces.

Australians later joked that the campaign ended in a “cessation of hostilities.” The outcome later inspired endless jokes that Australia had officially lost a war to a bunch of birds with the scientific name, Dromaius novaehollandiae.

Viewers React

When ABC Australia covered the historical event, plenty of fans rushed off to comment on it. The quips came quickly, and one follower wrote, “The emus: ‘I see that you’re putting me in a fight-or-flight situation. Too bad for you, I’m a flightless bird.'”

Here are a few more responses from the discussion:

• A ceasefire was called. 😆 Makes it sound like the Emus were shooting back.
• How did Emus achieve total victory? Using the same tactics the allies used against Napoleon – ‘When they approach, we run away.'”
• I’m still in utter shock. I saw this on Facebook and thought it was a joke. Then went to Wikipedia and saw it…It’s even more hilarious 😂.
• I’m always amazed by the sheer number of emus in Australia. It’s like they’re emu-merous!

Lessons From History

So what did we learn from this historical footnote? Even machine guns couldn’t solve the problem, especially when the flightless birds in the emu war seemed completely unaware they were supposed to be losing.

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