In late 1932, the wheat farmers of Western Australia faced an existential crisis. The Great Depression had already wiped out crop prices, but a migrating horde of over twenty thousand wild emus made matters catastrophic.
Standing six feet tall and weighing over one hundred pounds, the birds found the newly cleared, irrigated farmland an ideal sanctuary. They trampled fences, ruined wheat crops, and tore massive gaps in perimeter enclosures that let rabbits pour in to eat whatever remained.
Desperate, a delegation of World War I veteran farmers marched to Canberra to ask the government for help. Instead of sending agricultural relief, Minister of Defence Sir George Pearce treated the situation as an armed rebellion.
He dispatched the Royal Australian Artillery, equipped with two heavy Lewis machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and commanded by Major G.P.W. Meredith.
On paper, modern automatic weapons against flightless birds should have been a massacre. In practice, the emus proved to be masters of guerrilla warfare.
During their first major engagement in November, the soldiers spotted a flock of roughly one thousand birds. Rather than waiting for close-range ambush, the gunners opened fire from hundreds of yards away. The emus instantly scattered into tiny tactical squads running in every direction at speeds over thirty miles per hour, making it impossible to traverse the heavy gun mounts fast enough.
In a subsequent ambush, soldiers hid behind trees as another flock marched straight toward them. The gunners held their fire until the birds were point-blank at twenty yards. The gunner pulled the trigger—and after firing barely a dozen rounds, the Lewis gun jammed. The flock vanished into the bush before the weapon could be cleared.
Frustrated by the birds' speed, Major Meredith mounted a machine gun onto the back of a military truck to chase the emus down in open country. The plan backfired instantly: the terrain was so rough that the truck violently bounced around, preventing the gunner from aiming a single shot, until an emu became tangled in the steering mechanism, sending the vehicle crashing into a ditch.
After weeks of operations and expending nearly ten thousand rounds of military ammunition, the troops had eliminated only a tiny fraction of the population. The emus took virtually zero tactical damage, maintained territorial control, and forced the Australian government to pull out the military in humiliating defeat.
Deploying regular artillery units with heavy machine guns only to be outmaneuvered, outrun, and thoroughly defeated by twenty thousand giant birds is one of the most comical military failures in modern history. That wraps up Day 24 of Crazy History Facts!
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