Australia's Most Hilarious and Crushing Defeat (HBF-UPS).

And no, I am not talking about the Ashes.

Fig. 1: DeadMeme.gif

Hello guys and welcome back to another blog post that about six of you enjoy and find funny and the rest are bots I painstakingly coded to buff up my views and who refuse to even do that. Today we are going to talk about one of my favourite historical events and something that reduces me to near tears everytime I talk about it. The Australian War on Emus.

I am not kidding.

In 1932, Australia declared war against the ever-rising emu population. And they got their asses handed to them harder than Trump in the 2020 US election #DingDongTheTwatIsGone. Jokes aside, I don't really blame the Australians. How were they to know that the emus were militaristic geniuses rivaling Sun Tzu himself? They were well trained, expertly coordinated and patient to a fault, allowing the Australian army to strike first only to counter-strike to disrupt their concentration. They employed deviously clever guerilla tactics, striking hard and fast before retreating to their hidden bases in the open plains. That and emus are absolutely fucking terrifying. Look at their face!

"Evil Incarnate. 'Tis not a being of my realm." - Satan, 3500 BC

Truly, they were a force to be reckoned with. It is a little known fact that Genghis Khan's military advisors and about a third of his army were all emus*. The Sun Herald had this to say on the 5th of July, 1953:

"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. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.”

But how did this largely unexpected military upset happen? Let's go back over one-hundred years in the past

*insert flashback noises here*

Australia post-World War One had a difficult problem, it had a host of military veterans coming back from the war. They were tired, suffering immensely from the horrors of war, and were not looking forward to the sequel, "World War 2: Hitler goes to Warsaw". So, in 1915 the Australian government started the Soldier Settlement Scheme which distributed plots of land to just over five-thousand soldiers. These plots of land were mainly used as wheat and sheep farms. By 1920, the Australian government had distributed over 90,000 hectares of land but still needed more, so they started dumping soldiers outside Perth in Western Australia. This was a largely unsuccessful scheme. Setting up a successful farm in an area with good soil and with absolutely no experience is a hard enough feat on its own, but starting a farm in the marginal areas around Perth? Insanity. These were soldiers, not farmers. You can't load a seed into a gun and just unload into the earth. The soldiers were then under even more pressure when the Great Depression hit the world, and the prices of wheat plummeted. The government promised subsidies for the wheat, but they never came.

And Lo and so it comes to pass, as if the Four Horsemen apocalypse themselves where on holiday, the mighty emus crested the hill to take their place and reduce the landscape to nought but dust. The suspiciously well equwell-equippedipped farmers shall be naught but blades of grass before their talons. Thou art doomed.

I jest, but it was a literal tide of grey emus. Some 20,000 angry birds migrated west to look for food and happened upon the bounty of wheat that was the farmer's lands. The emus trampled farmlands and feasted on the wheat and reduced them all to stubs. By 1932, the farmers had killed thousands but that could not put a dent into the grey horde. Bounties were even placed on the heads of the emus but to no avail. The farmers simply did not have the ammunition to deal with the absolute mass of feathered beasties. So in November of 1932, the army, equipped with machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, set out to cull 50 emus in the district of Campion. They open-fired, but the emus proved to be smarter than they thought. They immediately split into smaller groups to minimise casualties and ran everywhich direction. While not a lot of emus perished, first blood had been drawn by the Australian army.

The army would come to regret ever getting involved. The emus banded together and struck back two days later. The campaign lasted a week as emu reinforcements came from the East.

Concealed gunners spotted 1,000 emus running over the hill. They waited patiently and then open-fired at almost point blank range. As if anticipating this, the horde immediately split into smaller groups and serpentined to avoid the hail of gunfire. They killed maybe 12 emus before disastor struck: the guns jammed. They were forced to retreat, with the emus hot on their heels. The Sun Herald once again had this to say:

"The emus have proved that they are not so stupid as they are usually considered to be. Each mob has its leader, always an enormous black-plumed bird standing fully six-feet high, who keeps watch while his fellows busy themselves with the wheat. At the first suspicious sign, he gives the signal, and dozens of heads stretch up out of the crop. A few birds will take fright, starting a headlong stampede for the scrub, the leader always remaining until his followers have reached safety.”

The army then decided to start fighting in vehicles but found that the birds were to fast to aim at properly. The fiends learned this and often would charge at the vehicles, dodging all bullets and attacking the guns directly, nearly destroying them in the process. One bird managed to cause a mounted vehicle so much trouble for several hours and when it eventually died, its body got caught in the wheels causing the driver to lose control of the vehicle and destroying someone's property. By the eighth of november, the army had used twenty-five percent of the ammunition they had brought and they killed only 200 emus.

A second campaign was launched on the 18th of November and for about a month they killed 100 emus a week, but Major Meridith who led both campaigns calculated that it took ten bullets to kill a single emu. Major Meridith was eventually recalled and Australia bowed to their new feathery overlords. The Great Emu War had finally ended. Unfortunately, the farmers did not feel the same way and killed some 57, 000 emus over the next six months. But the shame of ultimate defeat lays at the feet of the Australian army. They spent kilograms of ammunition and barely half of the emu forces fell. It was a truly masterful display of warfare, never before seen. But one day the dreaded fowl fiends will return, and all your wheat are belong to them.

Fear them, and when you fight show them no mercy for you will recieve none.