Sadly not an Australian choking an emu with his bare hands – but instead holding an emu killed by Australian solders published by the Land Newspaper on 25 November 1932
(19) EMU WAR
The “war” the Australian army lost to flocks of flightless birds, since immortalised in meme. Although groups of emus are more commonly known as herds – or mobs.
The Australian army was the best in the world, man for man, as it had demonstrated in the First World War, and would demonstrate by stopping the German army at Tobruk and the Japanese army at Kokoda in the Second World War, but it lost to emus in 1932.
Of course, it wasn’t an actual war – the Emu War or Great Emu War was just the humorous tag given to it by the media – but a nuisance wildlife management military operation to curb the population of emus, apparently as many as 20,000, damaging farmland in Western Australia.
And there’s the rub, as the Australian army undertook a task it was not designed for, despite taking to it with machine guns – having seen their effectiveness in the First World War. Unfortunately, the emus didn’t charge at guns like the human soldiers of that war, but evaded or fled from fire.
Calling it a defeat, however, is unfair – the army did kill and wound a substantial number of emus, particularly as their skill at hunting them improved, such that by the end they were killing approximately 100 emus a week, ultimately killing almost 1,000 emus at the rate of ten rounds per confirmed kill, while also claiming 2,500 emus as wounded.
It just wasn’t economic – the emus were difficult to locate in substantial numbers and keep within range as well as scattering and evading pursuit. Even mounting a gun on a truck wasn’t effective – it wasn’t able to gain on fleeing emus and the roughness of ground prevented the gunner from firing.
And so the state and federal governments resisted further calls for military culls (in 1934, 1943 and 1948), resorting instead to the far more effective means of bounties to professional hunters.
So why the special mention amidst actual wars in history?
Well, because it does illustrate a number of themes, some of which are of note or interest for historical wars.
One is humanity’s hubris in waging war on nature, albeit more metaphorically rather than literally, not least in pest or nuisance wildlife management. Interestingly, Australia wasn’t the only nation to be “defeated” waging war against birds. Famously, China waged war against sparrows as part of its Four Pests Campaign to much more disastrous results – as the loss of crops to insects spared from sparrow predation was a contributing factor to the catastrophic famine of the Great Leap Forward.
Another is the military forces of humanity being humbled by the forces of nature in historical wars – most of all weather, which has swept away what have otherwise seemed overwhelming military forces, particularly in war at sea. It also applies to terrain – John Keegan in A History of Warfare notes how terrain (and climate) has been a limiting factor in wars throughout history, such that the majority of battles occur in surprisingly small or narrow territories on a global scale.
Occasionally, those forces of nature have included animals – with two of the most famous occurring in the Second World War, although unfortunately both are somewhat inflated and one almost so apocryphal as to be urban legend. The first involved sharks preying on the sailors from the cruiser Indianapolis when it was sunk by Japanese submarine in July 1945, made famous by iconic narration of it in the film Jaws.
The other involved crocodiles preying on Japanese soldiers trapped in mangroves by the British in the Battle of Ramree Island in Burma from January 1945 to February 1945. At one stage, they were reported to have killed all but twenty of a thousand Japanese soldiers, but sadly for fans of crocodile horror such as myself, this has been discounted to almost the reverse – at most they killed up to twenty soldiers, although they may also have scavenged on the bodies of Japanese soldiers killed by other causes.
Of course, the true unsung champions of animal destruction of human forces at war are insect vectors and the diseases they carry, which have been as effective as hostile weather in wiping out whole armies.
And then you have the theme of humanity’s use of animals in or for war or military operations. Of course, the horse is standout here, but war has seen a whole range of animals used in it – from more commonplace ones such as elephants, camels, donkeys or mules, oxen or cattle, dogs and pigeons, to more exotic animals such as pigs, moose, rats, dolphins, sea lions and others. And then you get to the truly bizarre, such as entomological warfare or animal-borne bombs – with my personal favorite as the American bat bomb project against the Japanese, taking my quip that the Americans fight wars like Batman to a literal extreme
To that you can add wars named for animals, of which there are a surprising number, albeit including similarly non-military conflicts such as the Cod Wars over fishing between the United Kingdom and Iceland, or border conflicts or near-war situations such as the Crab Wars or Pig War – with perhaps the Beaver Wars being the most intense actual wars named for animals.
And finally you have the military approximations from the Emu War itself, particularly for guerrilla war.
As one ornithologist observed, “The machine-gunners’ dreams of point blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month”
And the commander of the operation, Major Meredith, observed after their withdrawal – ” 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”.
RATING: 4 STARS****
X-TIER (WILD TIER)