In November 1932, the Australian military went to war. Not with another country — with birds. Specifically, with the roughly 20,000 emus that had marched into the wheat fields of Western Australia and begun eating, trampling, and generally dismantling an entire year's harvest.
The farmers, many of them ex-soldiers from the First World War, appealed to the Minister of Defence. He obliged in the most military way imaginable: he dispatched Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, two soldiers, two Lewis machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. On paper, it looked like it would be a very short war.
It was not. Emus, it turns out, are fast — they can sprint at nearly 30 miles per hour — surprisingly bullet-resistant, and annoyingly well-coordinated. The moment the shooting started, the giant flocks scattered into small, fast-moving squads, as though someone had quietly briefed them on guerrilla tactics the night before.
The first proper ambush was a fiasco. The birds were herded toward the guns, one gun promptly jammed, and the flock bolted before the soldiers could do much of anything. A later plan involved mounting a machine gun on the back of a truck to chase the emus down. The emus simply outran the truck across the rutted field, while the gunner, bounced around like a pinball, couldn't aim at anything at all.
By the sixth day, around 2,500 rounds had been fired, and somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred emus were confirmed dead — accounts vary, and the Major's were, let's say, optimistic. The operation was quietly called off. When the whole affair reached Parliament, one member dryly suggested that the medals for the campaign should probably go to the emus, who had "won every round."
Major Meredith, to his credit, seemed almost impressed by his opponent. "If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds," he reportedly remarked, "it would face any army in the world. They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks."
The emus, unbothered, kept eating. The farmers kept complaining. Australia eventually switched to bounty payments and exclusion fencing, both of which worked far better than artillery ever had. And the Great Emu War, as it is now affectionately remembered, stands as one of the very few campaigns in which a modern army was, more or less, defeated by a flightless bird.