Over The Years,

 I have heard of many different wars,

with strange names, in the UK for instance the War of the Roses, or the One Hundred Years War, but here is one I have never heard of before, the Great Emu War of 1932, Emus are native to Australia and at one time were a pest, in the wake of World War I, over 5000 veterans had set up camp on the fringes of the emus’ habitats in Western Australia, it was part of a soldier settlement program to help the soldiers make a living farming the land, however, drought caused many of the crops to fail, and emus had a tendency to gobble up what was left, unfortunately, prices of things had skyrocketed after the war, meaning many of these ex-soldiers couldn’t afford fences to keep the birds out, being soldiers, they grabbed their guns and started shooting the birds, some 3000 emus were killed in 1928,


however, despite these killings, by 1932, an estimated 20,000 emus invaded the farmers’ fields and the bountiful food supply they provided, the farmers knew they had to do something, they approached the Minister of Defence who more or less declared war on the birds, he granted the farmers the use of two Lewis machine guns and 10,000 bullets, plus the expertise of two gunners and Major G.P.W. Meredith, problem solved, or you would have thought so, 


Meredith led the assault on the emus, only to find that the enemy was quick and cunning after a few battles the emus seemed to work out the range of the guns—they always stayed just out of that range, the end result of the war was arguably that the emus won via outlasting the humans, while there were no human casualties only 986 of the roughly 20,000 emus were killed and 9,860 bullets had been used up, with an exact 10-1 ratio of bullets to dead emu the soldiers and the government were rightly embarrassed by the whole event and refused to repeat the experiment in later years, someone asked in parliament whether or not medals would be given out for this war—another noted that medals should be given to the emus, who had “won every round so far.”


but in the end the emus gave up, they did wander off eventually, but that was because the wheat was harvested and they had little left to eat, so the farmer/soldiers sort of won.