The Emu War of 1932: When the Australian Military Lost to Birds.

In November 1932, the Australian Army went to war with machine guns, trucks and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. The enemy: twenty thousand emus. This is a true story. It is in the parliamentary record. And it did not end the way the Army hoped. After the First World War, Australia settled its returning soldiers on wheat farms at the edge of the Western Australian outback. When the Great Depression collapsed wheat prices and a massive emu migration flattened their crops, the veteran farmers asked the government for a very specific kind of help. Not money. Guns. What followed became known as the Great Emu War: Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Seventh Heavy Battery, two Lewis machine guns, jamming weapons, a truck that could not catch a bird, emu lookouts posting sentry, and a Parliament laughing too hard to continue. By December the Army had withdrawn and the emus, as one Perth newspaper reported at the time, remained in possession of the disputed territory. Featuring genuine 1932 photographs and newspaper reports from the National Library of Australia's Trove archive, brought to life alongside cinematic recreations, and real emu footage filmed on the road in outback Australia. The Emu War remains perhaps the only war in history where the enemy was a bird. And the bird won. History Reconstructed brings forgotten true stories back to life. Subscribe for more. Sources include Trove (National Library of Australia) newspaper archives: Daily News Perth 9 Nov 1932, Western Mail 1 Dec 1932, Canberra Times 4 Oct 1973, and public domain photographs via Wikimedia Commons.