It sounds like a story someone made up to win a bar bet. In 1932, the Australian army went to war against emus — large, flightless birds — complete with soldiers and machine guns. And the birds won. Every ridiculous part of this actually happened.
How a nation ended up at war with birds
After World War I, Australia settled thousands of returning veterans on wheat farms in Western Australia. Then came drought — and roughly 20,000 emus, migrating inland in search of water and food. They found the freshly planted wheat fields, and they feasted, trampling crops and flattening fences that let rabbits in to finish the job.
The struggling farmers, many of them ex-soldiers themselves, asked the government for help. The government’s answer was, memorably, to send in the military.
Bring the machine guns
In November 1932, a small detachment arrived under Major G.P.W. Meredith, armed with two Lewis machine guns and thousands of rounds. On paper, it was no contest. In practice, the emus had not read the plan.
The emus split into small groups, sprinted in zig-zags, and proved almost impossible to hit. Guns jammed. Birds that were hit sometimes kept running.
One early ambush at a dam went wrong when the gun jammed after only a dozen birds fell and the rest vanished. Attempts to mount a gun on a truck failed too — the truck couldn’t keep up with the birds, and the ride was far too bumpy to aim.
The birds win
After days of effort, the tally was dismal: thousands of rounds spent, only a small fraction of the emus killed. Meredith is said to have marvelled at the birds’ toughness, reportedly remarking that if a military unit could take bullets like emus it would “face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”
The operation was withdrawn. It was briefly restarted, with slightly better results, but the emus were never truly beaten. The birds had, by any honest scoreboard, won the Great Emu War.
Why we still tell it
The story survives because it’s a perfect little parable: overwhelming firepower, humbled by a flock of birds that simply refused to cooperate. It even reached the floor of Australia’s Parliament, where the whole affair was debated with a mix of concern and disbelief.
Nearly a century later, the emus remain undefeated — and the Great Emu War remains one of history’s most gloriously absurd true stories.