This is the true story of the greatest interspecies war in recorded history.
The setting is Western Australia, October 1932, so it’s mid-spring Down Under. Spring is migration season when waterfowl and songbirds fly overhead in murmurations and sharp V-formations. Australia also has a migratory bird that does not fly. Emus are large critters. When they migrate, the image that should come to your mind is the wildebeest of Africa, the caribou of the Arctic, or the bison formerly of North America. The 1932 spring migration was the invasion that started the Great Emu Wars.
A decade before, veterans of World War I had been given land in the Western Australia Outback as payment for their service. Western Australia had been threatening to secede for thirty years, and Parliament hoped that the new settlers would turn the tide. When the Depression hit, Parliament encouraged those new farmers to plant more wheat. An abundant wheat crop was growing just in time for migration season.
General Napoleon Bonaparte said, “An army marches on its stomach.” Migrating giant flightless birds discovered that wheat fields make excellent forage. They tore gaps in fences, gorged themselves on wheat, spoiled the crop with their big feet, and invited their allies, the rabbits, to run amok in the fields.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie The Birds, a character hears that birds have attacked a school and tried to kill children. Skeptical, she says, “Birds have been on this planet since Archaeopteryx, a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn’t it seem odd that they’d wait all that time to start a… war against humanity?”
A single emu can strip a garden in a couple of hours. A handful of emus can devastate a wheatfield in half a day. Twenty thousand emus were making brisk business of acres and acres of farmland. These birds had declared war on humanity. Humanity had to defend itself.
At first, the farmers fired rifles to scare off the birds, but the sheer number of invaders overwhelmed them. They needed something more. So, they got an audience with the Australian Minister of Defense. They demanded machine guns like those they had used at Gallipoli and ammunition to repel the enemy incursion. And since Western Australia, where the mood favored secession, now asked for federal government help, help was politically expedient.
But the farmers were a dozen years rusty in deploying heavy weaponry. So, the Defense Minister sent highly-trained military personnel in troop transports to fight. Since this mission was as much a military action as a public relations opportunity – surely those grateful Western Australians would stop their silly secessionist talk now! – the Defense Minister also sent a cinematographer to record the whole thing. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
So, on the side of the humans: Major G.P.W. Meredith in command of the 7th Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery, two Lewis machine guns from World War I, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and two personnel carriers in the form of Model Ts.
On the enemy’s side: an unidentified emu general and his barefoot battalions. Sun Tzu said, “A good commander is unconcerned with fame.” I’m sure this is why we don’t know the name of the humble emu commander.
Because as we will see, the emus had studied Sun Tzu. The Australians had not.
Historian Barbara Tuchman said, “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.” The first miscalculation happened in late October when the humans delayed their participation in the war on account of rain. The sun finally came out on November 2nd; the two sides could play ball. But the birds were no longer clumped in large groups that were easy to find.
Sun Tzu said, “Allow the enemy to think you foolish because their arrogance will cost them the battle.” Being too foolish to come in from the rain, the emus had spread out over miles and miles of farmland while the humans stayed dry. The emus knew exactly what they were doing.
Eventually, someone spotted about 50 emus together. Farmers tried to herd them into an ambush, but the birds scattered. History must assume that the emu commander rallied his troops by reminding them of Sun Tzu’s famous advice: “Be extremely subtle, even formless.” The birds refused to stay in formation, and their tactics confounded the Aussies.
The strategy of the emus was simple. Having read Sun Tzu, they knew that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” So, they didn’t fight. They ran away.
Running emus are difficult to target. They’re big birds, sure, but they have tiny heads. Feathers make their bodies seem bigger than they actually are, and they run 30 miles an hour. Salvos from the Lewis guns missed every single one. By the end of the first day, the humans claimed to have killed a dozen birds. Witnesses were skeptical. The cinematographer had caught it all on film. Exhausted from their exertions, the 7th Artillery decided to take a day of rest.
Two days later, on November 4th, Major Meredith received intelligence that a thousand enemy combatants had assembled their forces at a dam. A gathering like this was tailor-made for the Lewis guns. This time, the weapons could surely subdue the enemy and compel a surrender. The humans set up a single Lewis gun and aimed carefully. Staccato fire leaped from the gun, which almost immediately jammed. By the time the soldiers unjammed it, the birds were long gone.
Another human miscalculation was believing that a Model T’s top speed was 45 miles per hour. That top speed assumes paved roads. In the unpaved fields of the Outback, the Model T could barely reach 15 miles per hour, and emus are twice as fast. Only two Model Ts were in the fray. They couldn’t keep up, and the bumpy terrain made firing guns from them impossible.
Napoleon said, “You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” By November 6th, the fourth day of the campaign, apoplectic army observers noted that “each pack seems to have its own leader now—a big black-plumed bird which stands fully six feet high and keeps watch while his mates carry out their work of destruction, and warns them of our approach!”
On November 8th, after six days of battle without a confirmed kill, the Australian Parliament called for a cease-fire. It recalled the 7th Artillery, which had spent only a quarter of those 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Major Meredith reported that his troops had killed hundreds of birds, but the newspapers scoffed at that. The cinematographer had evidence. Word on the ground was that maybe 50 birds had been hit, and perhaps a dozen died.
Western Australia was still desperate for relief. Four days after surrendering the battlefield, Parliament relented and sent Major Meredith and his Lewis guns to the Outback again.
Machiavelli said that when the enemy knows your plans, you must change those plans. Instead of one bullet for every two birds, the Aussies brought along half a million rounds this time and prepared for a pitched battle. But Sun Tzu said, “There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.” Some Australian evidently stumbled across a copy of the Art of War, read that passage, and recommended that the Great Emu War should end for the good of the country. The Australians surrendered the battlefield again less than a month later, on December 10th.
Ultimately, Major Meredith reported that the 7th Artillery had fired 9,860 of its half-million rounds and killed 986 emus – one bird for every ten bullets. His numbers could have been accurate. We know this ratio is possible because a farmer hit an emu with his truck a few days after the detente. The bird’s autopsy revealed nine bullets had been in its body for about two weeks before the truck killed it.
A few months after Australia declared the Great Emu War ended, Western Australia voted overwhelmingly to secede. Secession never happened, though – probably because the people were still too busy trying to fend off guerrilla attacks by emus. Despite pleas from farmers in 1934, 1943, and 1948, the government never sent more help.
As that same character in Hitchcock’s The Birds observed, “The very concept of war with birds is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn’t have a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them?”
Eventually, farmers learned how to build emu-proof fences.
*This post was originally a presentation to the Æsthetic Club on 25 April 2023.
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