The Army That Lost a War to Birds
In 1932, Australia sent soldiers and machine guns into the wheatbelt to deal with a wildlife problem. One side kept detailed records of the campaign. The other side won.
In the spring of 1932, in a dry wheat-growing district of Western Australia called Campion, a group of farmers sat down and wrote a letter asking their government for machine guns. They were not joking, and the government did not treat it as a joke. Within weeks, soldiers from the Royal Australian Artillery arrived with two Lewis guns and ten thousand rounds of ammunition, under direct instructions to clear the district of its enemy. The enemy could not fly, could not fire back, and was, by most measures available to the men pointing guns at it, not very bright. It beat them anyway.
This is the true story of the Emu War — sometimes called the Great Emu War — one of the strangest military operations of the twentieth century, fought not against a foreign power but against a flightless Australian bird, and lost.
The land that promised too much
To understand why anyone thought machine guns were a reasonable response to birds, you have to start a decade earlier, with a promise the Australian government made to its own soldiers.
After the First World War, the government ran a “soldier settlement” scheme: returning veterans were given plots of land, mostly in marginal, barely arable regions, and encouraged to turn them into farms. It was meant as both reward and rehabilitation. In practice, much of the land handed out was poor — thin soil, unreliable rainfall, far from markets — and the men farming it had little agricultural experience to begin with. Many of these settlers ended up in Western Australia’s wheatbelt, clearing scrub and fencing paddocks for wheat.
Then the 1930s arrived, and with them the Great Depression. Wheat prices collapsed worldwide, and Australian farmers found themselves growing a crop that cost more to plant and harvest than it earned at sale, even as the government kept urging them to produce more of it rather than less. Rabbits, introduced decades earlier for sport and already a national plague, were chewing through what crops survived the falling prices. By 1932, the soldier-settlers of the wheatbelt were farming failing land, growing a crop that no longer paid, in the worst economic collapse in living memory.
Into this came the emus.
Emus are the second-largest living bird by height, standing up to two meters tall, flightless, fast — capable of sprinting at roughly 50 kilometers per hour — and in 1932, numerous. Each year after the breeding season, emus in the Australian interior migrate toward the coast in search of water and food, and that migration happened to pass directly through the wheatbelt. An estimated 20,000 emus moved into the Campion district that year, discovered the farmers’ crops and, just as importantly, their fences, and went through both. Emus are heavy enough that a fence is not an obstacle so much as a brief inconvenience; they flattened miles of rabbit-proof fencing simply by walking through it, which then let rabbits in behind them to finish off whatever the emus had missed.
For settlers already on the edge of insolvency, this was existential. A deputation of them traveled to meet with the Minister of Defence, Sir George Pearce, to ask for help. Pearce was a natural audience for the request: he was himself a veteran political figure who had overseen Australia’s war effort, and the settlers — many of them former servicemen — argued that Lewis guns, the same light machine guns used against the enemy in Flanders, would make short work of birds that had no means of taking cover or shooting back. Pearce agreed to send troops, with conditions: the Western Australian government would cover transport costs, and the soldier-settlers would house and feed the men. There was even talk, never substantiated by any source closer than secondhand retellings, that someone wanted the birds’ feathers for use in military hat plumes, as a kind of bonus. Whatever the full mix of motives, the operation went ahead as a formal, Defence Department–sanctioned deployment.
Three men, two guns, and twenty thousand birds
The operation was placed under the command of Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery. His force consisted of himself, Sergeant S. McMurray, and Gunner J. O’Halloran — three men in total — armed with two Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The campaign was originally scheduled to begin in October 1932, but heavy rain delayed it, which gave the emus time to disperse further across the district before the soldiers ever arrived. By the time Meredith’s small detachment got to work in early November, the birds they were meant to be fighting were no longer the semi-manageable flocks local farmers had reported.
The first engagement set the tone for everything that followed. On November 2, 1932, local settlers spotted roughly fifty emus and tried to herd them toward the waiting guns. The birds split into smaller groups almost immediately, each apparently following its own instinct rather than any predictable flock behavior, and ran in different directions, too far apart and too far away for the machine guns to be effective. The soldiers opened fire at long range anyway. Few, if any, birds went down.
Two days later came what should have been the decisive engagement. More than a thousand emus were sighted moving toward a dam near Campion, and Meredith’s men set up an ambush, waiting for the flock to come within range in a single mass — exactly the kind of target a machine gun is built for. The birds came. The gun fired. And after only about a dozen emus had been killed, the Lewis gun jammed. By the time it was cleared, the rest of the flock had scattered into the bush, and no more birds were sighted that day. A machine gun, it turned out, is an excellent weapon against an enemy that stands still in large groups; it is considerably less useful against an enemy that, once the shooting starts, immediately disperses in every direction.
Meredith tried adapting. He had a Lewis gun mounted on the back of a truck, hoping to pursue the birds that wouldn’t hold still for him. The attempt failed almost immediately — emus could run faster than the truck could drive across rough paddock terrain, and the ride was rough enough that the gunner on the back could not keep the weapon steady enough to aim, let alone fire. One of the birds reportedly even collided with the vehicle, which did it rather less damage than you might hope, for the soldiers’ sake. Observers, including ornithologist Dominic Serventy, who studied the episode afterward, noted that the emus seemed to employ a kind of organizational instinct in the face of gunfire: large groups would break into smaller units, often appearing to follow a bird positioned like a lookout, scattering before the gun crews could bring sustained fire to bear.
By the end of the first week, Meredith’s team had fired around 2,500 rounds. Estimates of the emus killed by that point varied enormously depending on who was asked, ranging from as few as 50 to a few hundred — a staggering amount of ammunition for a very small number of carcasses. News of the fiasco did not stay contained to Western Australia. It reached newspapers overseas, where the image of a modern army being outmaneuvered by panicked birds was too good a story to leave alone, and it reached the federal parliament in Canberra, where it became a target of ridicule from Pearce’s own colleagues. Members of the House of Representatives pressed him on the operation, reportedly asking, to laughter, whether a medal should be struck to commemorate it. Between the foreign press coverage and the mockery at home, the political cost of persisting outweighed whatever the operation might still accomplish, and on November 8, Pearce ordered the troops withdrawn.
It did not end there. Western Australian officials, under continued pressure from farmers whose crops and fences were still being destroyed, persuaded Pearce to send Meredith’s unit back out later that month. The second attempt ran from early November into early December 1932. Meredith’s own final report claimed a total of 986 emus killed using 9,860 rounds of ammunition — a ratio of roughly ten bullets per bird, by his own count among the most generous estimates offered — though he separately suggested the true figure might be closer to 2,500 once wounded birds that later died were accounted for. Even taking the higher of Meredith’s own numbers at face value, the operation had used a military unit with machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition to kill a small fraction of an estimated 20,000-strong bird population, over the course of roughly a month, at a cost that dwarfed whatever crop damage it was meant to prevent. The sources disagree on the precise kill count — official tallies, press reports, and Meredith’s own differing figures don’t match — but all of them agree on the shape of the outcome: the emus, overwhelmingly, won.
What actually worked
The military was not asked back. In 1934, 1943, and again in 1948, wheatbelt farmers facing fresh emu incursions requested army assistance again, and each time the government declined — a notable change of heart from an administration that had agreed to the original deployment within weeks of the first request. Instead, Western Australia leaned on a bounty system that had quietly existed since 1923, paying farmers directly for emu scalps or beaks. It worked far better than the Lewis guns had: in just six months in 1934, more than 57,000 bounties were claimed in Western Australia. Over the following decades, ordinary settlers with ordinary rifles did what three machine gunners could not — between 1945 and 1960 alone, close to 285,000 emus were killed in the state through bounty hunting, a program effective enough that by the back half of the twentieth century, Australia’s approach to its emu population had shifted entirely, from extermination to management, and eventually to legal protection.
That last turn is the detail most retellings of the Emu War leave out, and it’s the one that gives the story its real sting. The emu — the animal the Australian Army mobilized against, fought with machine guns, and lost to in open humiliation in front of Parliament — is today a protected native species under Australian wildlife law, and has been for decades. It is also, and has been since 1908, one of the two animals holding up Australia’s coat of arms, standing opposite the kangaroo on the national emblem that appears on government buildings, passports, and currency. The nation that once sent an artillery unit into the field against the bird now puts its picture on official seals.
The Emu War is often told as pure comedy — soldiers versus birds, birds win, laugh and move on — and it’s easy to see why: the image of a military unit outmaneuvered by panicking, directionless poultry practically writes its own jokes, and Australian politicians at the time leaned into the humiliation as much as anyone. But underneath the joke is a fairly ordinary failure of a fairly ordinary kind: a government reaching for the most forceful tool available — a weapon designed to kill concentrated groups of human soldiers who stand and fight — and discovering that the tool was simply built for the wrong kind of target. Twenty thousand emus scattering through open country in family-sized groups were never going to behave like infantry holding a line, and no amount of ammunition was going to change that. The slower, cheaper, less dramatic solution — paying individual farmers a few shillings per scalp — had already existed for nearly a decade before anyone thought to call in the army, and it was the one that actually worked.
Major Meredith, for what it’s worth, came away from the whole affair with something like grudging respect for his opponents. In comments after the campaign, he was reported comparing the emus’ resilience to that of tanks under small-arms fire, remarking that the birds could soak up bullets and keep running in a way he’d never have anticipated. It’s a strange compliment to pay a bird, but it’s an honest one, and it is, in its way, the most fitting epitaph for the only war in modern Australian history that the country’s own government openly admitted to losing.