After World War I, more than 5,000 Australian veterans took money and land from the government to establish farms in the country’s harsh west.

Life was hard, but not impossible for the former soldiers. But during the 1930s, the Great Depression tanked the world economy and a drought ravaged Australia. Worse, a marauding horde of 20,000 emus invaded the western farms.

The emus had migrated from the center of the country. They sought safety, water … and the farmers’ delicious wheat.

“The enemy is the tough, prolific, gangling marauder of the sand plains whose species … has invaded, in a frenzy of hunger, some of the finest fields at the time of ripening of the harvest to shear off crops with voracious beaks,” The Sunday Herald newspaper stated in 1953.

The emus brought devastation at a time when farmers’ yields were already low. But most of the farmers were once soldiers, and they had rifles. But they also remembered the more powerful weapons of the Great War — such as machine guns.

    It was 1932, and Australia was about to go to war against the emu. The war would be far more difficult than anyone anticipated.

“There’s only one way to kill an emu,” one veteran of the bizarre conflict remarked to The Herald. “Shoot him through the back of the head when his mouth is closed, or through the front of his mouth when his mouth is open. That’s how hard it is.”

    The delegation of soldier-settlers cornered Australian Defense Minister George Pearce and told him they needed help fighting the birds. And they wanted machine guns.

The minister relented. He would send the weapons, but soldiers — not veterans — would operate them. The eradication of the emu would be an official military operation. He ordered Maj. G.P.W. Meredith — commander of the Royal Australian Artillery’s Seventh Heavy Battery — to lead the mission.

Meredith took three men with him — two soldiers to operate the weapons and a Movietone News journalist to film the conflict. The men planned to annihilate the animals with two Lewis machine guns and a stockpile of 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

fully six-feet high, who keeps watch while his fellows busy themselves with the wheat.”

“At the first suspicious sign, he gives the signal, and dozens of heads stretch up out of the crop. A few birds will take fright, starting headlong stampede for the scrub, the leader always remaining until his followers have reached safety.”

Beaten once again, Meredith moved his troops south following reports that the emus there were more placid. He also devised a new tactic.

The birds were smarter and faster than anticipated — so fast that they were often out of range of the machine guns before the soldiers could aim and fire. Meredith needed to get the guns close and keep them close.

The campaign wore on, and the local press was less than kind to the soldiers. The bad coverage caused Australia’s government to recall the troops. But farmers protested, and Meredith and his men went back to war against the emus in mid-November.

The commander sent reports back to Canberra about the devastation he brought on the birds. According to Meredith, close to 1,000 emus died after his men fired off all their ammunition. He claimed 2,500 more succumbed to injuries after taking fire.

These claims are impossible to verify. Estimates of the number of dead emus from other observers range from 100 to 1,000. It’s possible that Meredith inflated his own numbers. We’ll never know.

But we do know that the commander admired his adversaries. “The emu is an amazingly hard bird to kill outright, many carry mortal wounds up to a distance of half a mile,” he wrote in his report of the incident.

    “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds,” Meredith told a local paper. “It would face any army in the world. They could face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”

It was clear to parliament that the beasts had won, and that Meredith’s campaign was ineffective. The commander, his men and the Lewis machine guns went back east at the beginning of December, leaving the farmers to fend for themselves against the emu threat.