The Emu War
The army brings machine guns against emus, and the emus win
In November 1932 Western Australian farmers asked the army to rid their fields of emus. Soldiers with two Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds fired 2,500 of them in six days, but the birds scattered in small groups. The commander compared emus to tanks, and the operation was dropped amid newspaper ridicule.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Did you know
The Emu War was the idea of World War I veterans. Ex-soldiers turned farmers knew what machine guns could do and asked the defence minister to send some against the birds. The minister readily agreed. Share →
The commander of the Emu War admired the enemy. Major Meredith said a division able to take bullets like these birds could face any army in the world: emus met machine guns “with the invulnerability of tanks”. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 14 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 7 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 15 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 16 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 17 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 13 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 4 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 1 year later
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 4 years later
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 9 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 3 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 4 years later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 9 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 10 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 13 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 24 years earlier
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 17 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 16 years earlier
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 9 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — same year
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 10 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 3 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 24 years later
Asia
- 1923 Great Kantō earthquake — 9 years earlier
- 1931 China floods — 1 year earlier
- 1934–1935 Long March — 2 years later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 13 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 21 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 18 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 3 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 2 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 13 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 15 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 76)
- Marie Curie (aged 65)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 63)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 61)
- Winston Churchill (aged 58)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 54)
- Albert Einstein (aged 53)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 51)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 51)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 43)