Emus is the second largest known bird in the world (Shutterstock)
Militaries and countries usually overcome their military defeats, but defeats are hard to forget, especially when the event in the country becomes an inexhaustible source of ridicule, such as the defeat of the Australian army in 1932, in a military operation against ostrich-like emus, when it decided to carry out a military operation against them after they destroyed many wheat crops.
It all started – as reported by the French magazine Le Point – in the early thirties when the Great Depression hit agriculture hard in Western Australia, plunging farmers into a deep crisis after the collapse of the price of wheat, and the situation was further deteriorated by the arrival of a wave of migration of giant emus birds to the region.
More than 20,90 emus, each measuring a meter and 50 cm long and able to overtake a car traveling at <> km per hour, trampled crops and ate everything in their path, dealing a real blow to Australians.
Emo (Shutterstock)
Declaring war on emo
In these circumstances, the Australian government, in search of popularity, chose to solve this problem radically, by sending in the army, deploying soldiers equipped with Lewis' machine guns and 10,<> rounds to eliminate these destructive creatures, with the government funding the movement of soldiers and leaving farmers with food, housing, and enough to pay for ammunition.
The initiative was welcomed by the local population, and the army thought that 3 soldiers were enough to shoot down the enemy, especially since emos are birds that cannot fly, but the army made a mistake in underestimating the intelligence and speed of these monsters.
Brigadier General Gwaned Purvis, who "fought" in the operation, says, "The emu proved that it wasn't as stupid as people think. Each group has its own leader who stands guard to take care of his peers with the wheat, and at the first suspicious signal he gives the signal and dozens of heads come out of the crop."
The organized and reactant emos caused a defeat for Australia, with no losses in its military, making the operation widely ridiculed across the country, as much as it seemed to be a huge waste, with 2500,100 rounds of ammunition used to kill about <> emus.
Australian ornithologist D.L. Serventi summed up the emu war well in the Encyclopedia Britannica, writing, "The Emu command seems to have adopted guerrilla tactics, and its army, which could not maneuver much, quickly split into countless small units which made the use of military equipment unprofitable, so the disgruntled field force withdrew from the combat zone after about a month," a defeat for the Australian army to thousands of emus.
Source: Le Point