The Great Emu War: The Army That Lost to Birds

In nineteen thirty-two, the Australian military went to war against an enemy twenty thousand strong, armed with machine guns, and lost. The enemy was the emu. This is the true history of one of the strangest military defeats ever recorded.

On Six Feet of History, host August Mercer tells the real story behind the Great Emu War: how soldiers with machine guns were outrun and outlasted by flightless birds, and why the whole farcical campaign ever happened at all. But underneath the comedy is a bleak true story about broke, abandoned ex-soldier farmers in the Great Depression, and a government that chose a spectacle over a solution.

If you love true history, forgotten history, and the dark and strange corners of the past that never made it into your textbook, this is your podcast. New stories every day. Follow Six Feet of History and subscribe wherever you listen. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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