The army that lost to the emus

In 1932, the Australian army waged a campaign against an unusual enemy: thousands of emus. And, against all odds, it didn't win.

After the First World War, many veterans were given farmland in Western Australia. The trouble was that some 20,000 emus, huge flightless birds, began ravaging the wheat fields. Desperate, the farmers asked for help, and the government sent soldiers armed with Lewis machine guns.

The plan seemed easy, but the emus turned out to be lightning-fast, scattered into small groups and shrugged off the gunfire. After weeks of burning through ammunition to bring down a handful of birds, the operation was called off amid mockery in the press. The emus, quite simply, outran the bullets. It went down in the books as the war a modern army lost to a bird.