Historian Reacts - The Emu War by Oversimplified

you asked for it you got it welcome back to another over simplified reaction video and today we're going to take a look at the final mini wars video that i have yet to review which is the emu war if you have not seen any of my other reactions to oversimplified videos which really reaction's a difficult term to use because i really try to add something new and add some context uh with my background and history so i don't know a ton about the great emu war of the 1930s but i'll try to offer what i can fill in some information um give a little bit more background kind of de-simplify this a little bit but there's links in the description to my other oversimplified reactions check those out if you would and if you're new to the channel welcome look around there's a nice mix of reaction content as well as original content all focused around the idea of us learning more about history together so hope you enjoy let's dive into the great umu war from oversimplified this is australia for the man who imagines being strangled by a tarantula while kangaroo breaks his kneecaps and thinks um yes please for the man who pictures himself being eaten by a snake in the burning outback while eating a vegemite sandwich and thinks um yes please and that man was governor arthur phillip who landed in eastern australia in 1788 presumably saw dingo being eaten by a crocodile being eaten by a death adder being eaten by a koala being eaten by mel gibson and thought to himself yes being eaten by by mel gibson so yeah um you know australia for my australian friends and i know we have a lot of you out there that follow this channel australia is viewed by much of the rest of us as this kind of wild place even today where there are giant spiders that will eat you my wife wants no part of ever going to australia because she's seen pictures of i guess you guys have a spider season no thank you but yeah australia starts out for the english as a penal colony which is basically um if you look through the records at this point in history in the 17 1800s they had a very interesting way of dealing with criminals often they would do one of two things if they didn't execute you for a number of crimes um they would put you on what was called a prison hulk which was basically if you imagine a big warship where they take all the stuff off the top like the cannons and the sails and all that stuff and you're basically just left with the hull and they park it in a river somewhere in near a major city and then they fill it with prisoners that's a prison hulk i had uh uncles who ended up in prison hulks at different times the other thing they would do is send you to penal colonies and australia was one for a long time georgia in the united states was set up as a penal colony at one point and of course what we're going to get into today is a time when a major nation went to war with flightless birds and lost but anyway i'm getting ahead of myself good now i know what you're thinking but simplified the british didn't discover australia the vikings did and you'd be wrong i'm not sure why you'd think that but hey if you love vikings so much then why don't you check out today okay vikings wondered where he was going with that strategy and rpg games of the 90s we all loved like age of empires and civilization if you like me want to relive those memories again with a new experience then this mobile game is for you vikings lets you choose your own play style and what makes its world so addictive is that more than 20 million online players are constantly changing the way it evolves by never ending fighting over resources forging new alliances and competing in live events support my channel by downloading vikings for free only from my room in the description box below and get the special bonus of 200 gold coins and a protective shield bye bye man this is great the market will continue to grow forever but what if it doesn't oh crap i never thought of that cells 1929 and the stock market crashed which led to economic downturn which meant banks wouldn't lend anyone any money which led to more economic downturn which meant everyone stopped buying stuff which led to more economic downturn so yeah it's a spiral of stuff that goes out of control that leads to the great depression interestingly before the great depression was the great depression there was another great depression it happened in the 1870s there was a panic very similar in a lot of ways to this one it wasn't quite as worldwide as the great depression was in the 1930s uh but they called it the great depression that one in the 1870s until this one came along and hey what if all the crops in the great plains were destroyed in a drought and then a big dust storm engulfed the area that's right more economic downturn and in an effort to combat the crisis america began imposing tariffs on foreign imports which made the economic downturn go global and the earth got really depressed but one nation that was hit harder than most by the whole affair australia the problem for australia was that it relied heavily on its export industries and in the current economic climate no one was buying to make things worse australia had introduced its own currency and pegged it onto the gold standard by the british pound but then the uk started messing with its own pig on the gold standard and if this is starting to sound confusing then let me oversimplify it for you hey uk looks like my car is broken down want to give me a tow no problem friend i got you [Music] more economic downturn the point i'm trying to make is things weren't good and in particular it was australia's farmers that were suffering most after the first world war australia had given returning veterans land for farming but with the current economic crisis the farmers so much there's a parallel here between uh the united states after the american revolution uh in australia after world war one what does australia have a lot of land now a lot of the center of the country is not really good for uh land like farming and things like that but but there's still a lot of it there and not a lot of people to occupy it and so what they have in abundance to be able to reward people with is land the same thing happened after the american revolution uh when the revolution was won by the united states everything west of the appalachian mountains is now fair game whereas the british had made it off limits and set it aside for the native americans so now the u.s government is giving these huge land grants to men who served in the army during the war because they've got lots of land owners just weren't making enough money and many left to go find work in the cities but for those who remained things were about to get even worse the emus before we get into that it's time for some cultural exchange my national bird is the bold eagle it's a strong patriotic symbol of america and a deeply valued and protected species my national bird is the peafowl it's a beautiful creature whose vivid colors represent india so we list it as a protected species my national bird is the emu and it's a pest also bloody delicious six feet tall 90 to 120 pounds and able to run at speeds up to 40 miles per hour usually returned to the coast after their breeding season but suddenly they found western australia full of lush wet farmland so not only six feet tall and can run 40 miles an hour which is crazy fast i mean this is a flightless bird that is as tall as a human that can run faster than humans can and they also apparently are bulletproof but we'll get to that oh my look at all this delicious wheat that just so happens to be growing here in large quantities hey guys get a load of this hey who left this big hole in the fence guys get a load of this wow [Music] what a lovely morning for some farming what those damned emus they have it in for me they're bullies they're nothing but bullies calm down bruce they're just animals it's not personal hey farmer bruce where did you find that hat the toilet yes 20 000 emus cost the already struggling farmers millions more pounds in lost crops and damages only 20 000 of these things but they're huge imagine if you looked out the door uh at your farm and you saw a bunch of six foot birds running around eating your stuff i mean where do you even begin to deal with that the situation couldn't continue like this something had to be done so in 1932 the farmers turned to the government for help you'd think they'd go to the minister of agriculture but these farmers said no this is a job for the military so they went to george pearce the minister of defense that's right australia was to go to war with the emus but not everyone was happy with the idea this is barbaric we can't go slaughtering thousands of our own national bird oh come on guys the machine guns will make it quick and painless machine guns you're using machine guns this is animal cruelty look i know it's unusual but it's not like we're poachers turning the birds into feather hats think of the benefits it'll be good target practice for our boys the government can show it took action plus i can get myself a nice new feather hat did i say feather hat i meant i want to gather chat with you about getting you all some nice new feather hats did i say feather hats i meant i want to wage terror at these emus and turn them all into feather hats damn it of course pierce first made the farmers sign an agreement saying that they would pay for the whole thing and that pierce wouldn't take any of the blame if the operation that was clearly very stupid turned out to indeed be stupid so typical politician right i i want to get all the credit if it goes right but none of the blame if it goes wrong and the operation went ahead major gpw meredith and his men were sent with two lewis machine guns to hunt down and take out the evil emu population in western australia target spotted well was it an emu no sir it's an emo damn it jones learn your vows i'm sorry okay it looks like the humans are coming for us but check this out i've come up with an amazing plan see if you can follow me here okay when they approach we run away sir you're a genius here sent the camera crew along with the machine gunners to capture some good old propaganda for the government and the first battle took place in november at campion the men spotted a mob of emis from a distance so they set up the guns and opened fire the emu split up into smaller groups and ran in every direction the men were only able to kill what they called a number of birds but the vast majority got away cut i don't know why you think only two is gonna be enough because they're gonna scatter uh you're dealing with 20 000 of these things why can't you send in like at least a battalion or something i don't know surprisingly many of the emus were able to take multiple bullets but still run at full speed to save proof causing meredith to compare them to tanks saying if we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world okay we need to get closer no you idiots not to me to the emus oh sorry no no i like it so next they tried sneaking up on a large number of emus near a local dam and firing at short range maybe the men were just unlucky but my professional opinion says the emus were magic because both guns jammed after just 12 emus were killed and once again the rest got away crazy again you're using two guns maybe they thought that sending more would be overkill and it would be bad optics i don't know cut the men were feeling a little humiliated after losing to a pack of discount ostriches so they decided to move further south where the enemies were said to be tamer and this time they had a new strategy okay jones here's the plan you mount the machine gun in the back i'll chase the emus you shoot mechanized warfare that went well i'm gonna shove that camera up your the operation was a fiasco so speaking of mechanized warfare i can't speak to other nations but i know in the history of the united states military the first person to employ the idea of mechanized warfare in other words or mobile warfare using a vehicle to carry out an attack was actually george patton george patton is a lieutenant serving on the staff of general pershing in an incursion by the u.s military into northern mexico to try and get pancho via pancho villa had raided into the united states killed some american citizens and so the us military was sent into mexico to deal with him and patton actually gets a bunch of guys onto a car and they go driving into this ranch guns blazing and it's the first time that an attack like that was carried out by the u.s military and the press had a field day in parliament pierce was unbasted and an opposition party member suggested that medals should be handed out to the emus who had won every round so far pierce that is brilliant politics right there i mean and i've always loved how i don't i'm i'm guessing australia's par parliament is similar to how they do it in the uk i've always loved that style of democracy better than uh the uh republic that we have in the united states where everything's like there's decorum and all that stuff in the house i love how they do it there uh and for this guy to stand up and call his opposition out like that by saying we should give medals to the emus for winning these battles it's fantastic feeling quite humiliated hold the operation off but four days later the farmers approached again and said hey man the emus are still eating all our crops can you send the army back out here and pierce was like yeah okay so the operation was back on for round two and this time meredith and his men had learned the emu's gorilla tactics and were much more successful with reports suggesting the men were cutting down 300 emus every week i hope you boys are getting great footage of this what on earth are you filming despite the success what mel gibson eating a koala come on oh boy was killed pierce finally ended the operation and returned to parliament declaring victory for the humans so there were 20 all right and so the mission accomplished thing uh is a uh a reference to um in the early days of the war in iraq uh in 2003 2004 that time period um there was this what turned out to be a really bad visual stunt where you have george w bush who's president of the united states at the time and had been a fighter pilot in his younger days coming in landing on an aircraft carrier uh in a fighter plane uh and there's this big banner that says mission accomplished uh and of course they'll argue that it was actually the mission of that uh aircraft carrier that was accomplished they weren't claiming that the war was won because we all know in hindsight it certainly was not at that point but that's a reference to it two thousand emu's out there destroying crops and you've killed a thousand meaning there's still nineteen thousand emus out there yep and in addition you've burned through 10 000 rounds of ammunition meaning you wasted 10 rounds per confirmed kill that's right yeah i'm gonna go ahead and call this one for the emus at least i got a feather hat now honestly i will say this 10 rounds per confirmed kill when you're dealing with birds that can run 40 miles an hour that can take multiple bullets before they go down and and when you look at the stats on how many rounds are expended per kill in war it's honestly not that bad in fact let's take a look at that real quick so i looked up a couple of different resources apparently uh some estimates for world war ii are that 45 000 rounds were expended for every person killed in world war ii in vietnam for the u.s it was about 50 000 rounds for every person killed uh so 10 per it's honestly not that bad what what so in the end the emus won the great emu war of 1932 and the emus continued to wreak havoc on the farmers for years to come the government introduced a bounty system which saw some success but for a moment let's take some time to remember the brave men who said goodbye to their families and risked their lives to take on the great evil emu population in western australia look at those lewis guns those are huge and the guys got it mounted on somebody's shoulder i would think i mean because machine guns very historically get super hot when they're fired for a lengthy period of time a lot of them they started end up developing cooling systems to to help keep them firing longer but they couldn't have been able to do that on somebody's shoulder for very long but even more importantly let's think of the friends they made the bond they created and the memories they shared i think the evil war went for like six weeks [Music] what is happening right now [Music] hey guys i solved the emu crisis really how i just made some better fences [Applause] oh my gosh that was awesome all right so don't forget uh check out the original content i put a link in the description to the original video make sure you subscribe to them if you haven't already uh and check out some of my other reactions to oversimplified in the description below and please consider becoming a patron uh shout out to all of our fantastic patrons nearly 300 of you now we've got a goal of getting to 500 by the end of the year hopefully you can be a part of that thanks for watching you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 240,738

Keywords: oversimplified reaction, history reaction, emu war reaction, reaction video, oversimplified emu war reaction, historian reacts, emu war, history teacher reacts, reaction to oversimplified, oversimplified emu war

Id: c9RArZ5aLrQ

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021