World war weird: The battiest weapons and craziest conflicts from the Great Emu battle to the Pointless Paraguayan scrap
Think war is crazy? You wouldn’t be wrong...
There have been more stupid conflicts for dafter reasons than you could imagine, not to mention peculiar plans, eccentric events and strange coincidences.
Here author Benedict Le Vay picks some of the wacky war stories from his book and tells of the bizarre creatures who fought.
In the 1930s, the military might of Australia took on an apparently easy-to-defeat enemy: the emu. Farmers – mostly veterans of the First World War who had been encouraged to settle in Western Australia, just in time for the Great Depression to slash prices for their produce – were desperate and pleaded for drastic government action to deal the emus savaging their crops.
Given that the emu cannot fly, has no commanders, is generally unarmed and untrained, and an easy target at six feet tall, and that the soldiers were armed with Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, it should have been no contest. In fact, the emu was the clear victor. Only a few were hit, and carried on being pests, tearing holes in fencing so whole regiments of rabbits could join in on their side. The Army retreated, humiliated after two failed campaigns.
At the beginning of the American Civil War , in April, 1861, Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour endured a bombardment of 36 hours during which more than 4,000 rounds were fired. No one was killed by all these shells, miraculously, and the fort surrendered. As the flags were hauled down at the surrender ceremony, a salute was fired and a cannon exploded, killing two men and injuring four.
The US military developed a strange programme in World War II to drop bat bombs over Japan. Each bomb would contain thousands of live bats to be released close to the ground. The bats would carry tiny incendiary bombs strapped to their legs and, come daybreak, roost in nooks and crannies of the paper and wood houses of the Japanese cities. One experts predicted: ‘Japan can be devastated, with very little loss of life’. (Bat life excepted, of course).
The plan was coming along nicely when one of the canisters burst open at a US air base in New Mexico. The creatures fled to roost in dark places around the base – including fuel tanks and ammunition stores. Boom!
An equally batty Japanese plan was to take advantage of the prevailing jetstream wind across the Pacific by launching balloons with small explosives attached and letting them drift across to America where they would descend and explode, causing mayhem. They were made of paper pasted together in halls by schoolchildren.
Oddly it worked – a little bit. Some 10,000 were sent off and of these 285 were known to have exploded in the USA. Dreams of starting forest fires were thwarted by heavy rain. The only serious incident was when the family of an Oregon churchman picnicking in the woods found one of the objects. When a child tugged at the strings, all were killed. Tragic – particularly if you think of it as children killing children – but not a war-winning offensive.
Between Great Britain and Zanzibar on August 27, 1896, and as well as being remarkably quick - the shortest in history - it epitomized gunboat diplomacy and British imperial power at its zenith. A quick bombardment sunk the entire Zanzibarian navy (one armed royal yacht) and hammered the key buildings ashore (the Sultan’s harem took a heavy knocking). As well as high-handed regime change (a Sultan the British didn’t approve of had come to the throne), it brought an end to slavery in the island Sultanate off East Africa.
There have been more stupid conflicts for dafter reasons than you could imagine, not to mention peculiar plans, eccentric events and strange coincidences.
In the 1930s, the military might of Australia took on an apparently easy-to-defeat enemy: the emu. Farmers – mostly veterans of the First World War who had been encouraged to settle in Western Australia, just in time for the Great Depression to slash prices for their produce – were desperate and pleaded for drastic government action to deal the emus savaging their crops.
Given that the emu cannot fly, has no commanders, is generally unarmed and untrained, and an easy target at six feet tall, and that the soldiers were armed with Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, it should have been no contest. In fact, the emu was the clear victor. Only a few were hit, and carried on being pests, tearing holes in fencing so whole regiments of rabbits could join in on their side. The Army retreated, humiliated after two failed campaigns.
At the beginning of the American Civil War , in April, 1861, Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour endured a bombardment of 36 hours during which more than 4,000 rounds were fired. No one was killed by all these shells, miraculously, and the fort surrendered. As the flags were hauled down at the surrender ceremony, a salute was fired and a cannon exploded, killing two men and injuring four.
The War of the Stray Dog
On October 25 1925, a Greek soldier’s dog strayed across the border with Bulgaria at a place called the Pass of Demirkapia, near the Bulgarian border town of Petrich. The soldier nipped across the border to grab the errant animal – at which point a Bulgarian sentry shot him (the Greek soldier, not the dog) dead. As a result at least 50 people – mostly civilians – were killed in the one week before it was over. And it included an early and effective intervention by the League of Nations, the peace-keeping precursor of the United Nations.The US military developed a strange programme in World War II to drop bat bombs over Japan. Each bomb would contain thousands of live bats to be released close to the ground. The bats would carry tiny incendiary bombs strapped to their legs and, come daybreak, roost in nooks and crannies of the paper and wood houses of the Japanese cities. One experts predicted: ‘Japan can be devastated, with very little loss of life’. (Bat life excepted, of course).
The plan was coming along nicely when one of the canisters burst open at a US air base in New Mexico. The creatures fled to roost in dark places around the base – including fuel tanks and ammunition stores. Boom!
An equally batty Japanese plan was to take advantage of the prevailing jetstream wind across the Pacific by launching balloons with small explosives attached and letting them drift across to America where they would descend and explode, causing mayhem. They were made of paper pasted together in halls by schoolchildren.
Oddly it worked – a little bit. Some 10,000 were sent off and of these 285 were known to have exploded in the USA. Dreams of starting forest fires were thwarted by heavy rain. The only serious incident was when the family of an Oregon churchman picnicking in the woods found one of the objects. When a child tugged at the strings, all were killed. Tragic – particularly if you think of it as children killing children – but not a war-winning offensive.
Between Great Britain and Zanzibar on August 27, 1896, and as well as being remarkably quick - the shortest in history - it epitomized gunboat diplomacy and British imperial power at its zenith. A quick bombardment sunk the entire Zanzibarian navy (one armed royal yacht) and hammered the key buildings ashore (the Sultan’s harem took a heavy knocking). As well as high-handed regime change (a Sultan the British didn’t approve of had come to the throne), it brought an end to slavery in the island Sultanate off East Africa.
The Longest War
Also involved the British. But, unlike the shortest war, above, it caused fewer casualties. In fact, none. For 335 years this war was fought – or rather, not fought as everyone had forgotten about it – between the Isles of Scilly and the Netherlands.
It was an official war, however. During the English Civil War (1642-52), the Royalists were losing, so were driven out of mainland Cornwall to the Scilly Isles.
The Dutch sided with the victorious English parliamentarians. This meant they were the enemy to the Scilly garrison, who used their small navy to raid passing Dutch ships.
In March 1651, the Dutch Admiral Maarten Tromp declared war on the Scillies. When Parliamentary forces eventually took over the islands, no one remembered to do anything about the Dutch. Move on to 1985, and the chairman of the Scilly Isles Council, Roy Duncan, was fed up with hearing the ‘myth’ that they were still at war with the Dutch. He wrote to the Netherlands Embassy in London to debunk the idea. They found they were still at war, technically. The Dutch ambassador Jonkheer Rein Heydecoper was asked to visit and sign a peace treaty, which he gamely did on April 17, 1986. He joked that it must have been rather harrowing for the Scillonians all those years ‘to know that we could have attacked at any moment’.
Not all the D-Day allied paratroopers dropped onto France were quite as they seemed. Some were mini-men dolls, with smaller parachutes, to fool Germans – you can’t tell from the ground. They had firecrackers attached that went off when they landed to start apparent firefights with which the Germans obligingly joined in, while urgently calling HQ to warn that the invasion was on - in the wrong place.
This war of 1864 was one of the most staggeringly stupid and horribly costly. In fact the worst war in South American history – with an estimated 400,000 deaths – was completely pointless.
The war of 1864-70 started with Paraguay’s needless aggression against all its bigger neighbours, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, who formed a triple alliance against it. The cited cause was some imagined border dispute, but it was the delusional, vainglorious leadership of President Solano Lopez that was the real cause. He vowed to fight to the death - which he did, taking many of his starving countrymen with him (the cavalrymen had to eat their own horses, men had to charge into battle with no ammunition in the hope of finding some before being killed).
It was an official war, however. During the English Civil War (1642-52), the Royalists were losing, so were driven out of mainland Cornwall to the Scilly Isles.
The Dutch sided with the victorious English parliamentarians. This meant they were the enemy to the Scilly garrison, who used their small navy to raid passing Dutch ships.
In March 1651, the Dutch Admiral Maarten Tromp declared war on the Scillies. When Parliamentary forces eventually took over the islands, no one remembered to do anything about the Dutch. Move on to 1985, and the chairman of the Scilly Isles Council, Roy Duncan, was fed up with hearing the ‘myth’ that they were still at war with the Dutch. He wrote to the Netherlands Embassy in London to debunk the idea. They found they were still at war, technically. The Dutch ambassador Jonkheer Rein Heydecoper was asked to visit and sign a peace treaty, which he gamely did on April 17, 1986. He joked that it must have been rather harrowing for the Scillonians all those years ‘to know that we could have attacked at any moment’.
Not all the D-Day allied paratroopers dropped onto France were quite as they seemed. Some were mini-men dolls, with smaller parachutes, to fool Germans – you can’t tell from the ground. They had firecrackers attached that went off when they landed to start apparent firefights with which the Germans obligingly joined in, while urgently calling HQ to warn that the invasion was on - in the wrong place.
This war of 1864 was one of the most staggeringly stupid and horribly costly. In fact the worst war in South American history – with an estimated 400,000 deaths – was completely pointless.
The war of 1864-70 started with Paraguay’s needless aggression against all its bigger neighbours, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, who formed a triple alliance against it. The cited cause was some imagined border dispute, but it was the delusional, vainglorious leadership of President Solano Lopez that was the real cause. He vowed to fight to the death - which he did, taking many of his starving countrymen with him (the cavalrymen had to eat their own horses, men had to charge into battle with no ammunition in the hope of finding some before being killed).
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