Australia

The Emu War

The Emu War

After the 1918 armistice ended the fighting of World War I, the Australian government instituted a program to buy and provide farming land for its returning soldiers, in order to reintroduce them back into civilian life.  In Western Australia, the government established 48 farming estates totaling almost 90,000 hectares, a little over 200,000 acres, in an area northeast of Perth, in the southwestern corner of the nation. Years later, the Great Depression of 1929 hit the area particularly hard, and when the land was invaded by a relentless and destructive pest, the Minister of Defense in Perth dispatched a machine gun crew, with less than stellar results.

Grenades at Gallipoli

Grenades at Gallipoli

In the early days of World War I, British and French forces launched an assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula, between Turkey and Greece, with the ultimate intention of taking Constantinople (modern Istanbul). The campaign turned out to be a large-scale disaster, with plenty of logistical snafus and military blunders dooming it to failure. However, it served as a showcase for the prominence of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, also called ANZAC.