Oh What A Time... - #115 Weird Wars (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week on the show we’re looking at wars that were, frankly, weird. We’ve got the Bulgarians and Greeks booting off over a dog, the great emu war in Australia, and how about Honduras and El Salvador kicking off on the football pitch and off it.And do you miss the days of ringing a mate’s landline to see if they wanted to do something? Or do you miss those pre-facebook days of never seeing people again? Any feedback on this weeks chat and correspondence welcome here: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is part two of Weird Wars. Let's get on with the show. So today, as mentioned earlier, I'm going to talk to you about an incredibly weird war that occurred in the autumn of 1931 in Western Australia. And it was a war between humans and a certain animal. Now Chris has guessed already, kangaroo, ah-ah, wrong from the off. Al, would you like to guess which animal did humans

in Australia declare war on? There's quite a few options in Australia. This is why it's tricky, because there's a lot of things that you think might want to kill you, or affect your life at least. Well, it's not going to be a koala, is it? It's not a koala, it's bigger than a koala.

It's bigger than a koala. It's bigger than a koala. A dingo. A dingo. It's not a dingo. It's not a dingo. Chris, one more guess. It's got to be something deadly, isn't it? Snakes? No, it's not deadly, but it is sizable.

OK, the animal they declared war on in the autumn of 1931 was the emu. OK. So... The friendly emu. OK. So... Emu? A friendly emu? You would think that. Here's the context. Farmers were sick of emus rampaging around, destroying their crops.

So this was happening at a time when the economy was feeling weak, fragile due to the Great Depression and there was an issue that these huge birds were running through farmland and just destroying all the crops, which farmers couldn't sustain their lives if that was going to continue happening. So, because of this, the Australian farmers decided to do something about it and they declared war on this huge flightless bird. I was thinking about this, before we get into what they did, because obviously there's a bit of killing coming and it's easy to judge them, how would you feel, Al, let's just say,

if there were emus running around Crystal Palace, just denting your car, running around your garden, destroying your kids' toys? How calm and reasonable are you about that? Or do you think we get to a point where we go, we need to get rid of the emus? I've got an issue with foxes. Yes. You know, I don't like fox mess. When they get into the food bin, it's a bloody nightmare. Would I take arms? Dunno about that. Okay. Can't imagine throwing a grenade at a fox. There's gonna be an awful lot of collateral damage.

You come out in the morning, Al, in your dressing gown. It's a cold morning. Yeah. And there's three emus trying to get into your food bin. They're big as well. They're massive. They're big busters. Well, this is the thing, I think of emus as cute, but when you go to a zoo and you're up close with an emu, you're like, bloody hell.

They're ginormous. They're like six or five. They're inform, and they're dangerous with their trotters. They're, what are they called, hoofs? I don't know. They're quite dangerous call the hoofs? I don't know. They're quite dangerous, aren't they? They can do some damage. They can.

They're also unbelievably fast. They're very heavy. I think if you're an emu running around one's dead skull, you'd have an issue with it. I'd have a huge problem. And also there are nightmare on chat shows from what I remember of the 80s and early 90s. So in Australia, this was an issue, as they say. Yeah, they could grow as high as six foot three.

It'd be like a plague of goalkeepers without arms. It's a matter of a herd of Peter Schmeichels running rampant through your town. So this is what's happening. Running rampant is the right phrase. They were destroying crops in farm after farm after farm. And so the farmers decided, we've got to do something about it. Because this was so soon after World War I... Can I just say, they've got to do something about it. We've got to draft in Rod Hull. We have to draft in Rod Hull. Exactly. He'll know what to do. What's happened to him? Oh, that's horrific. So

as this was so soon after World War one and Many of the farmers were ex-soldiers. Okay, so they meet with the Australian government to present their plan and their plan Was to turn the machine guns they'd used in the army into Emu killers. Okay. Oh Yeah, it's it that they're dealing with this in a very real way. The EMU war, as it was called by the Australian press, begins in November 1932. They've got the machine guns. I've got a bad feeling about this. The first shots are fired by Sergeant S. McMurray and gunner J. O'Halloran, a campion in Western Australia, which is about 200 miles east of Perth. And the whole patrol was overseen, and this guy's quite important,

by a man, he's got an incredible name, Major Gwyneth Purves Wynne Aubrey Meredith. I mean, he sounds very Welsh. Yes, I think there probably is a link there. Who brought with him orders from uniform suppliers in Sydney for 100 emu skins to be turned into hats. So the guy who's overseeing this, he really arrives to oversee the war and he's already got a deal in place with the manufacturer to turn the skins into hats. Which is quite sort of fair play to you in terms of your side hustle, seeing an opportunity you're going into a war. It's going to be quite one-sided, isn't it?

They're not going to retaliate, emus. So it is one-sided, but as we'll find out, it's not successful. We'll get to that in a second. A little brief comment on the machine gunning option. I think we can agree that's pretty brutal, but what they've been doing beforehand, before the soldiers came in, was equally brutal. Before the soldiers arrived, farmers were chasing emus down in lorries or paying boys to cycle around and push bikes, holding out long sticks to whack the emus to death. As your first job as a teenager. Dan Mallow You're not going to be able to whack an emu to death,

are you? You're just going to leg able to whack an emu to death, are you? You're just going to leg it. Well, you can. They go like 40 mile an hour. They would surround it, cycle around and around and keep whacking. Oh my god. Horrendous, isn't it? Absolutely barbaric.

Bloody hell. Very different time and place. Western Australia in 1932. I'm not sure we do particularly well here. So the war begins, the machine guns are out, the Australian press starts to report on it and very quickly they start to report that it's not going to plan. Okay. One report on the 4th of November- The EMUs have got hold of the machine guns. Yes. It's the one thing we didn't want to happen. One report on the 4th of November says,

and here's a quote, the EMUs are more than holding their own against the defence department's crack gunners. In spite of their elaborate stratagems, the first day's warfare saw the ranks of the emus reduced by only 20. So 20 emus killed in a full day when you've got machine guns is not good enough. Can I say that? Are they just sat around waiting for the emus to wander up to the machine guns then? Or are they running around like mad max with the machine guns on them? They're chasing them with the machine guns. Oh my god.

I'm not trained, but I confidently think I could kill a thousand emus with a machine gun if I was given 24 hours. Surely. I wouldn't want to. Yeah, but what are you running around, you've got him in the back of like a Ford Fiesta, the machine gun. What are you doing? How are you running around chasing emus with a machine gun? Are emus like a kids football team? Do they bunch?

You're needing them to bunch really, aren't you? The altering of emus really taking the brunt. Yeah, and it is one talented emu in the middle of the ball. Because isn't the thing with emus as well, like their meat is notoriously tough, this is why humans have never eaten them. And obviously, going for a headshot on an emu is going to be difficult because they've got very tiny heads with big bodies, but the body is so tough that the bullets are just bouncing off.

Well, Chris, you could not be more correct. The press described emus as the hardest bird in the world to kill. And Major Meredith, the aforementioned general all this, he compared them to tanks in terms of how hard they are to kill, how hard they are to bring down. And the next day was slightly more successful. The figure of Emus killed had risen to 200, but at a cost of nearly 2000 rounds of ammunition, so 2000 full rounds of ammunition to kill 200 emus. And after a week or two, it was just generally accepted, it was going so badly, that the gunners were withdrawn and returned to their barracks at Fremantle defeated and completely humiliated

that they've been utterly unable to deal with the emus. And the farmers were livid about this. They were livid because they thought it just reflected sort of city officials lack of concern for the farming community. That's what they thought. They thought this is just they don't really care about us. They've withdrawn the funding. They've withdrawn the action immediately.

Once again, they don't care about the plight of people who are working the land. And to be honest, that was nearly it. That was nearly the end of it. However, here's the interesting twist. The whole war was caught on camera by a cameraman from the Fox movie tone company, who was employed to capture the cull and then complete with sound. Now this is, this is horrific. Imagine having to watch this before a film, you go see Finding Nemo and then this is on beforehand. Complete with sound. It was shown at cinemas across Australia before Christmas 1932. So you go to the cinema and rather than being a trailer for what movies are coming up, you're watching a documentary film about the culling of emus with machine guns.

Why? for what movies are coming up. You're watching a documentary film about the culling of emus with machine guns. Why? I have no idea. But this was enough to suddenly rouse concerns about animal welfare, understandably, among cinema goers in eastern Australia, which in turn revealed a huge gap in attitudes between the two parts of the country, the East and the West. And after a fortnight of fighting, less than 200 emus have been killed at the cost of $924 Australian dollars, which is equivalent to $50,000 today.

So $50,000 to kill 200 emus. And this cost was what led the federal government to refuse all subsequent requests for resumption of the war. But interestingly, because it was such a farce, the emu war has gained notoriety in Australia in the 20th century, and still talked about in schools today. It's a moment when human needs essentially faced off against the natural world, when rural attitudes confronted urban ones, when economic demands were balanced with environmental considerations, all of which actually feels quite contemporary and up to date in terms of the things that are happening now.

Not least in our relationship with animals, you know, rats, seagulls, all these sort of things. It wasn't long ago, I don't know if you remember, in Scarborough here when they wanted marksmen to be on the roofs to take out seagulls, because in Scarborough there were far too many. That was actually disbanding because people pointed out that having marksmen on roofs shooting into populated areas probably isn't a good idea. But this is an ongoing discussion point. Yes, of course. And our relationship with people who are from farming communities, people from cities, it's

not an easy balance. No. Because the views are so... We have to share this planet with a lot of other species. Yeah. And yeah, it's difficult sometimes to find the right balance. Wow, I'd never heard of this. There's one other animal species war that I've really got into recently. And they say this is, in terms of lives lost, this is the biggest war in the history of

Earth. Do you know what species is at war? Is this going to be some really pertinent point about humans? No. Sorry. No, there's nothing deep. Man versus man? No.

Have you heard about the global ant war? No. This has blown my mind. I heard about this recently and I've got well global ant war. What? This is blown my mind. I heard about this recently and I've got well into reading it. So basically there's lots of invasive species of the Argentine ant and they have formed three major super colonies in the world. There's the main European super colony, 6,000 kilometers down the Mediterranean coast. It's the largest insect colony ever recorded.

And there's also one in California and one in Japan. And basically these super colonies are like cooperating internally. But when they butt up against other ant colonies, they are at war. They're killing each other. It's nonstop violence between ants. Wow. Wow. Imagine running a restaurant and there's an ant war

happening in your kitchen. These Argentinian ants don't have any natural predators. And so like these colonies have been able to grow and grow and grow and they're at war with each other. It's the global ant war guys. I've never been happier to be living on an island. Yeah. Thank God for that.

Let them cross the channel. Give it a go. Try it. The next time a weary ant wanders into your kitchen, give him a little cuddle. The geese are knackered, he's been in the trenches all day. Remarkable. Okay, it's time now to talk about when football became war. And we're going back to the 60s, the 27th of June 1969 in a decisive World Cup qualifier as well. It's between Honduras and El Salvador and they're meeting in Mexico City.

And this is the third time they've played in just three weeks. The series between them is tied with one win apiece. Okay. Tensions are sky high. It's 2-2. It's the 90th minute. Qualification for Mexico 1970 hangs in the balance. It's the 11th minute of extra time. Mauricio Pippo Rodriguez slips the ball past the Honduran goalkeeper, Jane Varela, and scores for El Salvador. Full-time 3-2 to El Salvador. With that goal, El Salvador moved one step closer to its first ever World Cup finals and they did eventually qualify for Mexico 1970 after beating Haiti in the next round. But what came next for El Salvador

wasn't celebration. It was war guys. Oh dear. Okay. Yeah. 17 days later, 14th of July 1969 now, El Salvador launched a military offensive against Honduras, a short but violent conflict that became known as the Football War. Oh bloody hell. Now, despite the title, football didn't really cause the war, but it became the spark and the symbol and the story that people and the world can understand. But diplomatic ties had been severed before Honduras and El Salvador had that third match.

And the day before kickoff, El Salvador officially broke off relations with Honduras. But when Rodriguez scored that winning goal, it became more than a moment of sporting triumph. It was the trigger, the spark for a political explosion. So the seeds of this conflict were marked across all three games. We begin on the 8th of June, Intego Seagalpa, that's the best I'm going to do with that pronunciation. Honduras won 1-0 and Salvadorian fans allegedly set fire to part of the stadium in response. The team blamed their loss on sleepless nights due to coordinated harassment. So this is what the El Salvador had to put up with before they lost to Honduras. They had people gathering outside their hotel,

throwing rocks at windows, setting off firecrackers, people outside all night banging on metal sheets, the sound of car horns all night long. This is a staple of the hostile game in enemy territory. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would find that so annoying. Still happens now. Absolutely. Is it okay? No, it's not really okay, is it? Imagine playing an important football match, having not slept for 24 hours. You would be so grumpy.

Yeah, yeah. Would you be tempted, let's say you're the chairman of Real Madrid, to book a dummy hotel? The dummy hotel. Yeah, I was just thinking that. Where you claim your players are, but They're obviously not. You're in the Ibis, the other side of town. And then obviously the team bus turns up and all that kind of stuff. Part of the team bus upsides over and assumes that and then you're in a hotel two miles away. Exactly. The under 21s walking in with their headphones on. You can't really,

they're going in quite quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're playing a young team tonight, whatever. How are you guys going to feel the night before the first Oh What A Time live gig at the O2? We're in the hotel. You turn off the light, you get in bed and you hear bang, bang, bang, car horns. You look outside. Yes, Dominic Sandbrook. The rest is history, lads.

The rest is history, guys. Beep, beep, beep, beep Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. Beep beep beep beep. Metal sheets, rocks at the window. Sun rock! Ole ole ole. Ole ole ole. You walk on stage and they're like

sorry guys I'm absolutely not good. Beep beep beep beep beep beep. Simon Sharma was out all night. Wanker wanker. Oh, wait. Yeah, so that's the 8th of June, Honduras winning 1-0. And then somehow we still rip it. We still absolutely win.

Oh, yeah. And Sam Brooks at the back going, oh, that's so annoying. God, dude. God damn it. So 8th of June, Honduras won the first game of the series 1-0 at home and El Salvador have to put up with a lot. But in the second leg in San Salvador on the 15th of June, it's even worse. So this time the Salvadorian fans are out for revenge.

Honduras team hotel, the windows get smashed. They're really ramping it up. When the windows are smashed in comes the rotten eggs. And this is a bit, this is a bit strong. They also throw dead rats into the Honduran team hotel through the broken windows and dirty old rags are thrown inside as well. Rags I can handle. So broken window, egg in, then they throw a rat onto the egg. Is that right? And then they throw a funnel over the rat over the egg. Rotten eggs, dead rat. So you come in and you don't even know then they throw a rat onto the egg is that right and then they throw a flannel over the egg so you come in you know there's a rat and an egg and you go what's that just a flannel what's that smell that's weird then you pick up the flannel it's a rat oh my god it's a rat throw the rat again

also you know the rat is angry because it wants to eat an egg but it's rotten so now it's getting wound up you've got a wound up rat and a smelly egg and a dirty man. Well the rats are all dead apparently. So some comfort for the Hondurans. I think that's great for you though. I think if you're the person bringing the dead rat, I know you're throwing a rat into someone's hotel room, which is obviously a form of attack, but you're also having to bring a dead rat across town, aren't you? It's not great for you, is it? You've got a dead rat in your pocket. You're slightly experiencing the horror as well.

Yeah. There's a lot of people turning up with one glove on. And you're like, oh, I know what you've been doing. You've been throwing ruts into a team hotel haven't you? Yeah, no, what makes you say that? Yeah, so I mean, so the Honduran team, they have to put up with a lot all night. And then by the time the game comes around, there are the fans outside are still rabid. So the players have to get collected by the military and brought to the

stadium in armoured vehicles. Once they're inside the stadium, so the players have to be taken to the stadium in military armoured vehicles and once inside the stadium they've got the Honduran flag flying, the El Salvador fans pull down the flag and burn it. And guess what they replace it with? Never a good start. They replace it with a dirty rag. They seem to be obsessed with rags. Wow. And then there is enormous violence between the fans. Two Honduran fans are reportedly killed.

Back home in Honduras, anti-Salvadorian riots break out, driving thousands of Salvadorans to flee the country. And obviously El Salvador win that game, which tie the series at 1-1. But El Salvador are unable to contain the spiraling violence. And they decide to launch airstrikes and a ground invasion on the evening of the 14th of July as it really begins to spiral out of control. The war just lasts over 100 hours.

It ends on the 18th of July, thanks to the Organization of American States, which is like a regional political diplomatic organization made up of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean, basically like the UN of the Americas. I hadn't heard of them before, Organization of American States. The human toll was steep. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of civilians were killed. Deeper issues, land reform, immigration and economic inequality all remained unresolved. So it became known as the football war and it was famously coined by the Polish journalist

Reisad Kapuzynski, whose memoir The Soccer War appeared in Poland in 1978 and in English in 1991. But the term was already in use and declassified CIA cables from the 17th of July 1969 refer to the football war. And so did American news outlets like Newsweek. They also called it the football war and so did American news outlets like Newsweek. They also called it the football war. But Kapusinsky gave it literary weight and ensured that the phrase was in the public imagination. And actually Henry Kissinger wrote a memo to Richard Nixon on the 9th of July 1969 and connected

explicitly the football directly to the crisis. This is what he wrote, El Salvador broke diplomatic relations with Honduras on the evening of June 26th. The rupture followed 10 days of deteriorating relations after anti-Salvadoran riots swept Honduras in the wake of reports that Honduran soccer fans had been assaulted while accompanying the national team to a World Cup regional playoff in San Salvador. But Kissinger also acknowledges the deeper causes, but again he points that the stadium violence was at the very root of Washington's understanding of the conflict. It's also worth noting that an American English soccer war might evoke little more than a league rivalry. In Central America this was something else entirely.

Last year they played a friendly against each other. Just check! I mean, I think between West Ham and Millwall we can get a half hand, but Millwall have never called in an air strike. I can't believe that, that's absolutely extraordinary. In the years that followed, both nations returned to the world stage, but mercifully, just on the football, as opposed to on the war front. Both El Salvador and Honduras qualified for the 1982 World Cup in Spain. They were kept apart though in the group stages and were both eliminated early. Since then, Honduras has reached the finals twice in 2010 and 2014. El Salvador, meanwhile, has yet to return. And the man that scored the infamous goal, Mauricio Rodriguez, reflected on it in 2019, telling the BBC,

the goal will always be a source of sporting pride. But what I'm sure of is that the authorities and politicians made use of our victory to glorify El Salvador's image. A reminder that in sport, as in politics, stories can be powerful, but also very dangerous. Also, that's not the only time it happened. There was the war in the Balkans because Dynamo Zagreb, they clashed with Serbian, their fans who were sort of Croat nationalists clashed with Serbian militants when Red Star Belgrade played them. So there was a Dynamo Red Star riot in 1990. There's a documentary about this. I can't remember which platform it's on, but it was just after Croatia's first multi-party elections in like 50 years. And so then there was a riot after the game and yeah,

you know, there were already huge tensions in the region anyway in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So football can be, I mean, it's more than just a game. And I've always said that, but yeah, I'd not heard of the Honduras El Salvador war that happened because of a football match. That's an absolutely astonishing story.

Oh, so where do you get your hands on a dead rat? Well, I don't want to say this. I've got two cats. It's easy. You know, I know you're a Norfolk now. It'd probably take me three hours. I could get you a dare drop by this evening. to both parts of each week's episode together. You'll get all the shows ad free, you'll get first dibs on live show tickets which are coming up in the very near future.

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