The Rest Is History - 22. Weird Wars

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

The Rest is History brings you the top ten strangest conflicts of all time. Obscure, little-known, downright strange. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland choose five each.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. Today's topic is one I've been looking forward to ever since we came up with the idea for this podcast. It is weird wars. Our favourite obscure, little known, colourful or just downright strange wars. It's probably worthwhile saying in the beginning. Of course every war involves an awful lot of suffering, so we're not making light of that. Well, no more than is tasteful, anyway.

My ever-tasteful guest is Tom Holland. Hello, Tom. Guest? I'm not your guest, Dominic. I'm your co-presenter. Stop trying to elbow me off. Let's have a war about it. The pod war of 2021. I hoped. I've been saving that up for weeks.

I'm thinking, when can I, if I distract him with some just sort of blather, then I can sneak that in and he won't notice. And then once it's said, it is said. I noticed. I noticed. Well, as the host, Dominic, perhaps you'd like to spell out what the format is. So we're going to choose five wars each. And with all due respect to the casualties, we're going to choose five wars each and uh with all due respect to the casualties

we're going to discuss them and um what's strange about them and um then and that's it really it's very simple yeah yeah maybe we can have a public vote on who has the best one yeah exactly since we're not taking since we haven't taken questions we'll obviously um welcome feedback and people can choose their favorites um yeah and i'm sure that we think we've most misrepresented all the one that we've missed out i'm sure listeners will have their own their own so they will indeed and i suppose it's worth saying as well you know we're doing this from you know comfortable prosperous britain uh and and these wars seem weird to us but of course they don't seem weird to the people in their countries involved. So to some extent they reflect our ignorance and solipsism, I suppose.

Yes. But with that caveat, why don't you go first? Give us one of your wars. Okay, I'm going to kick off with the oldest war I've got on my list, which dates from 590 BC. And it's the First Sacred War. And it actually takes us back to a theme we touched on in the previous podcast which is Delphi and it it was it was fought by a league of Greek cities who were anxious that a city called Kira which was the port that people would land when they

wanted to go to Delphi that Kira was becoming too dominant and essentially wanted to absorb Delphi into its own kind of framework of power. So a league of cities, which included Sicyon, which was a city on the north of the Peloponnese, kind of directly opposite Kira, and Athens, several other cities as well, got together and they were told to do this they said by apollo and apollo basically said not only capture kira but nuke it nuke all the lands around it make them uninhabitable um i don't want anyone ever living there again and so what um what this league does is they lay siege to kira and they cut off the water supply so that everyone in Kira starts to um to die of thirst and then they take a poisonous plant called Hellebor and they put it in the

water supply and the water goes back in and everyone in Kira drinks harsh and in some way we're not quite sure it the lands all around kira are indeed left devastated because um we have the record of pausanias who is a geographer writing around 150 ad so centuries after this war and he says that the plains around kira um are completely barren um people don't plant trees there the land is still under a curse um the anger of apollo still marks it um and again we we talked in the the last podcast about how the priests of apollo were really the only professional priests and that's because of the sacred war it's essentially because this league get together and say that delphi is you know it it has to be a kind of independent temple complex it cannot come under the influence of any one city um but i i

choose this because i think it's um you know it's it's kind of the first example really of uh of of using plants to poison people it's kind of hint of chemical warfare there chemical water um so there's no sense that the greeks had that this was bad form that they thought it was crafty yes i mean it's it's clearly remembered because it was seen as being terrible um and it required the sanction of um of apollo and then it kind of interesting context I think for the sense that something quite sinister had happened is that um suppose well there are various accounts about how this came about I think this is kind of a hint of legend there but one of the accounts says that um the person who comes up with this idea is a guy called Nebros who is a follower of Asclepius who is the god of healing um and one of his descendants supposedly is Hippocrates

okay and Hippocrates of course the guy that you know you if you become a doctor you swear you won't do people any harm and there is a thesis that this the Hippocratic oath is is a kind of an attempt to make amends for his ancestor, what his ancestor did in the first sacred war. So anyway, so that's my first choice. But you said it's the first sacred war. There are other sacred wars. Yes, there are further sacred wars, but they're not quite as much to talk about.

Okay, fair enough. All right, I'm going to go in really strong with my first one. So my first one is The War of Canudos. Have you ever read a book called The War at the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa? I have. So, yes, in that case you'll know that it's about a war in Brazil in 1896 to 7.

So basically what happened was the Brazilians, Brazil was this colossal plantation, effectively, for several hundred years. And then at the end of the 1880s, the Brazilian emperor abolished slavery, Dom Pedro II, but then the military kicked him out and they wanted him to go. And for the next 10 years, Brazil was very unstable, very sort of tense a sort of tense conflicted place and in this fragmented landscape this sort of prophet figure called antonio concilero antonio the counselor he comes along and he's basically says let's set up in in bayern in this sort of back country very poor

big slave ex-slave population a lot of mixed race people as well. He says, let's set up this sort of sacred community at a place called Canudos and we'll wait there for the coming of the late, the medieval Portuguese king, Sebastien. Sebastien will come and he will bring the sort of the new Jerusalem and better times. So all these people i mean thousands of people go to live at this place and the brazilian military who are all

um secularists and freemasonry is very strong in brazil so that freemasonry and sort of enlightened thinking and stuff they say these people are backward they're monarchists they're going to bring the country down we must crush them and extirpate them and they send troops and there's multiple attacks on canudos um and eventually the military wins they destroy the the settlements they kill most of the people they kill about 25 000 people and it's this extraordinary conflict so on the one side you've got the forces of kind of progress and liberty and order and modernity who are effectively, in the novel and in the sense of the war, they're the kind of bad guys. And then the other, you have the dispossessed bandits, ex-prostitutes, ex-slaves who tend to be black who are in this city,

and they end up all being killed. So it's kind of a sad, it's a strange, very strange, but sad story. Is it famous in South America? Do you know? I think it's famous in Brazil. Right. And I think, you know, Brazilian, nobody in the West, in Western Europe really knows any Brazilian history, I suppose, unless they're Portuguese. We certainly don't know it in England. I mean, you know, it's a black hole, I guess. And its strangeness, I think, comes from the fact that, you know,

we have no real reference points from a sort of Anglo-Saxon perspective. But also because it's almost like the Waco siege writ large. Remember the Waco siege in the 90s? It's got a slight element of that about it, but because it's rooted in this sort of world of slavery and of intense racism and of sort of this fanaticism about progress. So the Brazilian army just think

we need to sort of completely destroy these people because they're backward. It makes you think the whole magical realist tradition in South American fiction, but actually the real you think the whole magical realist tradition in South American fiction. Yeah. The realist. It is quite realist. Yeah.

I mean, strange things really are going on. Well, I'm going to come back to South America with a later war because I think their wars are so little known here and often they're incredibly violent

and bloody. Okay. Well, my next choice also has a prophet, but it's a female prophet and she features in um the umayyad berber war of the 690s to 702 ad wow that is that is an issue this is a great this is a this is this is an astonishing war um so it's taking place during the arab conquest of um the uh coast. So they conquered Egypt,

they sweep westwards, they come to the Byzantine province of Africa, so it ruled from Constantinople, including the great city of Carthage. It falls and the Arab commander, his troops are now looking westwards towards the Straits of Gibraltar and ultimately Spain but to do that they have to get past the Berbers who are notoriously tough opponents they you know they'd oppose the Byzantines they'd oppose the Visigoths they'd oppose the Romans they'd oppose the Carthaginians they're very very tough opponents and the Arabs are overconfident and they they go sweeping in and they come up against the Berbers who are led by a queen called Diyah. But she is better known by the Arab word for prophetess, Al-Kahina.

And she is supposed to have had the gift of being able to speak to birds. So she was kind of well-informed. So, you know, they were her scouts. She was meant to have um murdered her husband on her wedding night um and according to ibn kaldun the great um arab historian writing in the middle ages um she's meant to have been jewish not not um uh descended from um children of israel but she had adopted the Jewish faith. Interesting. Supposedly. Although there are other traditions

that say that she was a Christian or that she was a pagan. Basically, we don't know very much about her, but almost everything we do know about her is fantastical. And it's clear that she did, she defeats the Arabs in a great battle beside a river

in 696. And the Arabs retreat and they lick their wounds. And Dia is anxious that they're going to come back. So what she does supposedly is to try and create a corner sanitaire by kind of destroying everything so that the Arabs won't have anything to forage or live off. But this just alienates her subjects. And so when the Arabs come back this time, she loses. She gets pursued into the mountains and she gets killed in battle. And she's supposed, before she dies, to tell her sons, go and become Muslim. And she's supposed to say to all the Berbers, become Muslim.

Right. How convenient that that's in the Arab tradition. She's kind of, I suppose, the North African Boudicca. She's the great warrior queen who's fighting the imperialists. And so she's put to, and the fact that she's supposedly Jewish as well, you know, made her a subject of great interest in the 19th century. She was used by the French as a kind of emblem of resistance to islam and she was used by um people in algeria as an emblem of resistance against the french she's she's quite a kind

of malleable and potent symbol so this is in modern day algeria right this is yes modern day algeria why did she win if it where did she win initially because the arabs had carried all before them hadn't they i I mean, they were unstoppable. I think the Berber's just very, very tough. Very tough. And maybe they've been underestimated by the... Yeah, and also the Arabs are going along the north coast, where there are cities, where it's much easier to water your horses,

get supplies, and they're defeated in more hostile terrain. Yeah, never go into the interior. That's the lesson. Never go into. Yeah, never go into the interior. That's the lesson. Never go into the interior. Never go into the interior. But I choose her because I think that prophetesses who are kept informed of their enemies' movements by birds, I don't think there are enough of them in the historical record.

No, that's right. So I give you Al-Kahina. Okay. Well, since you've done an African one, especially one where people go into the interior i'm going to choose a very strange um african war in which people go into the interior so this is the british expedition to abyssinia 1867 68 so if you've for the listeners who've read the flashman books um this is flashman in Ethiopia, if you remember that. So this is a war that basically begins with an unanswered letter.

So you have Abyssinia, Ethiopia, and their king is called Tewodros II. People called him Theodore in Britain. And he's a sort of modernizer. Everyone said he was this great romantic figure, a kind of Robin Hood of a king who wanted to break the power of the old kind of land-owning elite and sort of drag his country towards the 19th century and build things and all this business.

And he provoked a lot of rebellions, and he wanted military assistance from Europe. So he writes these letters to, I think, Russia, France and Britain. And he writes to Queen Victoria and says, can you please send me some military aid? And Queen Victoria ignored his, was told by the Foreign Office, don't write back, just, you know, ignore him, he'll go away. He's the Emperor of Abyssinia, you need to give him no thought at all.

And, you know, she's probably got other things on her mind. So two years went by, he was outraged that he didn't get a reply from Queen Victoria. Did the Russians and French reply? No, they didn't reply at all. I mean, that was the sort of, yeah, I mean, he didn't get any help from anybody. People treated him very badly. But he was particularly outraged about Queen Victoria. And in revenge revenge he started capturing missionaries and um sort of British traders and people wandering through and locking them up as hostages until he got a reply from Queen Victoria yeah fair enough so the British had an expedition to to crush him and this expedition came was the army it came from Indiaia uh read by sir robert napier who was a leading sort of general in india

and they have this colossal military expedition they land on the red sea they have to take all kinds of engineers and things to basically get them across 400 miles into the the sort of heart of ethiopia they don't really know where they're going um you know it's this sort of real sort of leave in the dark and they go all this way i mean they go 400 miles um to odros he retreats to his sort of mountain citadel a place called magdala with the missionaries with the sort of prisoners um and he's determined to hold out. And so they siege and they defeat his army and the British break in. And ironically, he shoots himself with a duelling pistol that was a present from Queen Victoria.

And do we loot all kinds of stuff and bring it back to the British Museum, that kind of thing? Exactly. And then we sort of came home again and said, you know, in future, when we don't reply to your letters, you know, behave yourself and don't take it so badly. So in the Flashman books, Flashman sort of presents it as a, we were talking about historical fiction in one of the previous podcasts,

and the Flashman book actually presents it as quite a sad story that Theodore just wanted to reply to his letter. well i'm completely on his side the british lost so the abyssinians lost hundreds of people i think the british lost two we lost two men in the whole expedition because we had the gatling gun and they did not precisely we had all this technology and you know just fighting people with um swords and spears and muskets. Okay, well, time for one more from me, and then we'll have the break. And Dominic, I chose this one especially for you, because I think that you're going to pick up on why I've chosen it.

And it's the German-Hungarian War of 955. Wow, is that the Battle of the... The Battle of the River Lech. Yes, Battle of the River Lech. And the two contestants on this, have um the uh the saxon kings saxon kings are highly mobile heavy cavalry um they're in possession of the spear of power the spear that supposedly pierced the uh the side of christ on the cross and is possessed of a terrifying potency power that's of power. That's amazing.

And they look back to the example of Charlemagne and ultimately of the Roman Empire. But there is no empire. That has gone. So no emperors. And on the other side, we have the Hungarians who are highly mobile. People who've settled on the Carpathian plain with their horses. They're able to launch raids against Christian Europe.

Christians find them impossible to hold off. Completely terrifying. The Hungarians are supposed to drink blood. They're seen as demonic children of the devil, portents of the apocalypse. So the whole backdrop to this is kind of lit up by a sense of the clash of good and evil, of the satanic and the angelic, and the feeling that patterns are being written on the flux of time, all of which provides the background for what is the ultimate Hungarian invasion, where they come not with horses but with siege engines as well and this time they're trying to conquer and their target is augsburg and they bring huge battering ram siege engines um and the message goes to uh otto who is up in the north in saxony please come to our rescue and in the meanwhile the citizens of Augsburg have to hold off.

And they are led in the siege by the Bishop of Augsburg, Ulrich, a guy with a great long flowing white beard who rides around on his horse on the battlements. Oh, I can see where this is going. The mighty hordes of the East who have flooded out. And at one point, the gates are smashed by the battering ram. And Ulrich stands there holding up his cross to stop the Hungarian hordes from coming in. And people come to the rescue and they're able to hold up the gate.

And just when it seems the city is about to fall, people in Axburg hear the battle horns and they look up to the hill and they're arriving the cavalry of the heavy cavalry led by um led by Otto who charges down the hill shatters the uh the Hungarian hordes they're trampled down and that evening um amid the the cries and howls of dying across the plains beyond Augsburg, Otto is hailed by his troops as Imperator, as Emperor. And six years later in Rome, he is crowned as Emperor and it is the return of the Imperator. So I give you that because there are clearly echoes there of Return of the King. And I know you're because there are clearly echoes there of Return of the King.

And I know you're a Tolkien fan. When this podcast goes out, I think they should put under it the Lord of the Rings soundtrack for your monologue. And people can listen to it on a loop. Yes. Okay. So on that perhaps slightly histrionic tone,

let's go for a break. When we come back, we've got five more weird wars for you. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix

of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched

our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to this episode of The Rest Is History. We're doing our top 10 weird wars. Five from me, five from Dominic. Dominic, your turn, your third choice. Well, Tom, you took us out on a note of high melodrama there with your Siege of Augsburg. So I shall come back with some low comedy.

It is, of course, the War of Jenkins's Ear. Everybody's famous ear-based war. There aren't enough, are there? No, there aren't. So this is a war that went from 1739 to 1748, although I think most of the fighting ended a little bit earlier. And if people know anything about it, I mean, most people know practically nothing about 18th century wars, do they? But if people know anything about it, they'll know that there was a fellow calledbert jenkins who was a welsh merchant whose ship was captured by the spanish um in the caribbean and jenkins was sort of trading they suspected him of smuggling and

trading illegally so they cut his ear off so this happened actually in 1731 which is eight years before the war happened so jenkins comes back home and uh the story goes that he exhibited his ear to a to the house of commons so he had a pickle to carry around a jar and he's supposedly i'm sure it was horrid well it turns out this story is totally untrue actually uh he didn't He did nothing of the sort. There are cartoons done at the time showing him, showing his ear to Sir Robert Walpole, who was prime minister, and Walpole looking away because he doesn't want to look at it. He wants to eye up some girls instead. This is what's happening in the cartoons. And this was because the sort of opposition to Walpole wanted war with Spain.

They wanted – the Spanish were not letting the British trade with their colonies. They weren't letting our ships in to sell them goods, particularly in a sort of, there was a lot of tension along the coast of North America where the British had just started up a colony in Georgia, which was next to the Spanish colony in Florida. The British wanted to get into Florida. The Spanish weren't having it. So people wanted Walpole to go to war.

And they used Jenkins' ear as an example of what they saw as these sort of Spanish depredations. They said, you know, this fellow's had his ear cut off. You're not doing anything about it. Do you have a question, Tom? I do. I was wondering, is this when Walpole says, let sleeping dogs lie?

I don't know. That's a good question. Maybe it is. That's a very good question. Maybe it is. i hope it is well there are you'll find out there are some interesting things we've got from the war of jenkins here so finally we go to war in 1739 walpole's kind of at the end of his time and he says fine he's always tried to stay out of wars but he says fine have your war we fight this war

with the spanish and basically actually the war jenkins is a bit pathetic because it ends up it's a bit of a draw nothing happens it gets subsumed into the war of the austrian succession which i have to confess i know virtually nothing about um however the war the jenkins is it does give us a couple of things so one of the great sort of um high points for the british is we capture a place called portobello in panama and we get two things from that. One is Portobello Road, which comes from Notting Hill. There's an area of Edinburgh called Portobello as well. And we get Royal Britannia.

So Royal Britannia was written after the capture of Portobello to sort of celebrate our great victories in the Caribbean. So the last line of the problem is we could all wave ears. Yeah. Well, I mean, I do that. I mean, no one would complain about that. That would unite the country in a shared sense. Yeah.

Instead of people going with sort of EU flags as they do now, everybody should take giant ears. Just wave an ear. Yeah. That would surely be seen as anti-Spanish, though. Wouldn't it be seen as Hispanophobic now? I'm sure the Spanish wouldn't mind. Yeah, they'd surely be seen as anti-Spanish, though. Wouldn't it be seen as Hispanophobic now? I'm sure the Spanish wouldn't mind. Yeah, they'd probably go over it.

An opportunity to wave large ears in the air. I mean, I'm sure they wouldn't object. Right, well, my fourth one also involves trading wars over vast distances. And it's the Dutch-Portuguese War, which went from 1602 to 1663. And the reason I've chosen this is because I think that actually this is the First World War. Wow, that's a big claim. And the reason it's the First World War, I mean, I suppose you've got the Mongol conquest, haven't you? I mean, that's ranging from Japan up to wherever, Hungary.

Yeah, but not all at the same time, surely. Yeah, and it's all on one continent. Whereas the thing about the Dutch-Portuguese war is that it is properly global. Okay, yeah. So Portugal has, over the course of the late 15th, 16th century, has carved out this empire, which would include Brazil, Cape of Good Hope,

Angola, Goa in India, various kind of Macau and so on, and various places controlling the spice trade in the Pacific. And you've got the Dutch as the kind of the coming traders. It's basically, as with the British conquest of India, it's basically kind of companies who are running this war rather than the Netherlands itself. So it's the Dutch East and West India companies who are pushing it. And you get wars that span South America, Africa, India, the Pacific.

And the Dutch don't manage to take Brazil. They don't manage to take Angola, but they do, with momentous consequences, seize the Cape of Good Hope. So that's essentially, you know, lots are going to come from that. And although the Portuguese keep hold of Goa and Macau, the Dutch basically kind of elbow them out of the way to seize control of the specific spice trade. So that's Indonesia?

The Dutch East Indies? Yeah, so Indonesia, Jakarta, Batavia and so on. And it's a war over spice, but it is, I think properly, the First World War. So that's why I've chosen it. and is that where um

suriname comes from because suriname was a dutch colony am i right in south america yes and and um also they the dutch build the fort at gore which uh provides the backdrop um for the test match in sri lanka so that's another reason for choosing it. So that's a nice war, because those are two people who you don't imagine going to war with each other, you know, Holland and Portugal. A sort of, you know, perennial World Cup quarterfinalists. Well, except that Portugal at this time is ruled by the Spanish king. So obviously there's a bit of beef between the Spanish and the Dutch,

so that is going back. But actually the Portuguese feel that they haven't been properly backed by the Spanish. So that's a massive contributory factor in the Portuguese deciding to go independent again. Right. Interesting. Because I was going to say, well, to the Spanish. And the Portuguese, so the Portuguese lost this war. This was a Dutch win.

Yeah, basically. Yeah. Okay. But then, but you know who the real winners are? The British? The English? Yes. How do I guess? But you know who the real winners are? The British? The English? Yes. Because basically the Portuguese and the Dutch are left so exhausted

that it's then easy pickings for the English to move in. So that's how the English get hold of, you know, the Dutch rule Gaul and Sri Lanka for a while, and then it's not long before the British are muscling in. So as per normal, we are the bad guys. Perfidious Albion. Yeah. Okay.

Jolly good. I've got two left, haven't I? So I shall go with probably the more bizarre of my two remaining choices. This is the War of the Triple Alliance, which is also – I mean, that doesn't give anything away, does it? It could be anywhere. But it's also known as the Paraguayan War. So this is actually a terrible war.

This is an unbelievably bloody war, which begins for very sort of obscure reasons. So Paraguay is generally a very strange place, completely landlocked in the middle of South America. It was basically a sort of Spanish administrative division that broke away when the Spanish lost South America. And it was run for a while by a man called Dr. Francia, who was a disciple of Rousseau. And he tried to run Paraguay. He tried to make it an idealized Rousseau-style society. So it was completely isolationist. He had complete control. He was very anti-clerical. He was very keen on prostitution as one of the sort of key industries

of paraguay so again it sounds like a kind of magical realist it does exactly so paraguay is this weird introverted place and um and basically paraguay also kind of starts the war which you would think is a foolish thing to do if you're going to take on argentina and brazil so there is a conspiracy theory actually interestingly going back to your last war there is a conspiracy theory. Actually, interestingly, going back to your last war, there's a conspiracy theory that actually the British planned this war. We're so bad, aren't we? But it turns out to be totally untrue. It's very deeply rooted in South America, but academics think it's totally untrue.

The British, for their own perverse reasons, wanted the Paraguayans defeated, which we didn't. So when the Paraguay decide they're going to fight Argentina and Brazil simultaneously, and they reckon they can handle handle it and it turns out that they can't so the war lasts six years it basically goes on in the 1860s the same time as the american civil war and it is colossally bloody so about half a million people die in total the paraguayans are totally defeated um and they lost. So get this. Historical estimates about the number of people who died

from Paraguay's population range between about 60% and 90%. Goodness me. So basically everybody, or a colossal proportion of people are killed. At the end, there are about four or five times as many women in Paraguay as there are men. And historians and sociologists think that this has sort of completely affected paraguay's development ever since and paraguay is utterly brutalized by its neighbors it's occupied basically most the vast majority of the men are killed and ever since paraguay has remained this very sort of strange, introverted, quite isolationist regime. So that's

why it was the sort of destination of choice for Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II, because you could be sure that no one's going to come after you in Paraguay. The only person I know who's been to Paraguay is Alan Wicker. In Wickers, there's a brilliant edition of Wickers World where he goes to Paraguay. But anyway, yeah, the Paraguayan War. Nobody knows about it. And it was colossally, it was horrible. That sounds horrible. Okay, well, I'm going to give you a war now where nobody dies,

or at least no humans die. That's a cheery war. It's the Emu War of 1932. Are you familiar with the Emu? Is it Rod Hull? It's not Emu War of 1932. Are you familiar with the Emu? Is it Rod Hull? It's not Rod Hull. No, it's in a way even a lot funnier than Rod Hull. So this is about, it's rather kind of Roman.

Roman soldiers would come back and be given plots of land. And rather similarly, after the First World War, Australian troops coming back to Australia were given plots of land in arable territory in Western Australia. And they set up their farms there. And then their lands get invaded by a task force of 20,000 emus. Wow, a task force. And the emus kind of devastate the land. And so all these soldiers start saying, well, we need to take them out.

And of course, they're all very good with machine guns and things. Yeah. Kind of armed to the teeth. And the Royal Australia Artillery see an opportunity to kind of have a bit of practice so they can use the emus as target practice. And so they go in to take on the emus. And there was all kinds of jingoistic footage, which you can see. And it's kind of, yeah, boy's going in.

Look at these emus running at 40 miles per hour. These are tough enemy. And it turns out actually they are incredibly tough enemy because they just run. And then they kind of come up in the rear and take out all the take out all that take out all the crops and um the uh the commander uh ends up comparing them to zulus he says that you know they they just kind of melt away and then when you think that uh you've got them on the run, suddenly they attack you from the side. And he says that they kind of, you know, when facing machine guns, they have the invulnerability of tanks.

And the whole thing is a kind of a parody of colonial wars, really. Yeah. the kind of the mismatch between heavily armed european troops and the way in which kind of repeatedly they find it difficult to um essentially kind of enforce their will um and and the emus basically get away with it and yeah the emus kind of win yeah i mean they it's it's it's basically it's i think pretty much the only war that dinosaurs have won since the Mesozoic. So hold on, a lot of these Australians, are they veterans of the First World War? Yeah. God, so they could beat the Germans, but they couldn't beat the Emus. Well, I guess they're kind of used to being in trenches where you know where the enemy are whereas the emus yeah you know they can run at 40 miles an hour

so it is a kind of place yes it is a kind of metaphor for vietnam or something isn't it it is and um and of course you know looking ahead you've got um you've got singapore lots of singapore you've got the french indochina you've got vietnam um yeah so there's iran as a kind of, yes, as a metaphor for the Western way of war and its inadequacy, it's kind of perfect. And if I were a magical realist novelist, I was ready for this. Yeah. Surely some, there's an Australian Booker Prize winner in this, isn't there? You thought so, yes. All right. Well, my final war is a bit less jolly. It's a very bloody war, probably the bloodiest one we've done. It's the Russian Civil War. So this is a colossal war that often we know nothing about. We sort of assume the Russian Revolution happened and then you have the Soviet Union and it's sort of inevitable. But of course it wasn't inevitable, not least because the Allies hoped to strangle Bolshevism at birth.

So we were landing small amounts of troops at Archangel and Murmansk and whatnot. But also because it looks like a war from a video game, from a sort of computer strategy game, or if you're playing Risk or something. So you have these colossal armies kind of wandering across these massive expanses of territory. The Bolsheviks are surrounded. There are white Russian armies on all sides. And often it looks as though the Bolsheviks are going to lose because the whites control colossal areas of Siberia and stuff. There are very strange combatants.

So the Baltic states are involved. Poland are involved, Ukraine. The Allies are involved, but also, of course, the Germans are involved because at the end of the war, the Germans are still in the game. There are people like the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus, so all these countries that don't exist anymore that are involved too. And my favorite competence, the ones that I find most intriguing, are a group of people, there are about 50,000 of them,

called the Czech Legion. So you might wonder why the Czech Legion are in Russia. They're prisoners of war. They're Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war that have been held in camps in Russia. And basically when czarism fails, they decide that they are going to go, they want to rejoin the war. They want to get back to what becomes Czechoslovakia. But they can't go west because of the Germans and the wars. They decide they're going to go east. They'll go all the way to the Pacific by train. Then they'll go through the US, across the Atlantic, and they'll get back that way.

Like a sort of gap year gone horribly wrong. But basically, on the way, they get distracted and they get drawn into the war. They seize control of the entire Trans-Siberian Railway. And there were these sort of trains of Czechs for months, crossing Russia, capturing towns, intervening in the war. And at one point, you know, they're the biggest threat to the Bolsheviks. So that doesn't appear in Dr. Zhivago, does it?

No, it doesn't, but it should. I mean, it's such a great story. They appear a bit in a book called People's History of Love by James Meek, a novel, and the Czechs are in that. But the Czechs are really never discussed in sort of western um sort of histories of communism the soviet union because they sort of they did get back they went all the way they they messed around in the war for a bit and then they kind of lost interest um and and went off to the pacific um and went through america and they did get back i mean it's

an amazing story they traveled thousands of miles in these armoured trains. And, of course, the Bolsheviks won. The Bolsheviks won the war because they controlled the industrial centres and they controlled Moscow, but also because they were the only people that were really selling the Russian peasantry a positive message. So the sort of the whites, I mean, they're very much kind of skull and crossbones kind of characters. They're very anti-Semitic, and they just have this pure sort of the whites i mean they're very much kind of skull and crossbones kind of characters they're very anti-semitic and they just have this pure sort of negative they want

to bring back feudalism and reactionary kind of um uh sort of reactionary world of czarist russia and not surprisingly the rush the ordinary russians don't really fancy that but you know it could have gone it could have gone either way. And it's just such a massive, confused, you know, it feels like a board game gone wrong in which millions of people die. I mean, you know, millions upon millions of people die. And as you said at the beginning, that is the key thing to bear in mind

is that everything we've discussed, apart from the emu war, even some emus die, is, yeah, yeah terrible although the interesting thing though tom i thought we'd um discuss this right at the end is there are some historians who argue that wars are good things so for example margaret mcmillan in her wreath lectures in a book about war you know she sort of says people not war but war is often a great force for progress lots of inventions um but also society you know human society often progresses by kind of leaps and bounds that are driven by wars

but then again dominic war what is it good for oh yeah yeah absolutely nothing discuss maybe maybe we'll have maybe we'll have a podcast on whether war is good for anything um some later time i think it's probably easy to say war is good for anything some later time. I think it's probably easy to say it's good for something if you're in your seminar room. If you're in a trench, maybe it feels a bit... Or if you're a mighty conqueror. Yeah, drinking from your adversary's skull.

Well, that's a charming note on which to end. We will be back on Monday when we will be discussing the 90s. And that's the 1990s. We will see you then. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. We've got another podcast that we'd love you to try as well. It's obsessed with history too, but just six years of history, albeit a pretty important six years. It's called We Have Ways of Making You Talk, and it's all about the Second World War. My brother, James Holland, presents the show with comedian and avid historian Al Murray. Here's a taster.

We have ways of making you talk wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, buddy, look out. Hey, buddy, look out. Which is, of course, American English for Achtung, Achtung. How are you this morning, Jim? Yeah, no, I'm not too bad. How about you? Oh, all right.

Yeah, you know. How did you pass your time over the weekend? no, I'm not too bad. How about you? Oh, all right, yeah, you know. How did you pass your time over the weekend? How did I pass my time over the weekend? Building a diorama of Bastogne. Oh, yeah, I've got to say, that is looking sehr toll, I have to say. Well, it's, yeah, oh, and you've been on Duolingo learning German, haven't you? Have I? How can you tell? Ich kenne nicht, aber du hast sehr gute Skills mit das Deutsch.

I do know how to say the ducks are eating the flies, which is obviously very useful. Die Enten frissen sie fliegen. Yeah, we need to work on that accent. Die Enten frissen sie fliegen. There you go.

Goering really was rubbish, wasn wasn't he and isn't it amazing that had had he been operating for you know had he be operating in the soviet union you know he just would not have survived till 1945 no not a chance and it's odd that hitler doesn't quite have the same ruthlessness as stalin i don't think well yeah, yeah, but that's Hitler's sort of tendency towards indecision, isn't it, as much as anything else? He'd rather they're all fighting each other and that saves him having to make a decision. Stalin is all about siloing the power in himself and using people to do his bidding

until he decides they're no use to him anymore. And when they're no use to him anymore, they tend to end up purged. There's such a difference in style, in actual fact. Yeah. And there is that, the end of the war hit, they're saying, oh, Stalin had it right. It's a thing we've talked about before.

Yeah. Stalin had it right. I wish I'd been as ruthless as him. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Going would have lasted five minutes in the Soviet Union. I mean, he's so shit. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening