Imagine this. It’s 1936 and you’re a teenager in Hitler’s Germany. Membership in the Hitler Youth has just become mandatory, but you say no fucking way because fuck that Nazi bullshit. What do you do? Answer: You become a pirate.

At the time, you were allowed to leave school at age fourteen, but if you were seventeen you were going to get conscripted. If you stayed in school, you’d be forced into the Hitler Youth in order to be indoctrinated into Nazism and work to convert others into the murderous cult. Many young people quit school and formed their own resistance group called the Edelweiss Pirates, and they loved to punch Nazis.

In addition to all the allegiance-to-Hitler stuff, being in the Hitler Youth sucked. It was highly regimented fascist paramilitary bullshit and totally the death of fun. Hitler Youth was boys only; girls were made to be part of the League of German Girls. Edelweiss Pirates were all about freedom of expression and growing long hair and mixing genders and fucking up those Nazi punks.

They numbered in the thousands, and in addition to just enjoying being teens and playing that “degenerate” jazz and blues music and exploring their sexuality, they’d hunt down Hitler Youth patrols and beat the shit out of them on a regular basis. The pirate slogan was “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth.”

Before the outbreak of World War II the pirates were seen as little more than an irritation by the Nazi government, but during the conflict they did things such as gather up Allied propaganda dropped by airplanes and push it through people’s mailboxes to spread the word that Hitler was bad. They also helped German army deserters disappear. They added sugar to the gas tanks of Nazi vehicles, pulled down Nazi flags, and even derailed munitions trains. On October 25, 1944, the Nazis finally took them seriously and Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s right-hand man, ordered a crackdown. The following month, thirteen people, many of them Edelweiss Pirates, were publicly hanged in Cologne.

The Nazi regime kept up the pressure on the Edelweiss Pirates, imprisoning many and even sending some to concentration camps, but their spirits would not be broken. History was unkind to the pirates, viewing them as criminals rather than a true resistance group. But efforts have been made to rehabilitate their image and view them as an important part of resistance to fascist authority during WWII.

Australia wants to kill you. Fucking spiders and snakes and crocodiles and goddamn dinosaur birds that can run 30mph and kick the shit out of you with their razor feet. In 1932 there was an emu invasion in Western Australia, so Australia sent in the military. The military lost. 

In World War I, Australia sent 10% of her population into battle, and 15% of those guys died. Half of those who didn’t get dead were either wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner. Many who made it home were told hey thanks here’s some farmland in the barely inhabitable ass end of Australia. Then there was a depression, a great one. Then the emus showed up. 

At least it wasn’t cassowaries. Cassowaries and emus are related, but the former are a lot heavier and way more pissed off. The emu will fight when necessary, and have injured and even killed people, but their greatest strength in this war was to run the fuck away. And yeah, they called it a war. The Great Emu War. 

Shell-shocked former soldiers were growing wheat and then 20,000 goddamn migrating emus showed up and started eating and fouling the crops and ripping apart the fences that kept the damn bunnies out. And then the bunnies that some asshole European brought over the previous century who then bred like rabbits started to eat everything too and the farmers were like I survived Gallipoli for this? 

The farmers, who were very familiar with the power of machineguns after having spent four years being shot at by them, asked the government, “Can we please have some fucking machineguns so we can kill these asshole birds?” The government didn’t want those guns in civilian hands because Australia is not America, so they sent in three soldiers and said to the farmers you have to feed and house them and pay for the ammo. 

The first battle in the war took place on November 2, 1932. The soldiers spotted about 50 emus and commenced blasting away like a Texan who believes the Second Amendment is the word of God. Unlike soldiers at Gallipoli, the birds did not bravely charge headlong into machinegun fire. They split off into small groups and ran the fuck away at top speed. Smart. 

They didn’t kill many, considering how many rounds were fired. Then they attempted to ambush the birds, but that didn’t work because the emus put out sentinels to watch for predators. Next the soldiers tried to mount the machineguns on a truck and chase down the emus, but the emus could outrun the truck over the rough ground. In the initial engagements they fired 2,500 rounds and killed only a couple hundred of the 20,000 emus. So much for one shot, one kill. 

After four days they gave up, and the emus kept invading and the farmers said come on please do something and the government tried again, and again their kill-to-bullet-use ratio was shit so they said fuck it let’s just build better fences.