Show Notes
In 1932, Western Australian wheat farmers — many of them WWI veterans — were losing their livelihoods to an invasion of 20,000 emus. Their government's answer: send in the army, with machine guns. What followed is one of the strangest true stories in military history. The soldiers had orders, tactics, and firepower. The emus had numbers, speed, and — according to the men sent to stop them — something that looked uncomfortably like teamwork. Six weeks later, the campaign quietly ended, the bir...
More from Double Helix: Blueprint of Nations
On a cold Sunday in March 1757, Admiral John Byng knelt on a cushion on the quarterdeck of a ship in Portsmouth harbour, dropped a handkerchief, and was shot by a platoon of Royal Marines while the entire fleet watched. He had thirty-nine years of service. His crime was failing to try hard enough. Voltaire got the line that stuck: in this country it is thought well to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. That is what Britain looked like in 1757. Losing, frightened, and ...
Before he was the marble man on the money, George Washington was a twenty-two-year-old Virginia militia officer with more ambition than judgment, standing in a rain-soaked hollow in western Pennsylvania watching something happen that he did not order and could not stop. Ten French soldiers were dead. Their commander had been carrying a diplomatic summons that nobody read. And within two years, the consequences of that morning were being fought out on the Elbe and the Ganges, in the sugar isla...
September 13th, 1993. The White House lawn. Yitzhak Rabin hesitates, then takes Yasser Arafat's hand. For one afternoon, the impossible is real. In the final episode of our five-part series on Israel and Palestine, we follow the Oslo Accords from a Norwegian living room where enemies discovered each other's humanity to the White House ceremony that shook the world — and then we watch the promise break. We're at the peace rally in Tel Aviv where Rabin sings "Shir LaShalom" minutes before a Jew...
On the morning of June 7th, 1967, Israeli paratroopers push through the narrow streets of Jerusalem's Old City and reach the Western Wall — the last remnant of the Second Temple destroyed by Rome in 70 CE. Hardened soldiers press their faces against the stone and weep. A military chaplain blows a ram's horn that echoes off the Temple Mount. A brigade commander grabs the radio and broadcasts three words: "The Temple Mount is in our hands." In six days, Israel conquers the Sinai, the Gaza Strip...
Same year. Same events. Two names that can never be reconciled. In Episode 3 of our five-part series on Israel and Palestine, we live inside 1948 — the year a Jewish state was born after two thousand years of exile and 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes. We ride with a supply convoy through the killing gorge of Bab al-Wad as Jerusalem starves under siege. We stand in the village of Deir Yassin the evening before it becomes a word that means massacre and trace the shockwave of terror ...