The
Battle of Ramree Island was fought for six weeks during January and February 1945, as part of the
Indian XV Corps 1944/45 offensive on the
Southern Front of the
Burma Campaign during
World War II.
Ramree Island (
Yangbye Kywan) lies off the
Burma coast and in 1942 the rapidly advancing
Imperial Japanese Army captured the island along with the rest of Southern Burma. In January 1945 the
Allies launched an attack to retake Ramree and its neighbour
Cheduba, with the intention of establishing sea-supplied airbases on the islands. The Japanese garrison of Ramree consisted of the 121st Infantry regiment, part of the Japanese 54th Division. The regiment's commander was Colonel Kanichi Nagazawa.
[1]
The battle is also associated with reports of many Japanese soldiers being eaten by the thousands of
saltwater crocodiles lying in wait in the inland swamps. The
Guinness Book of World Records has listed it both as "Worst crocodile disaster in the world"
[2] and "Most Number of Fatalities in a Crocodile Attack"
Continued:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ramree_Island#endnote_mbc
Section of interest:
Repeated calls by the British for the Japanese to surrender were ignored. The Marines holding the perimeter shot any Japanese attempting to escape, while within the swampland hundreds of Japanese soldiers died over the course of several days for lack of food or drinking water. Some British soldiers, including naturalist Bruce Stanley Wright who participated in the battle, claimed that the crocodiles attacked and ate numerous Japanese soldiers. Wright's description occurs in his 1962 book
Wildlife Sketches Near and Far:
"That night [of the 19 February 1945] was the most horrible that any member of the M.L. [motor launch] crews ever experienced. The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by the screams of wounded men crushed in the jaws of huge reptiles, and the blurred worrying sound of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left. . . . Of about one thousand Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about twenty were found alive."[2][4]
When the British eventually moved into the swamp, they found that of the nine hundred Japanese troops that originally fled into the swamp, only around twenty seriously wounded and weakened Japanese soldiers were alive. In all, about 500 Japanese soldiers escaped from Ramree despite the intense blockade instituted to stop them. If Wright's claim is true, however, the Ramree
crocodile attacks would be the worst in recorded history.
[1] The British
Burma Star Association seems to lend credence to the swamp attack stories but appears to draw a distinction between the 20 Japanese survivors of one attack and the 900 Japanese who were left to fend for themselves in the swamp.
[3]Furthermore there is no corroboration of the event by British military reports or by interviewed Japanese soldiers and local Burmese.
[4] These figures are disputed and the event has been described as an
urban myth by British historian
Frank McLynn, who opined that only a few wounded Japanese had been consumed by the crocodiles, although he did write that the saltwater crocodiles of the region were both "known
man-eaters and opportunistic killers".
[4] McLynn's criticisms of the account primarily stem from his personal incredulity that the "Japanese firepower, which tore such holes in British tanks and armour", would be incapable of killing large numbers of crocodiles during the night. His suspicions are not cited to any other source, nor are they echoed by other historians. McLynn accused Bruce Wright's account as being "unverified". Wright's career in the Royal Canadian Navy and subsequently as a scientist and author is described in many additional sources. McLynn's doubts are notably not echoed by other historians.
[5]
