Of the 1,000 troops who entered the swamp on Ramree Island, only a reported 480 survived. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left.” The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by the screams of the 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. With the ebb of the tide, the crocodiles moved in on the dead, wounded, and uninjured men who had become mired in the mud… The crocodiles, alerted by the din of warfare and smell of blood, gathered among the mangroves, lying with their eyes above the water, watchfully alert for their next meal. “That night was the most horrible that any member of the M.L. The most prominent firsthand retelling of what happened comes from naturalist Bruce Stanley Wright, who participated in the Battle of Ramree Island and gave this written account: Several British soldiers said that the crocodiles preyed on the Japanese soldiers in the swamp. Even worse, saltwater crocodiles are nocturnal and excel at taking prey in the dark. Mosquitoes, spiders, poisonous snakes, and scorpions hid in the thick forest and picked off some troops one by one.Ĭrocodiles appeared when the Japanese got deeper into the swamp.
Soon after entering the slimy mudhole, Japanese soldiers began to succumb to diseases, dehydration, and starvation. And in an incident not unlike the infamous U.S.S Indianapolis shark attack that befell American troops later that year, many of these troops didn’t survive. The Japanese understood that saltwater crocodiles have a reputation for eating humans but they went into the mangrove swamp of Ramree Island anyway.
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