Did Crocodiles Really Eat 1,000 Soldiers?

In February 1945, about a thousand Japanese soldiers were cut off on Ramree Island off the coast of Burma and tried to escape through ten miles of mangrove swamp to reach rescue boats on the far side. The naturalist Bruce Wright later wrote that saltwater crocodiles killed almost all of them in a single night, with only about twenty found alive, and Guinness listed it as the worst animal attack in history. But when the crocodile scientist Steven Platt visited Ramree in 2000, the local people who lived there in 1945 said the crocodiles were not the killers, and he could link only about ten to fifteen deaths to them. Most of the soldiers were shot or drowned in the creeks or died of thirst, and about five hundred reached the boats and escaped. Sources: "Battle of Ramree Island", English Wikipedia; Bruce Wright, Wildlife Sketches Near and Far (1962); Steven G. Platt et al., Herpetological Bulletin (2001); Frank McLynn, The Burma Campaign (2011); Guinness World Records. #history #ww2 #burma #crocodiles #shorts