re: #261 #FergusonFireside

Reminds me of this incident as well:

Battle of Ramree Island

When the Marines outflanked a Japanese stronghold the nine hundred defenders within it abandoned the base and marched to join a larger battalion of Japanese soldiers across the island. The route forced the Japanese to cross 16 kilometres of mangrove swamps. As they struggled through the thick forests the British forces encircled the area of the swampland. Trapped in deep mud-filled land, tropical diseases soon started afflicting the soldiers, as well as encountering scorpions, tropical mosquitoes and saltwater crocodiles.

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]