Crocs

[Blackwatch]

On 26 January in Operation Sankey, a Royal Marine force landed on the Island of Cheduba, which lies to the south of Ramree, to find that it was not occupied by the Japanese. On Ramree the Japanese garrison put up tenacious resistance. The British 4th, 26th, 36th and 71st Indian Brigades landed, with RAF and Royal Navy Marine units, and 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 fetid mangrove swamps, and 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, but worse was the presence of huge numbers of scorpions, tropical mosquitoes and thousands of, on average, 4.6-metre-long (about 15 feet) 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 soldiers died over the course of several days for lack of food or drinking water. Some, including naturalist Bruce Wright, claimed that the crocodiles attacked and ate numerous soldiers:

"That night [of the 19 February 1945] was the most horrible that any member of the M.L. [marine 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 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive."[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ramree_Island

http://www.britain-at-war.org.uk/WW2...1945/index.htm

[Kyt]

Gruesome. It highlights how the fighting wasn't just against a human enemy but nature as well.

Thinking about it, there must be many cases where the threat from the weather and animals was greater than humans. From the sands of North Africa, the jungles of Burma and the Pacific Islands, to the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, the actual enemy may not be seen for days, but soldiers still died.

Another gruesome story I remember vaguely was the fate of the crew of the Indianapolis after it had been torpedoed. I can't remember many of the details but weren't a lot lost due to sharks?

[Antipodean Andy]

She sank in 12 minutes after being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. 900 of her 1,200 crew survived. However, when they were discovered by a patrol bomber four days later, only 316 were left.

[Kyt]

I hadn't realised it was that bad!

[Blackwatch]

reports I have read before about Japanese sailors in the water after being sunk pale in comparison to the Indianapolis, and it was bad enough