When Crocodiles Attack.

It's 26 January, 1945 when the Royal Marines, supported by 4th, 26th, 36th and 71st Indian Brigades and the Royal Air Force, encircled and trapped 900 Japanese soldiers in a 16 square kilometres area of swampland on Ramree Island, Southern Burma. The British were attempting to take the area from the Japanese in hopes of creating numerous sea-supplied airbases.

The swamp is characterized by knee-deep mud; it supports a multitude of tropical diseases and is home to scorpions, mosquitoes, and thousands of 4 metre-long salt water crocodiles.

The events of Operation Sankey are murky but one account is that, unable to escape from the British barricade, hundreds of Japanese soldiers became sitting ducks for the crocs. British naturalist Bruce Wright described:

"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."

Guiness has recorded the Ramree crocodile attack as the "Greatest Disaster Suffered From Animals."