The crocodile casualties of the second world war

At the end of February, 1945 about 1,000 surviving Japanese soldiers based on Ramree Island off the coast of Arakan, a province in western Burma, fled the onslaught of the British Army commanded by Lt General William Slim. A squadron led by the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth had bombarded Japanese positions on Ramree. The 26^th Indian Infantry Division, led by Marlborough and Sandhurst Old Boy Major-General Cyril Lomax, swept in to finish them off.

Characteristically the Japanese soldiers did not surrender. Instead, they opted to get to shore through the mangrove swamps that connected Ramree Island with the mainland. Big mistake. A Canadian soldier Bruce Wright, who is credited with developing the military art of being a frogman (a soldier trained to scuba), author of The Frogmen of Burma, described what happened next: ‘of about 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive’.