I thought that is an urban legend?
Here is a portion of the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Ramree Island. This excerpt concerns the crocodile attack on the retreating Japanese soldiers. There is some dispute over the number of crocodile attacks.
"Some British soldiers, including the naturalist
Bruce Stanley Wright, who participated in the battle, claimed that the large population of saltwater crocodiles native to the mangrove swamps on Ramree Island
preyed on the trapped Japanese force at night and ate many soldiers. Wright gave a description in
Wildlife Sketches Near and Far (1962), quoted by
Frank McLynn,
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.
— Wright
[11]
If Wright was correct, the Ramree Island
crocodile attacks were the worst recorded in history. The British
Burma Star Association seems to lend credence to the swamp attack stories but appears to draw a distinction between the 20 Japanese survivors of one attack and the 900 Japanese who were left to fend for themselves in the swamp. There is no corroboration of the event by contemporary British military reports or by interviewed Japanese soldiers and local Burmese civilians. Wright is the only source for a mass crocodile attack and his figures have been disputed by other historians, who call the event an
urban myth.
[12] McLynn wrote
Most of all, there is a single zoological problem. If 'thousands of crocodiles' were involved in the massacre, as in the urban (jungle) myth, how had these ravening monsters survived before and how were they to survive later? The ecosystem of a mangrove swamp, with an exiguous mammal life, simply would not have permitted the existence of so many saurians before the coming of the Japanese (animals are not exempt from the laws of overpopulation and starvation).
[13]
The British official history (War against Japan volume IV,
The Reconquest of Burma, 1965 [2004]) referred only to "crocodile-infested mangrove swamps".
[8]"
-excerpted from Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ramree_Island#Crocodile_attack