A Fredericton Commando’s Second World War Victory Had The Japanese On The Run. Then Came The Crocodiles.
Frederictonian Bruce Wright dismissed the battle for Ramree Island as a mere “nuisance” before it even began.
In early 1945, British and Indian Army forces were preparing a campaign to drive the Imperial Japanese out of Burma (Myanmar), and the island itself mattered little to this broader objective. But Ramree was a heavily fortified Japanese base that was launching air raids against Calcutta, so Wright’s elite Canadian amphibious commando unit — the famed “Frogmen of Burma” — was dispatched.
They expected their landing on Ramree Island to be a tough battle. It wasn’t.
“The Japs had misjudged our landing,” Bruce Wright later wrote in his book The Frogmen of Burma. The Japanese had fortified the southern tip of the island, assuming the Allies would come ashore there. Instead, Allied forces landed on the island’s western coast, where they encountered little resistance.
Wright’s men seized much of the island, except a strip of impassable mangrove swamp, cutting off roughly 1,000 Japanese troops from their route back to the mainland.
Much to his annoyance, though, the trapped Japanese didn’t surrender. Instead, they disappeared into the mangrove swamp, beginning a brutal 45-mile march to escape.
Wright explained that Ramree was “one of the strangest islands in the world — an almost continuous mangrove swamp.”
Somewhere in those dense mangroves were not only 1,000 Japanese soldiers, but what Wright called “great estuarine crocodiles.”
Wright and his men grimly entered the mangroves…
It had been a long and unlikely road that brought Bruce Wright to Ramree Island. Four years earlier, he had been serving in the Canadian Navy, bored in St. John’s, Newfoundland, waiting for a convoy to assemble for an Atlantic crossing.
Sitting in St. John’s Harbour, Wright amused himself by imagining the scene from the other side. If he were a German U-boat commander, he daydreamed, how would he plan out an attack on St. John’s?
He decided that rather than torpedoes, he’d use a team of specially trained divers who would swim ashore and lay bombs at the bases of the harbour’s defences.
Wright mentioned his idea to his ship’s captain, more as a light topic of conversation than anything serious. His captain was amused, telling him to “put it in writing” squarely because he thought it would be funny “to confound the experts.”
Wright’s memo did exactly that. It was passed up the chain of command from the regional military headquarters in Halifax to the national headquarters in Ottawa, then sent across the Atlantic to the Allied headquarters in London. Next thing he knew, Wright was being summoned to England to demonstrate his ideas to the top Allied leadership in charge of the whole war effort.
“The fat is in the fire now,” his amused ship captain told Wright before he departed.
Next thing he knew, he was the head of an elite unit of divers that played a key role in Allied operations in the Indian theatre of war.
“As all but the very young know, war is not all blood and gore,” Wright wrote. “There are pleasant intervals, and there is much wit and humour. Also, there are unrivalled opportunities for travel.”
This particular travel destination, Ramaree Island, though, was absolutely hellish. The mangroves turned out to be filled with “flies, leeches and crocodiles,” and, somewhere in there, 1,000 enemy soldiers.
Wright and his men set up a blockade. They loaded up small boats with “searchlights, car headlights, anything that would throw a beam” to illuminate the dark mangroves, maintaining a 24-hour line. Then they waited.
Wright went to sleep on the deck of his boat after giving strict instructions to the night watchman to “call me if he saw or heard anything unusual.”
At dawn, he awoke and asked the night watchman, “Did anything happen while I was asleep?”
“No, sir,” the sentry replied, adding, “A hippopotamus came up and scratched his back on the anchor chain.”
“A what? … The nearest hippo was several thousand miles away in Africa,” an incredulous Wright wrote, noting that it must have been a dugong. “But I am still wondering what that sailor would have considered unusual enough to make him call his captain!”
A strange figure came into their view at dawn. It was a naked man on a log, “covered head to toe with insect bites, his feet swollen into raw masses of flesh from mangrove roots. He was a pitiful sight.” He was Japanese. He called out his name: Asahina.
The Canadians were surprised when Asahina had surrendered — normally, Japanese soldiers would rather die. Asahina explained he was a non-combattant with the medical corps and was mad at his commander because he’d been promised an evacuation before the attack. Therefore, “he saw nothing dishonourable about surrendering.”
Asahina relayed that there was great danger lurking in the mangroves: giant crocodiles. He was given a loudspeaker and spent a full day pleading to his fellow Japanese out in the mangroves to surrender.
“Not more than twenty surrendered,” wrote Wright.
“That night [February 19th, 1945] was the most horrible that any member of the crews ever experienced,” Wright wrote in his book ‘Wildlife Sketches Near and Far.’ The Canadians could only listen as the crocodiles descended upon the Japanese soldiers hiding in the swamp:
“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,” Wright wrote.
Over the next few days, the bodies of Japanese soldiers began to float out of the mangroves towards their boats. Vultures congregated above the mangroves.
“Of about one thousand Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about twenty were found alive,” Bruce Wright wrote.
The Battle of Ramree Island appears in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the largest ever animal attack on humans.
