>Over a 1,000 soldiers of the Japanese garrison retreated into the crocodile-infested mangrove swamps. We went in with boats and interpreters using loudhailers asking them to come out. Not a single one did. Salt-water crocodiles, some of them well over 20 ft (6.1 m) long frequented these waters. It is not difficult to imagine what happened to the Japanese who took refuge in the mangroves!
>That night [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.
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Yeah, reptiles love eating bugs; more at eleven.
Wouldn't crocodiles just want to kill thousands of anything if it were moving and in their space and helpless? Not necessarily eat it, just savage it?
There's no distinction between alligator and crocodile in Japanese
Why translate it as Alligator then?
Er, why they didn't simply climb the trees?
End.
Author is Shigeru Mizuki, who lost his arm in the war.
I read somewhere that the guy who said this didn't even participate in the search for Japanese soldiers and probably heard some tall tales from his friends who got the spook of their lives. 20 captured out of 1000 IJA soldiers isn't too surprising. I'd imagine a decent amount escaped, and many died on the way. This kinda warfare is particularly brutal, and with the logistics and medicine of Japan at the time things weren't too hot for them. Injuries, tropical bugs and diseases, swamps, dehydration aren't a fun combo. Moving through mud with heavy equipment is tough enough, now imagine doing it with diarrhea or malaria or beriberi or whatever. I'm sure crocodiles got a great many of them, but I doubt they killed more than a hundred or so, many more were likely scavenged. Particularly damning is that there are no Japanese accounts, especially from the captured.
Thanks for the posting, seems like a good read. Also a more probable description of crocodile deaths, hapless men picked off one at a time.
>Thanks for the posting, seems like a good read.
No problem, and yeah I'd highly recommend it. Just about the most accurate depiction of Japanese infantry life outside of actual memoirs.
Even the combat gets the general theme of the conflict, with the Japanese on the receiving end of absolute superiority in American air power and artillery. Mizuki himself lost his arm to a bombing raid, if I recall.
I think it's either a translation issue, or a way to show how a lot of Japanese infantrymen in the manga were somewhat clueless. A certain naivety about them permeates the manga, which may be a means to show a loss of innocence and needless loss of life, as well as perhaps an accurate recollection of Mizuki's experiences.
Do you know where exactly the story is taking place? The Alligator part?
All of it takes place in New Guinea.
Japbois been real quiet since this dropped. Crocbros... We won.
neat read, thanks
Reminder that these barbarian yellow apes got off scott-free (minus the 2 suns) at the end of the war because the U.S. paid them for their useless "research" done at Unit 731. Should have been glassed to bedrock.
>Reminder that these barbarian yellow apes got off scott-free (minus the 2 suns) at the end of the war
bruh they literally became a colony of the us
You don't know what a colony is.
Japan got off scott free so they could act as a bulwark against Russia, and it worked
>Of about one thousand Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about twenty were found alive.
This doesn't make sense. It is worse than those B-grade Killer Croc movies that Hollywood produces. How many were there anyway? The crocs should be leaving them alone after the gunshots. They are either lying or succumbed to mass hysteria and confusion.
most of these ww2 tale-tales are BS
>us pilots destroyed hundred of tiger tanks because our .50cals bounced off the streets and pierced their bottom armor! the tanks always went up in flames!
Please never post on this board agin.
try to stop me
You take a 22 year old farm boy, give him 6 months of flight training and then send him to Europe to fly fighter planes with machine guns and they're going to think up all kinds of crazy stories.
Not really sure how this is supposed to disprove a bunch of Crocs eating 1000 starving little 5'2" japs. A normal croc.cpuld probably rip through 2 or 3 alone and not be full.
>disprove a bunch of Crocs eating 1000 starving little 5'2" jap
NTA but it is still hard to believe. How come the crocs just didn't leave them alone after they started firing? Do reptiles have a different response to mammals if prople in group starts attacking them and make loud noises? Also how many ctocs were there? Wouldn't they be satisfied for days after eating a single human each?
>Not really sure how this is supposed to disprove a bunch of Crocs eating 1000 starving little 5'2" japs. A normal croc.cpuld probably rip through 2 or 3 alone and not be full.
It doesn't need to when a basic understanding of crocodiles and propaganda does.
>propaganda
kys weeaboo schizo
>The crocs should be leaving them alone after the gunshots
>How come the crocs just didn't leave them alone after they started firing?
If anything the gunshots would alert them to prey. Crocodiles are not particularly concerned about loud sounds, especially when they’re underwater where the gunshots above are muffled
>Wouldn't they be satisfied for days after eating a single human each?
Several historians have said something along the lines of this, that it’s unlikely that the crocodiles would eat so many people because of the “they can go a year without food” meme. When nile crocodiles hunt migrating wildebeest and zebras they kill them by the hundreds if not thousands, and kill far more than they eat. The rivers end up full of rotting carcasses by the end of the migrations. Chances are plenty of the soldiers simply drowned or got stuck in the mud, but the idea a few hundred crocodiles could kill a thousand panicked people wading through chest deep muck in the middle of the night is not far fetched
It seems likely many of the gunshots were suicides. Japanese soldiers in WW2 committed suicide just as often as Japanese office drones do today.
On the other hand, many crocs probably mortally wounded, but then lost a few soldiers. I'm sure we've all seen the video of the Zebra escaping the croc with its guts hanging out. So they could kill more than they necessarily ate.
You appear to have confused catharsis as only meaning schadenfreude.
This confusion has required you to imagine that human suffering is a source of joy.
A form of relief from your own misery.
But this misunderstanding diminishes you.
Let me tell you about my own source of catharsis, though...
Every fricked up thing I ever suffered is mine.
All of my traumas and my injuries are mine alone to guard jealously and to want nobody else to ever be afflicted by.
There's a thing I really want out of God whenever my time's up here... I want to take the place of every soul he would rather see burn in hell.
To have that pit and that absence from him all to myself.
Just so I can look up and smile for how much better everybody else has it than me.
Because That Is Catharsis.