When Crocodiles Attack: The Ramree Island Massacre (2013)
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
A dog would be tied to a tree down by the river. The men would camp nearby. The dog would be heard barking, and men, armed with ropes, would pounce on the crocodile and circle its jaws with rope. Then tie it up and eventually shoot it so it could be skinned. The dog would most often survive. The crocs in those parts apparently loved dogs, and would come a way from the river to find them.
The ropes on jaws worked, as Bite force strong down, not so much up.
My grandfather would often remind me: you cannot outrun a croc on land.
This story is from the 20s and 30s, last century. My grandfather’s beautiful old house in Queensland, which his family sold sans sentiment, had a full crocodile pelt rug on the floor, among many other marvels.
I treasure many memories in my youth in that house of those marvels.
That doesn't sound very comfortable to sit on or even step on, compared to a furry mammal pelt. Was it just decorative?
SERPENTINE!!1!
Let no crocodile that lurks in the murky waters trifle with them, for it shall be promptly subdued with a humble frying pan, wielded with a vigour that belies its pedestrian nature – https://youtu.be/HA3SuHtCWo0
In any case, who's climbing? The reason the article's story is "apocryphal" is because even a few hundred crocs would be toast going up against a few hundred men with guns. Or any weapon really. Crocs are fast but humans are smart and can work together. Like your grandfather's story goes to show.
The somewhat sad truth is that we are the apex predator and the deadliest animal on the planet (yeah, including mosquitoes; humans have killed many more humans than mosquitoes have).
Guns didnt help them because it was a dense swamp, up to their waist in water in places, and at the times they were attacked, pitch black, against a fast moving animal they couldnt see. On top of that they had largely abandoned their equipment before entering.
5 round stripper clip fed rifles aren't much use when you're being terrorized by something lurking in the water....
Besides, ancient horses were much smaller and couldn't carry a rider, hence chariots. I would like to speculate that smaller means better thermoregulation, so smaller horses fared better on long distances versus Homo genus.
> Other animals, such as deer, bison and others, have bodies more suited to quick, short-distance running. The difference means that an average human being in running shape could catch a horse, deer or almost any other animal by pursuing it to exhaustion.
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-theory-humans-evolved-ability-...
It was weird to see you also interested in Erlang security too.. It's a very small world.
> In his 2011 analysis of the Burma campaign, the historian Frank McLynn challenged this interpretation, saying,
> 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).
> In 1974, a journalist, George Frazier, reported having asked the Japanese War Office about the crocodile attack and being told that they could not confirm that it had happened. In 2016, Sam Willis, a historian, reported that he had found documents indicating that the Japanese soldiers mostly drowned and/or were shot and that crocodiles scavenged on their corpses afterwards.
> In 2000, a herpetologist, Steven Platt, visited Ramree Island, where he interviewed residents who had been alive during the war and who had been forced into slave labour by the Japanese; they "unanimously discounted any suggestion that large numbers of Japanese fell prey to crocodiles".
Always crossed my mind when I see one :)
Sounds like a metaphor for a team of unknowledgeable developpers stepping into the realm of concurrent code.
We took a trip to (what, at the time was called) Murchison Falls. That's a big waterfall on the Nile River. We came at it from the north, so we were at the base of the falls.
The pond at the bottom has sandbar islands all around, and they are covered with monster Nile crocs, which are damn near as big as salties.
Scary beasts, and fast.
"Gustave is a legendary Nile crocodile from Burundi, reputed to be one of the largest and most fearsome of his kind to-date, He has been stated to have killed about over 300+ people for over a few decades, he is known for his strength, adaptation, and intelligence, he has never been captured for all this time, and he still resides in either the Ruzizi River and Lake Tanganyika, in Burundi, Africa. "
I know I will never be killed by a crocodile bite. I will die of fright before it reaches me.
They generally kill you by pulling you under, and drowning you.
Then, they let you rot, and gobble up the chunks, as they fall off.
The really dangerous African river beasts, though, are hippos. Even the crocs leave them alone.
I was thinking that this event might have been the inspiration for that part of the book?
Not sure what’s dubious about it…
A dubious distinction is one that is doubtful or possibly untrue. Given the lack of hard data, the aporcryphal nature of the stories, and the fog of war etc, dubious seems like a perfectly cromulent word to use here.
A "dubious distinction" is a distinction which is undesirable.
West Virginia has the dubious distinction of being the US state with the lowest average educational achievement.
If you parse the words separately, the other meaning is literally correct, but will not match the speaker's intent.
It is also unwise to sleep on a lonely beach.
https://www.rarebookcellar.com/pages/books/67453/hugh-edward...
Salties can snatch a bird in flight.
We know what godzilla was about because the creators have told us so. Also, it's rather obvious given the context and the environment in which godzilla was created.
The creature design had to elicit fear and the actual representation on film may have been influenced by it. The stance may be more t-Rex than crocodile and I’m really not sure “whale” factored into the final appearance on film.
No one is questioning the impetus and relation to the fire bombings and nukes.
> We know what godzilla was about because the creators have told us so.
That’s the funny thing about culture and creation: a creator doesn’t always know their sources or have definite aspects to point to. Creation is a bit fuzzy. ;) (the same applies for LLMs!)
As I've understood it (for decades), Godzilla represented nukes themselves.
edit: for the inevitable "i dont get it" https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/11/15/what-counts-as-na... https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/younger-generation-...
There's a reason Man vs Nature is a fundamental literary conflict even if we've long since pacified and destroyed the land around us.
England isn’t an island, it shares land borders with Scotland and Wales.
I feel like i'm in a unique position to talk about this. My family has been involved in crocodiles in one way or another since the 1950's, from a close family being eaten, to working in their preservation and tourism.
Crocodiles are definitely a high level predator. Mangrove swamps make an ideal breeding and hunting grounds for pubestant crocodiles.
Each male crocodile will consider humans (and other animals) a challenge to its territory. When they have an opportunity to overpower a threat, they will do so and drown their prey and stashing the corpse under a log usually under water.
These humans would likely be forced to sleep in the mangroves, the British had control of the non mangrove areas forcing them directly into the territory of the crocodiles, the humans in the dark and asleep would EASILY be taken and drowned.
My uncle (deceased last year) tells me of the time when my family friend was taken by a local crocodile. She was knee deep in the water, splashing herself with the water on a hot new years night, the other party goers around heard a splash and not even a chance of a scream. Imagine this when you are 500 strong, in a thick area of crocodiles with mangrove swamp blocking noise.
I can't bring myself to watch narration on the story but ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s4lrLtMjwA ) is supposed to be pretty accurate. Its possible that I'm doxing myself and a clever person maybe can figure out my family from this.
This is one crocodile, with a territory size of about 200m. Imagine this across an mangrove area of the island, while you are hunted, tired and can't hear your team.
The worse part is, the japanese soldiers probably were not aware of the existence and the the sheer number of crocodiles in Ramree, it is a recipe for disaster. If the crocodiles didn't kill them, the bites and infections from them likely would.
There is a good point in a comment there - at the time crocodiles were not expected:
"""
@thebackwardpointinggodwit8080 1 year ago
To all those people saying how could someone swim in waters with all those crocs around? Well the bit this account misses is that for many years crocs had been hunted to near extinction in that area and right across the north of Australia. Croc attack had become just a distant possibility in the most remote of locations. Then croc hunting was outlawed in the 70s and croc numbers recovered quickly and their distribution moved southwards to include places like the Daintree over the next decade or so. No-one really expected to see big crocs in the Daintree in the early 80s and what these people did was normal and considered not dangerous at the time. I was in Australia at the time and I remember when that attack happened - it didn’t seem possible. I and most people thought it was much more likely that she simply drowned or disappeared - or maybe some foul-play had occurred and people were covering it up - but we were very skeptical that it was a croc. Now crocs are common right across the north of Australia and sadly attacks keep happening, but Beryl Wruck just had the misfortune to be the first person to find out the hard way that things had changed and what everyone considered safe no longer was.
"""
So it was a policy choice to increase safety for crocodiles while decreasing safety for humans.
Humans are entirely capable of eradicating crocodile attacks, we just choose not to.
Why would you do that. They have been here millions of years before us. Leave them alone?
Think of how many stories warn children about the "big bad wolf" vs how many wolf deaths have you ever heard of?
The stories might be a legacy of times past before we killed off most of the wolves near us.
Ye I guess it is plausible but dunno if there would be enough crocodiles.
War stories like these are often just made up for propaganda or jingoist gossip purposes.
Like, Wikipedia references a source saying the "crocodile massacre" didn't happen.
I have had enough experience in the real life to know that the wikpedias truth is held by the most persistent editors, not what actually happened.
According to Hickey (1998), "the Japanese were forced into one corner of the island where, among the crocodile-infested swamps, most of them died from poor internet reception. most of them died from drowning, disease or starvation. Only 20 surrendered."