Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 407 - The Battle of Ramree Island

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

PREORDER JOE'S NEW BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QWHSPAADI07D&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uLEY0I7D6t0IC9GWsF7SH1FKEgKqsqTLmV4PQ_lLi-wVUCYgTqIv0BWd9_-x3VzP.xn7v2CqU5MjngXmmSbYvVGsY_fxkvgsz-LA2tkhHHTs&dib_tag=se&keywords=joseph+kassabian&qid=1774247705&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C176&sr=1-1 LIVE SHOW TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-tickets-1985443952308 LIVE STREAM TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-2026-tickets-1985444086710 SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys The Battle of Ramree Island has gone down in history for being known for one thing: a massive crocodile attack that apparently destroyed the Japanese as they attempted to retreat. But, what if we told you that that popular story was completely made up by one guy who wasn't even there at the time? Sources: Allen, Louis. Burma: The Longest War McLynn, Frank. The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–45 Wright, B. S. (1962). Wildlife Sketches: Near and Far. Wright, B. S. (1968). The Frogmen of Burma Platt, Steven. Man eating by Estuarine Crocodiles: the Ramree Island massacre revisited Lyons, Chuck. The Mystery at the Battle of Ramree Island. WWII History. Vol. 25. No. 1 Frazier, George. A Man's Worst Friend. The Boston Globe Archive. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/438950677/ https://the-avocado.org/2019/03/02/things-that-are-not-the-horrors-of-ramree-island/ https://www.thetimes.com/uk/history/article/crocodile-massacre-of-troops-debunked-as-wartime-myth-k6vxhdfsq

Hey everyone, Joe here. Me, Tom, and Nate are all going to be live May 29th in London at the Rich Mix. So get your tickets and come down and see us. It's going to be a great show. We're going to have some new merch, some shirts, some pins, maybe some book stuff because it coincides the launch of my book, The Highlands Burn. And if you can't make it, that's okay. We're going to be live streaming it. Check out our show notes. Make sure you click on the right link for live show and live stream tickets, whichever one you need, and get your tickets now. The Highlands Burn. My debut fantasy novel releases May 19th and is now available for digital pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes wherever it is you're listening to this. Just like this show, this book is a

completely independent production. To the crack of rifles and the Akrids, of sorcery, a sudden invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Syatt's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amid the smoking ruins of all that he held dear, Sia must make a choice. Is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him worth becoming one himself? As escape pushes him to the gruff embrace of the foundling brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for

destruction and the new responsibilities of his soldiers life. Even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems as clear as day. And Syatt finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. Hello and welcome to the Lines at by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the world. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, how are we doing? We've got a Aldi Elvis Costello and we've got an Aldi Charles Branson on the track. That's true. Yeah. Your guys's fits are changing rapidly while I look the exact same. I feel like I've missed the boat of like

I need to come up with something. Instead, uh, I don't, I don't know. No, Joe, this podcast is just you are the guy on like all of Judy Warzone who refuses to buy skins and is still using the default skin from like seven years ago. Meanwhile me and Nate are like buying this the glop shito skin bag. Yeah,

exactly. It's actually a pretty accurate representation of how I play any games that sell skins as well. Yeah, I show up wearing the red brick wall camouflage from MGS3 that doesn't make any fucking sense. I just, I'm wearing my glasses today because I don't know. Every now and again, I have this

condition called one of my eyes explodes. And it's just like, I don't know why, but like just eye tension. It feels like I got punched in the eye, even though nothing happened. And it's really bloodshot. And so I have a stigmatism, but not like severely enough to really need it. And God knows I don't want to wear these buddy Holly ass glasses while wearing clothes back headphones. But I also don't want my eye to explode further. So here I am looking like as, yeah, Poundland Elvis Costello. Nate has found strange hands in his sweater and just like immediately metamorphosized into Elvis Costello. We are the Pond.

podcast where none of us have a functioning set of eyes because I also wear glasses. My eyes are completely full. Me too. I can't do anything without my glasses. I am near-sided, far-sided, and having a stigmatism in both eyes. I can pass my vision test for driving without glasses, but just barely. But yeah, every now and again, it's just like one of my eyes just does that thing that, what was the principle from Darya?

It just goes like that. You're literally like the king of the blind because you can see out of one eye. because Tom and I are completely fucked. It reminds me of like you know, all those jokes of like, and people have said those to me after meeting me is like, oh, you were born in the wrong era. Like, you know, you should be smashing someone's skull in a gladiary. Like, no, if I was born back then,

I would have been thrown off of a cliff as a child because I can't fucking see anything. You would be the ANPRIM meme about like, you know, who would win. And was it anarchist primitive or vaguely tiger-shaped blob getting close to Yep, that would be me. Very on track for my reading at the moment. Joe just has the physiognomy of like just a random peasant character in a Dostoevsky novel, who is the oxen has died and he must pull the cart instead. Yeah, that's Oxford.

That is Tolstoy. Come on. Dostoevsky, Joe is like the hardworking son of the soil and his brother is a weird 19th century atheist. He's like, do you want to hear my fucked up idea? And it goes on for a hundred pages. And meanwhile, both me and Nate are the demons. from the book, demons. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like we don't want to go down a rabbit hole of weird Russian literature, but we could. We don't. Our producer, Ani, will have to join you for that one. That was just called light school reading for her. That's just called being alive in the ruins of the Soviet Union. But fellas, I've gathered you here today because we're going to talk about two things we love to talk about. And that is large scale animal attacks and swamps.

Yes. All right. Now, over the course of almost eight years and over 400 episodes now, we have talked about a lot of animal attacks in the context of military history. There was that one time we just talked about a monkey war on a bonus episode. I believe that was the first episode that Tom led. Yeah, right after the Trouble series, I was like, we need a pallet cleanser. Let's talk about chimpanzees fighting in the Tanganyika Reserve.

Yeah. Weirdly, not the only where we've talked about in that particular area, but definitely the only one involving chimpanzees. RIPJ and goodall, you would have loved lions like by tachies. The fact is animals and their impacts on the battlefield, whether it be on purpose or on accident, cannot be ignored. Most of the time, when looking at a tactical battlefield map, animals are always in opposition force.

Which is what brings us to what might be one of the most well-known incidents of a bunch of soldiers running into Eternities Op 4 of the Wild. The Battle of Ramri Island. Have you ever heard of this? I know Ramri Island is in Myanmar. Yes. Because for some reason,

my area has a Burmese restaurant for some reason. Sick. I went in for lunch and I was talking to the guy who owns it and he was like, oh, what do you do for work? Because obviously I'm having like a full dinner in the middle of the day and you're either unemployed

or have a stupid job if you can do something like that. And I was like, oh yeah, I do like a military history podcast. And he's like, oh, have you ever talked about Burma? And I was like, uh, probably. And he was like, oh, yeah, you need to talk about Ramory Island. Do you know anything about it? And I was like, no. And he's like, when you get there, you'll have fun.

Well, I have to disappoint this guy. So the battle of Ramory Island took place over the course of about a month in Burma towards the end of World War II in 1945. However, as infamous as this battle is, what makes it infamous has nothing. to do with the battle and much more to do with the fact that in the years since it has become known for the single largest crocodile attack on mankind. Oh, hell. Yeah.

Allegedly, this killed about 1,000 Japanese soldiers, but did this actually happen? And if not, how the hell did that become the popular myth that everyone seems to insist is true and continues to be repeated across TV and. movies and the internet. For example, if you look up Ramri Island anywhere, you get posts from multiple different social media things, you know, content mills, whatever, talking about this crocodile attack going back from like yesterday to when the internet was first congealed out of Al Gore's balls. This is a sign that we actually do proper research on this show because it would have been such easy juice to just say, oh yeah, the crocodile attacks happen and just

make hay out of it. But no, we're bringing. bringing you the real history. I might piss off a weird context of people I've never pissed off before this show, which is naturalists, but we'll get there. And Prims blown the fuck out. Look, I mean,

all I can say is I have seen many a time where I'm interested in the subject and I've read about it on Wikipedia and I go looking for documentaries or at least previews of documentaries on YouTube and then discover that they've just AI voice animated the Wikipedia article. Yeah, that's just YouTube now. That's just every YouTube video now. the degree to which being old as shit is a useful skill for determining reality versus fake stuff.

Like the amount of times my daughter has been like I want to see a video of like elephant noises and I realize like all of them are fake. They're all AI now. And it's like, and you can tell because they're all making the same noise over and over again, which is not how animals are. Don't like knock my side hustle, which is making fake animal noises in YouTube videos. Actually they're real. I made every single one of those. I made them the exact same. The same fucking time. He's actually on mute. I'm basically doing folly stage stuff, but for weird animal noises. It's elephant play. Every single history documentary is now either AI or hosted by Simon Whistler.

There's no in between. That's true. Simon Whistler is, I'm coming for you. We're going to have to fight. Joe, you're going to have to produce so many more episodes week to get to that level. Simon, the difference between you and me is I don't employ a whole team of writers to do this. I just have stimulants. I'm just kidding.

Simon Whistler, probably a lovely man. I'm not threatening him. Anyway, the crocodile of context. Time to snap down on some context. Time to grab onto some context. Do a death roll into a swamp. Extend your jaws to 180 degrees

so you can receive as much context as possible. That's useful at multiple different ways in life. But we should start this off by saying that we'll eventually do a larger series. on some of the bigger topics of the Burma campaign, because it's very much unlike a lot of the other stuff that was happening during World War II. And I'm going to call it Burma during the course of this episode

because generally, in the context of World War II, it's still called Burma because it was called Burma at the time. If you start calling it, the Myanmar campaign, doesn't really make a lot of sense. So be mad at history. And we're going to talk about a little bit of the Burma campaign just so you can better understand the story. the Battle of Ramory Island. That's it. And as we've talked about a lot on the show,

the Empire of Japan had several war aims, but imperial racial nonsense aside, which we went into more in our Nan King series, go listen to that one after a large meal and in public without your earbuds in, and one of the largest goals of theirs was getting resources. The Japanese home islands, it turns out, are really lacking the shit you need to build a long-term imperial powerhouse, namely in the forms of oil, rubber, tin, all the stuff you need to build a decent Gundam-based infrastructure. It kind of goes without saying that seizing those resources also denies them to your enemies, therefore making you stronger, right?

Just classic imperial bullshit. In order to do that, Japanese forces stormed through Southeast Asia, China, and of course, dragged America kicking and screaming into the war. Another part of the overall plan was the invasion of Burma, which kicked off two months after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Burma was a massive source of rubber for the British Empire and in turn, their American allies. It was also home of the Burma Road, which is probably one of my

favorite logistical hubs in military history because I am a guy that has one of those is like convoluted, deadly, really should not have worked at all, but it did. You're the military history version of a trucker with a favorite trucker. Yeah, Joe Casabian, ASMR is. just how there's something to describe like the bill of lading for top five supply depots in history.

Oh, man. I went to firefighting academy and had to learn what a bill of laded was and like how things get loaded into trucks. And that's what I realized I got into the wrong career. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, I don't know that people are going to do armchair diagnoses about some kind of neurodivergence about this. And I don't necessarily think that's the case. But there is something very satisfying. In my case, it wasn't trucks. It was a stratair. It was how you do the hilarious turn of phrase, load balance. thing on a plane when you load cargo into an aircraft. And it's just like, there's something so fucking satisfying about like, I could actually achieve like, for one, you have to achieve balance where the plane falls over, but also like the degree to which like the precision involved. And, you know, it's awesome. So I get it, Joe. I too have a, instead of having a top five supply depot list, I have a, I would watch fan games of a C5 galaxy, but I would make sure that they don't

have the reels of it breaking down every 90 minutes, which it always does. I think maybe I would have been a better soldier if instead of it listing combat arms, I was just a supply clerk. Maybe I would have loved that. I don't know. I would have been so fucking good as like a aviation logistics kind of person in the Air Force, you know, balancing, building pallets and doing all the things for like the manifest or planes. I would be amazing at that. Instead, I was like, go suffer. Nate, we both fucked up because, you know, we missed our calling. We heard about beans and bullets in the context of military. We're like, bullets sound cool. When we would have loved the beans. Absolutely, I would have been Lord of the Beans.

Like, that's what I would have wanted to do with my life. That's what they're going to do in the next recruitment drive for World War III is like, boy, would you like some beans? Join the U.S. military today. I would have gotten my master's while in the army of Masters of Science and Beans Management. Yeah. They see you, missed your calling. You could have done the aviation logistics version of none left beef, but with a plane loaded with cargo entirely on one side. None beef left cargoes.

You crash into the sea. You know me. I would have done something like, okay, the left side of the plate is nothing but palettes full of beans, which are not particularly dense. And they're right side of the plane is a couple of pallets of like vats of mercury that are insanely dense. And it does actually balance out. But everyone hates me. The Japanese invasion of Burma went very well in the beginning. As both things did for them, they war crime their way up southern Burma out of Thailand and forced the capital of Rangoon to be evacuated in March of 1942. Again, we'll talk about this more in future episodes. But the things that the Japanese did during this advance as well, you'll be familiar with them if you've ever listened to a single other episode of which we talk about the Empire of Japan. Really don't want to talk about them here. However, they also propped up a proxy army, the Burma Independence Army,

harnessing the energy of Burmese nationalists who, of course, already existed under British rule. The nationalists had the idea that the Japanese were the force of liberation, of Asian peoples away from their white masters. something that the Japanese were totally cool with nodding along to and just kind of leaving out the part that when they won, their country was going to look an awful lot like the eclipse arc from berserk. Just nodding along on, yeah, yeah, yeah,

as you're affixing a bayonet to the end of your rifle. Yep, yeah. The Independence Army, like a lot of proxy armies during World War II, committed so many heinous crimes that even Japanese commanders and members of the secret police told them they need to chill the fuck out just a little bit. Like, this is very much like Balkan Nazi proxies and the SS is like, you guys need to chill. You know, this shit happens.

I know this isn't a topic, but the BIA would eventually get mad at the Japanese because they wouldn't let them set up a real independent government in the conquered areas and kept having the loudest pro-independence voices get disappeared by the Japanese police. They eventually let them set up a puppet state, pretty much like Manchuko, which only pissed the nationalists off more once they looked at the mirror one day and realized, oh God. were puppets of Japan. And by the end of the war, they switched sides and were allowed to remain free and a core of them would be allowed to form part of the post-war army, thanks to everyone's favorite failed astronaut and pedophile Louis Mountbatten. Somehow it always comes back to him. Yeah, if we're talking about the 40s and it's like Southeast Asia or just South Asia in general,

Mountbatten's showing up and is fucking everyone's shit. Yeah, he will be there and there will be the stuff that he does that you can point at and be like, that's fucked up. And then there's also all the stuff you can draw. And for instance, from him, like, that's also really fucked up. And then you can also be like, but at least it has something of a happy ending. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, someone recently got very mad at me in social media for calling Louis Mountbat and a pedophile. Why, were they doing like he was an epiphophile or something? No, no, no. Just like a hero. There's like, oh, he was a British military hero that was killed by terrorists. I was like, look, you can agree or disagree with the

political aims of the Irish Republican army, but they got that one right. just take a break and Google Louis Mountbatten and King Cora's Boys Home. Yeah, yeah. That will dispel any thought goodwill you have towards Louis Mountbatten. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that person does not listen to this show. Japan took Ramri, Akia, and Chiduba Islands and turned it into something of a training base complex. It was a stopover, which logistically is kind of dumb. Um, obviously things were going kind of badly for.

them on the Burmese mainland. So they wanted to come up with a safe spot to continue training and acclimatizing forces that they were bringing into Burma. But it's an island off the coast. So that brings in all sorts of other issues that are obviously become important in a little bit. They also construct an airbase. Ramory in particular was home to a strategic port that allowed it to act as a logistics hub to resupply Japanese forces on the Burmese mainland. Again, doing this on an island, a bit of an Achilles heel for the entire process, but also not that important for our story. But

over the years, like the war in general, by 1944 and 1945, Japan found themselves being ground down thanks to a lack of pretty much everything. The same things that brought them into the war in the first place. Wow, all those resources we wanted to take, we didn't do

such a good job of that. Because it turns out when you're a small island with dog shit logistics and no resources, starting war with half of the world is a pretty bad idea. Yeah, they didn't really perfectly balance all the boxes of Nato with a single tungsten cube on their plane, so it like went

straight into the sea. Yeah, they only had Nate the plane instead of Nate the man. You need both. You need the plane named after me and the logistics, the loadmaster named after me. God, that's so fucking weird. That is what they call you, but Nate the load master.

Loadmaster Nate. I mean, there was a thing years ago where there was guy who was a crew chief on a C-17 and his name was unironically Steve C-C-C-Cum. Steve-Cum the loadmaster. He was like a chief master sergeant and he did work in a car like doing like strategic transport stuff. So he could have been loadmaster Steve-com. I don't know if he was actually the loadmaster or if he was serving as the loadmaster on that

C-17 when they took the photos. But his name absolutely was Steve C-C-C-C-C-com and his name tip just said come. And it was just and the U.S. Air Force presented that unlike their equivalent of A.k.O. like just completely straight-facedly. They have to, right? Like, they have to pretend like this is normal. Imagine being that guy's recruiter. Like, oh, dog, you got it at list. You're going to love it.

I mean, I feel like if that was me, your entire life would be that way. And so you either emigrate to a country where they don't speak English or every time you walk in the room, they call out roster, like, yep, it's come. I had quite a few funny names that I ran into

over the years when I was enlisted, but none were that good. Actually, I'm Turkish. Just June. I, when I was in basic training at Fort Knox, where I did one station unit training back when tankers trained there, there was a pussy in my unit. P-U-S-S-S-I pronounced pussy, though.

Dural sergeants loved yelling at him. I could not imagine how bad his, because I just had the word ass in the middle of my last name, so therefore I got called ass until the day I got out of the army, no matter what my rank was. That I thought was bad enough. I could not imagine if my name was pussy. My last name rhymed with a gay, so people made a lot of work of that one.

But I mean, I... Nate be gay. All your soldiers did that shit behind your back, I imagine. But no, don't worry. I mean, also there was a, I remember there was a guy named Drink Water in one of my training units. There was a guy named Drink Wine as well. Not at the same time, thank God.

Someone in the middle named Jesus, shaking hands. I imagine it was always very funny. Jesus Christ. Exactly. You know, it's get one and do the. other. I mean, there was a, there, he did tell me, drink water told me there was, it was annoying because Drill Sarge was like, drink water. And he'd be like, coming. Like, what are you say? What do you say when they fucking moving? Yeah. You know, like fucking. They're like, no, shut, not you. God damn it.

And then realizes like, oh, your name is like, they're going to have to come up with defamatory nickname for you. So this doesn't happen anymore. As the tide began to turn against the Japanese, the British planned Operation Matador, a seabor landing on Ramory that targeted the port in the north and the airfield to the south. and a two-pronged attack. Now, the commanders of this invasion are largely unimportant to our story because the invasion itself pretty much goes without a hitch, you know,

as long as you're not Japanese. But we do have a solid name alert here. British general, Cyril Ernest Napier Lomax. Yes. That is either like a British soldier in World War II or like a guy from Louisiana who is married to a crocodile. I was going to say Napier or Lomax

sounds like a rare genetic disorder. It's actually a genetic disorder where you turn into a crocodile. My name is Napier Lomax. This is my wife, Teethy. I live and down in this here by you my entire life except for about three months, three years when I was on loan to someone we call Ton Ton Sam. You could tell how much she loves our children because she just keeps on rolling, much like our good friend Fred Durst.

I can't get no sleep beside my wife because she rolls over, takes all the covers. Every now and again, she just grabs one of the dogs and goes underwater for as long as she wants to. So we're all picturing this man wearing only overalls but with one strap, right? Yeah. There's like a hole on the knee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just making sure that we have hive minded this man into existence.

Sergeant Nypey a Lomax checking in a barma. Well, it's hot and muggy here. It's not all that different where I'm from. Sadly, the crocodiles don't look anywhere near his fetching. my beloved wife. The crocodiles started attacking and they're like, get me, Sergeant Lomax. He's the only man who knows I had to deal with this.

Well, fuck y'all want me to do, sir. I were married one of them. That'd be big of me. I may have married a crocodile, but I am no Mormon. Yeah, shit, y'all can't make me into a polygamist. I know that's wrong. That's a sin. Now, human crocodile relations, ain't

nothing wrong with that. Lomax is something of a lieutenant Dan in the story. And for people who may be, aren't as old as us or have never seen Forrest Gump. Lieutenant Dan is a character who has at least one member of his family died every major American war going back to the revolution. Lomax's dad died in the Boer War. A cousin died in World War I and his own son would die in World War II.

Maybe just become a fucking painter or something like war is not for your particular bloodline it seems. he's also missing both his legs below the knee because his wife bit them all. You have the same like with lost record with war as my family does with alcohol and drug abuse. Just stay out of it. Well, that kind of implies if he lost his legs because his wife bit them off at the end of the redemption arc of this film is at Napier-Lomax stops being racist towards Crocodiles, but it's still very racist towards the Burmese. I mean, that is just your normal man from Louisiana, right? now I'm in character

and I'm feeling offended on behalf of all these folks now they're gonna be mad at us because they have alligators down there, not crocodiles and they're probably gonna say my accent some fucking bullshit and you're right

because I don't know how to do it it sounds kind of like North Carolina gets a little weird if I want to talk like my granddaddy did when you come down on Mississippi

on the Delta I can talk like I got a French accent like this you know, I mean that is kind of how it sounds no, I just in parli and French

like so, It's a match for you? Joe? No, your French isn't fucked up enough, Nate, to be Asian. Come on. Fuck it up a little bit. Callise.

I'm going to, I'm talking in French. I'm like, whatever her name is Celine Dion. They'll talk like that. Oh,

when I chant, I chant normal. But when I talk, I talk, I talk, I'm like the Colonel of Confederacy. Anyway,

the amount of force that the British brought to invade the island is overwhelming for the Japanese station there. It's 1945. The life of your average Japanese soldier at this point is terrible, short, and ends abruptly in the best case scenario, because the worst case scenario is you starve to death or die of disease,

right? The best thing you can hope for is a Japanese conscript at this point is just being hit by an artillery shell directly in the chest, so you feel nothing. The British Royal Navy just plasters the island with enough scunnion to make you have to give God to for flinching. By the time the shelling stopped, the only resistance British forces face, were some sea mines in the harbor, and they land unopposed on January 21, 1945. The landing at Akhub went unopposed as well, and so the third island Chiduba fell the same way.

The Japanese just abandoned the other two islands altogether. The harbor at Ramri was immediately taken over, and the British forces began converting it for their needs, which mostly consisted of fishing a ton of sea mines out of the harbor. After that, Lomac set his command center up in the same busted-ass buildings, the Japanese had used before they saw the sun get blotted out by naval artillery. By all accounts, they find the Japanese forces incredibly disorganized in a way that is just unfamiliar for the Japanese military for this war. The best reason anyone could find for this was the Japanese believe that Brits were going

to land somewhere else closer to the center of the island. And that had been the original British plan. But at the last second, the Brits changed the landing zone to the northern tip, catching them completely off guard. When the other Brits landed to the south of the island, it completely broke any kind of defensive plans the Japanese had. They didn't even really have dug in fortifications or anything. Like any of the island hopping that we've talked about over the years of this show

where the Japanese have bunkers and prepared defenses and, like, none of that happens here. Some of that could be chalked up to the fact that these are trainees. But not all of them are. And this isn't even the first time that a bunch of dudes straight out of Japanese basic training get thrown into war. This battle is very much unlike virtually every other defense the Japanese had in which they just didn't have anything. One thing that I find super fascinating about like this part of the war is because like if you're a British soldier from York or like Scunthorpe or Redding or something and you're like in mainland Europe is like yeah, the weather is kind of the same. Imagine being like a guy from Liverpool and you're in Burma and you have Japanese people screaming at you. running at you and I'm like, what the fuck do I do? There's mosquitoes eating your flesh.

Yeah, there's ants on your feet. I feel like if anybody is prepared for a swamp, it's a man from a place called Scunthorpe. You just sound naturally moldy to me. Britain doesn't have tropical diseases because it's not a tropical country, so you don't have the same climate, the same environment. At this point, they did have quinine, but like, you know, obviously malaria is a huge problem in World War II. And it's just like, I can't, I mean, you. you've experienced this in training, I'm sure, Joe, even in a subtropical place, like Georgia, the state of Georgia in the southern U.S.,

if you are out doing training and stuff, and you get like a cut or like an ingrown hair or something, it can become cellulitis really fast. Yeah, this shit's fucking nasty. Imagine it's an actual combat zone in the tropics. I mean, I did a thing where we were training the Royal Thai Army, and I just remember being like walking around during a training day, when it was like basically 100 degrees Fahrenheit and really humid

because it was, you know, July in Thailand. And I was just like, yeah, this fucking. sucks. Can you imagine fighting a war in this shit? This is awful. And it's like, I at least grew up a place where it's hot. You know, I'm not from Liverpool. So yeah, this, this would be shit. I kind of understand the job. I mean, Japan's hot. It's got a monsoon climate. It can be really hot in summertime. But I have a feeling like, this guy showed up and they probably just didn't have that one psychotic NCO who made them like, you know, I don't know, pull, pull down palm trees and weave baskets to fill them with sand to make defensive bastions. And there's like, fuck it. I hate the

shit. It's so hot here. And they just didn't do anything. I mean, that's the most. identifiable I've ever seen the Japanese behave in World War II. The first time I've been like, I get these guys. I get it. They followed the fourth general order. I walk my post round and around. Fuck this shit I'm sitting down. Yeah. They didn't even have the excuse that we had. They didn't have Xbox. You know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly. They couldn't do up a generator and have a fucking Xbox and a TV inside a shipping container and be like, oh, we're planning countermorters or something like that would actually just fucking off. traveling back in time to give the Japanese Imperial Army one soldier's cell phone full of porn. I mean, you know, they had the printed article. They had scrolls or fucking chat books of it.

Yeah, but there's a difference between that and a terabyte of porn. You know what I mean? That copy of Dream of the fisherman's wife was getting real steep. As the Brits advanced down the southern coast, the Japanese largely did not put up a fight, with most of the resistance to the British, coming from the horrible, unrelenting jungle that they were forced to advance through.

Bugs and getting stuck in the mud were a bigger threat to the Brits and the soldiers there were sent there to fight. Nighttime scouting patrol sent out by the British frequently ran away from like tall bushes and like from sounds and shit because like people were terrified of this island because, you know,

there's a lot of fucking wildlife in Burma in general. There were some scouts that had to climb up trees to get away from crocodiles. I just googled some pictures of Burmese jungle and like it straight up looks like something out of like Kingsquest 6. This looks like they've created a role playing like a click through role playing game where there's definitely some paths you just can't take. Like there's only going to be one road. You can walk on and nothing else is allowed because this is some dense rainforest. You click on the road and it just before long you're walking down it and the like the brown dirt turns a strange pink color.

The trees fade away and there's just teeth lining on either side of you. You just realize you're walking straight into a crocodile. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm going to copy an image and post it into our group chat because there's a part of me that's like, I can't believe this is real. But like, this is absolutely the thing where like a crocodile is actually eating you and your brain's releasing DMT.

It's not a place that I would certainly ever want to march through as a soldier. No. Eventually, the Japanese were trapped at a place called Yan Bak Chong where they were forced to try and fight. But they did manage to break out of encirclement and go running into the By February 7th, the British tactics had changed. At this point, the two forces, one moving down from the north and moving up from the south, have been traveling down the coast of the island.

The reason for this path is quite simple. Access to the sea means resupply and evacuation if needed, right? But also, Ramri's coast is the easiest part of the island to march over. England Ramory Island turns into a sea of mangrove swamps, an absolute nightmare at the best of times, and a cemetery in waiting during a war. Mangrove swamps are a treasure trove of fun diseases and animals. The kind of place that even if you're from there, born and raised going back generations, this shit will fucking kill you if you don't know what you're doing. And this is not a place you can acclimatize into. It's a skill, right?

It's just living on hard mode. So as the two British forces join up, they begin to drive the Japanese soldiers inland towards the mangrove swamp. At this point, the Japanese soldiers who are still alive are in really bad shape. Remember, most of these guys are not the hardcore jungle fighters that Japanese soldiers during World War II have kind of been known as, even if that reputation itself is quite overstated. It's a bit of an overblown idea of the Japanese Imperial Army.

But even in comparison to the standard soldier, these guys are rough. The vast majority of them were in training. They had been shipped over after a very abbreviated basic training course with the idea that they were going to finish their training on Ramri. Yeah, they didn't get to finish the module in their training that said, How to Fight When Drowned in Goop. Yeah. How to Goop.

box. Got a box that goop. Goop marching. Most of them had not even acclimatized to Burma yet. So the weather, the mosquitoes, like most of them were already quite ill. They'd been getting bombed

and shot at for weeks. The fighting in this case was nonstop if you happen to be a Japanese soldier. And I assume, dear listener, you are not. If you were British, most of this campaign boiled down to walking a whole lot and sitting around and doing a lot of nothing. Ground fighting was very limited. Instead,

the campaign boiled down to maneuvering, harassing fire, and pushing the Japanese soldiers somewhere where they would be bombed by unending air and naval support. So for British soldiers, this is quite boring, but miserable, because they're also sick as hell. For Japanese soldiers, they're just getting torn to shit and not even standing up and fighting because they don't even have a chance. Disease has more presence within the ranks of the Japanese soldiers than food or ammunition. At this point, the Japanese garrison is thought to be like maybe 1,500 men, thanks to attrition. And we've talked about these kinds of conditions in Japanese units quite a few times in different battles. It's 1945.

This kind of shoot is just fundamental to a Japanese soldier's life at this point. However, like I said, despite the fact that we've talked about how bad the conditions for your common Japanese soldiers are pretty much at any point after 1943, but quite grim by 1945. It never really seemed to stop them from fighting. But in Ramory Island, they're mostly just

running. In this case, it was so bad that even the bravest warriors of the emperor couldn't even manage a suicide charge. It's one of the few times that we see the Japanese army so broken that even though morale normally enforced through horrible violence from their officers in

NCO was completely broken. Instead, the haggard collection of sick, starving, and thirsty Japanese soldiers, airmen, and civilian contractors tried for the one possible escape route available to them. Retreat inland across the island and make for the opposite shore, where they might be able to be rescued by Japanese forces on the mainland. And multiple attempts were made by mainland forces to relieve these guys. Air raids were launched from the mainland to try to soften up British naval forces. And when that didn't work, they launched tons of small boats anyway, trying to get to

Ramory and pull the soldiers out of there. And we'll touch back on the boats in a little bit here. But going back to the infantry, you would think the British would give chase desperate to contain the last fighting unit on Ramri and destroy it. But they didn't. That's because they're out inland that the Japanese had taken led them directly into 15 miles of mangrove swamp. Oh.

And the British knew that and we're not going to send their men into it, which is the nicest thing I think I've ever said about the British Army. Yeah, the only time the British Army were like, yeah, we're not going to fuck up all of our troops. They're not expendable. We hate our soldiers, but even we don't hate them that much. 15 miles of mangrove swamp, fucking hell. At best, you're going to get like diphtheria or something. Yeah, you're going to come back more cholera than man on the other side. out of that if you make it through.

You're getting like pre-medieval diseases from the swamp? I feel like also there's just an extent to which these guys aren't exactly going to be like in prime condition. Like this would take out anybody in prime condition, but when you've already been exposed to the, you know, the crash diet of being at war and not having great supplies and being in a situation where you have to withdraw, you know, under pressure, you are probably more predisposed towards getting the itch and the gruff and the scratch and the, The flux.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like the grundle and any kind of these like pre-Latin names for fucking diseases. Like, we don't have words for them that like, they're like proto-Germanic words because like we cured them by developing underwear and soap. I don't know. By leeches. A private Imoata. We regret to inform me you've got the bloody grundle. Having to march through 15 miles of a mangrove swamps and getting boobos on my grondul. We're once again boobomaxing.

God damn it. I mean, yeah, that's probably what it's going to look like. You know, it would start out as ingrown hairs and boils, but it's going to fully become boobos. It's going to become, you know, like major terrain features all over your body. You're going to look like the underground monsters from chilled. Bitches looking like a topographical map and shit. Yeah, exactly.

I look completely hideous to myself and to everyone except people who have weird giraffe fetishes. Instead of going into the Bangoravs swamp, the British positioned themselves on the outward channels of the swamps. The only ways in and out that could be taken by anybody on foot, walking along the channel banks, or floating down the channels themselves on whatever they could find that could float. Because it's not like they brought boats with them. From there, the British did not advance,

but instead did what they'd been doing the entire time. Sheld and bombed and bombed the living piss out of the Japanese trapped within the swamp. Around 500 Japanese soldiers did break through the curtain of fire and doom in small groups, struggling their way on to boats that had made it to the island from the mainland, and then set sail trying to get away. The majority of these guys did not get away. Instead, most of the boats they were riding in were small and slow and easily captured by the Royal Navy. Or when they tried to fight when capture was upon them, they simply got blown out of the water.

What was the distance shore to shore? Not super long, but long enough to very easily kill you. Like, it's not swimmable. Yeah, so you're, you are at some point in open water completely exposed. Yeah. A place you don't want to be in a slow boat with the Royal Navy or any other Navy curtning around, you know? Everyone's covered in Bubos, even the guy rowing the boat and his hands are like blistering as he's rowing. Leaving a trail of pus in the water behind him.

Now, this left around a thousand men hunkered down in the swamp, having left the empire of Japan and having accidentally entered the imperial household of the bog. But this story is not one of the British slowly tightening the noose on the Japanese. That is just something of a prelude. This story is about what happens to the Japanese once they're in the swamp. You see, a mangrove swamp is a little bit different from most of the swamps we've talked about before. I know we've talked about a lot of them at this point. Namely, they're made out of salt water and bring with them all of the things that saltwater tends to bring.

It's hot, it's humid. And if you drink the water, you'll fucking die. And while drinking bog water is never advisable for anybody, and will probably still kill you eventually, drinking salt bog water will kill you very fast. But Joe, have you entertained the idea that maybe drinking salt bog water is the key to unlocking your true masculinity? Yeah, that's going to be the new, like, Department of Health and Human Services guidelines for flu season. Well, yeah, exactly. Fuck blue spirulina. I'm going to start selling balls of salt bog water. brackish bog water.

I mean, I feel as though, like, if you were a Japanese soldier, you know, you were left just the rear guard while people tried to retreat. And then you saw that like stragglers were coming back and every single one of them had been turned into pizza the hut. You might be like, I'm going to take my chances climbing up a tree and staying dry, quite frankly. That would be a good idea. The small problem was, is the soldiers, remember, they've been harried by air strikes.

Of course, yeah. Naval artillery, small arms fire for weeks at this point. And they've been driven into the marshes with no supplies whatsoever. Like other than like the ammo they have on their, which is largely useless at this point, right? Because they're not fighting anybody. They're just running from one point to the other and dying from airstrikes. Yeah, because it's like you want to get up,

get above ground, above the water and stay dry. But unfortunately, that's the least safe place. So you're being driven down to seat cover. But unfortunately your cover is the toilet basically. one of the soldiers is going to come up with the master plan. He's like, see, they're going to be looking for soldiers. He's going to slide into the mud, cover himself. It's like, I have become a crocodile.

They'll never look for me here. The Japanese soldiers knee deep in Boguar are being psychologically tortured by Napier Lomax doing whipping shitties around them in the airboat. That's the thing is he's like, you don't want to take your chances to decide to disguise yourself as a crocodile because Napier Lomachian. might either harpoon you or decide to marry you. Yeah. He might become one of his crocodile brides. He's blasting his own version of walk by Pantera.

It do do do do do do. Bog. God. And both of them have the same opinions on race. I'm thinking more of something different. I was thinking he'd be whipping shitties around in the air, but with a harpoon in one hand, but it's playing, let's pretend we're married by prince. Now, the main problem here is,

obviously they have no food. Having no food is bad. No one, unless you're on like the world's most TikTok diet. But the real issue here is the heat, the humidity, and the total lack of drinking water. Yeah.

You can last a pretty long time without eating, longer than you'd think. Yeah. But thirst is a different story. So these soldiers were left with two options. Try and stomach brackish salt water or drink nothing at all. And as people fall into pits of thirst, there is a thing of being driven mad by thirst, especially

if you're surrounded by water that you know you cannot drink. A lot of people end up drinking anyway, assuming, well, it's not like it could make it worse. It does. Salt water makes it way worse. It can always get worse. You get so much more thirsty and your throat burns and then you get sick and if you drink too much of it, you're going to throw up no matter what, but it makes you so much more dehydrated. The only way, it's not really reasonable in these circumstances, the only real way is to literally boil salt water and distill it. And you aren't going to have the ability to do

that or the fuel or any of the stuff requires. You're fucked. Animal blood is a short-term option. But the problem is, like, here's the issue is there's a lot of ways out of this situation which they find themselves, a bog-based problem-solving, if you will. If they were healthy, going into it.

But due to the fact that most of them already have, let's say the classic grand slam of malaria, typhus and cholera with a little sprinkling of diphtheria on top, by the time they're driven into the swamps, they're already like dead on their feet. Like they can't really hunt. They have no energy. The thirst is certainly not helping things. Most of them are just sitting down and waiting to die. I love that. I got the other week got all my vaccinations for my upcoming. trip to Vietnam and I would survive longer in this bog than these Japanese soldiers. I'm vaccinated

against diphtheria typhoid. Not vaccinated against naval strikes, weirdly. Naval strikes are one of those things that you only get through, um, you know, repeated exposure, like chicken pox. You have to just get bombed by the Royal Navy constantly and then you're immune. It's like getting shot. Look at 50 said. Yeah, exactly. sequential bullet that he got hit with increased his chance of survival exponentially because I don't know, more metal in his body is like a shield. Yeah, someone tried to strike him down and he became more powerful than he'd ever been before. And if you skip all your vaccinations when you're young, if you try to do it as a adult and catch up, like it never works well.

That's what happened to Nikola Chichescu. Yeah, he did the unfortunate thing of overdosing. His bullets relaced with more bullets. And if disease, thirsts, and hell raining down from above wasn't bad enough. They had to contend with wildlife. The mangrove swamps of Ranhry are known to contain scorpions, spiders, clouds of disease carrying mosquitoes,

venomous snakes, and of course, saltwater crocodiles. Now, for people who have never been to a zoo or had a weird obsession with Steve Irwin like I did when I was a child, saltwater crocodiles are larger

than you could possibly comprehend. They're huge. They're the largest, terrestrial predator on earth. They can weigh over 2,000 pounds and can eat just about anything that has the misfortune of wondering

near them. And if that wasn't bad enough, you would think that, okay, just stay out out of the water. The crocodile can't possibly catch up to me. Unless you are an above average person, these motherfuckers will also outrun you on flat ground. But it's important to remember that these soldiers are not

normal people anymore. And they're sick, they're weak, they're hungry, they're starving, and they find themselves competing in something I'm tentatively calling the half-dead guy Olympics. One time I got like really, really stoned, like out of my mind could not get off the couch stone and was watching a nature documentary. I shouldn't tell us. Never a good idea. Like there's a bit about crocodiles and it was like slow motion footage that was obviously shot in like 240 frames a second and super slowed down. and then when the crocodile

like shot forward they obviously sped up the footage and it freaked me the fuck out to the point I jumped off the sofa See this is why the guy had to be strapped out in a clockwork orange If there wasn't

a more perfectly manicured place on earth to die in The mangrove swamps Which you know Salt water means to connect to the ocean They would occasionally be home To fucking sharks

I love being a Japanese soldier during World War II and being trapped in the dark zone one level blight down. It's also very, very funny because it's like the Bay of Bengal. It's like you've got this, you've got North Sentinel Island where you also tie. Like there's just so much, there's Bengal Tigers, there's the Ganges Delta. There's all these places where you can drown, get flooded, get hit with cyclones, get speared to death. It just feels as though you got to be wise and basically not just go hang out on a random island in this area. I'm making the choice sitting on the bank starving full of cholera.

Do I just sit here and die normally? Or do I go to the left and be eaten by a shark? Or do I go to the right and be eaten by a crocodile? Or do I walk backwards and be eaten by the other six people I'm hiding here with who are also starving and dying of thirst? I think I'm just going to fucking shoot myself. I still have a bullet. Oh, but the powder's wet.

It doesn't work. I've left my gun in the swamp and now I have to slowly gut myself with my bayonet. A British soldiers manned their positions, occasionally shooting into the swamp, but most of the time just sitting there as artillery and airpower went to work. But when night fell and bombing lifted, soldiers sitting on the outside would be greeted by the screams of Japanese soldiers and sporadic gunfire and explosions, which they chalked it up to having to fight off hordes of crocodiles. This is because of one Canadian

soldier turned naturalist, Bruce Wright, who said, quote, that night was the most horrible that any member of the crews had ever experienced. The scattering 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 sounds of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on Earth. At dawn, the vultures rived clean-up what the crocodiles had left behind. Over the course of the days of inhuman horror, the British called out to the soldiers in the swamp, urging them to surrender, but only one man ever answered, a doctor from the Japanese army, floating down the channel on a log, who by all accounts, was mostly driven mad?

He was emaciated sick and jabbering in English to the Brits about what was going on in there. So the British, of course, put him in a motorboat and had him cruise up and down a few channels, screaming out to the Japanese soldiers to surrender, but nobody ever answered, not even to shoot at him or tell him to fuck off. Just nothing. A few days later, the British forces slowly advance into the swamps, finding only 20, seriously six soldiers, barely clinging to life.

And with that, the Battle of Ramory Island was over. But that brings us to the actual story of this battle. In the time since, it's gone down as quite possibly the largest known crocodile attack in human history. It even got the record for that by the Guinness Book of World Records. Everybody's favorite organization for recording stupid bullshit paid for by rich guys to get their names in a very expensive piece of paper. But it had been doing that dating back to when not everybody was aware of the fact that the book was just a scam.

This has been there for very long. And this is obviously not something that anybody paid to get done. Since this is not a record, you could feasibly cheat. challenge yet. I am actually pitching the world's worst live show live in a bog because I'm going to challenge the Japanese. Actually, who holds

this record? Is it the Japanese soldiers or the crocodiles? I think it's the crocodiles. It's probably right. I like to imagine the crocodiles. I also like to imagine the idea of lines set by donkeys live in the mangroves. That's right. We're only selling tickets to crocodiles. If our rift bombs, we get eaten by

a crocodile. Oh, we're all dead. We're all fucking dead. It's not happening. Yeah. We're not going to last. We don't speak their language well enough. Yeah. They're going to see us and they won't be impressed.

Nate, we'll have to start speaking Foktoe French to them. I'll do my best. I'll just start singing Celine Dion songs. Maybe they'll, maybe they'll understand. So how did we get here? How in the hell is at 2026 and the Battle of Ramri Island

is still largely known for being that time that the Japanese army was defeated by the Crocodile Liberation Force. For that, we have to go back to official records, right? Like Japanese and British military records. Like, let's see where this begins. Well, we're done because there isn't any. The end.

Neither the British nor the Japanese chalk any of this shit up to crocodiles. The only official crocodilian related report about this battle is that some scouts of the British military did have to run away from the occasional crocodile. But even that is like some rustling in the bushes. Remember, these dudes are from like, Scug hope or whatever. They don't know what a fucking crocodile is. And they're rightfully terrified of strange jungle sounds, right?

Yeah, I mean, like if anything, there are probably more people killed by snakes and mosquitoes. Mosquitoes win this battle 10 times out of 10 across all of human history, except the occasional guest spot by a flea that one time. Well, yeah. I mean, the USS Indianapolis is a completely different story because it was in the ocean and it was sharks. But in this case, there's other things that could kill you and it's more likely. The real foundation of this myth is a man we've already.

Quoted Bruce Wright. Wright in his book, Wildlife Sketches Near and Far, claims to have been an eyewitness to this event. In his quote, he's saying that he's witnessing this. But if he is to be believed, he is the only witness to this event. Not a single other person of the thousands of other people present in that immediate area of the battle claims to have seen this

to include the Japanese soldiers who survived. There are even doubts that Wright was on Rambury Island, at all. Yes. Yes. I love a classic bullshitter who's like, yeah, I need to sell books. This is going in. You've been flim flammed by a Canadian. This never happens. Flim flammed by a naturalist. The real digging to figure out if Wright was actually on Ramory Island that despite the fact it did fall into a bit of a hole on this one has nothing to do with me and everything to do with other animal science guys that he had pissed off. Like naturalists,

conservationists, and one particular herpetologist named Stephen Platt, who really got mad at the whole crocodile slander, I suppose. A herpetologist, so that's someone who studies crocodiles. Reptiles, yeah. See, I wasn't a reptile kid, so I wouldn't know that. I had a face. I just like weird ass words, so. Yeah. Herpetologist sounds like he studies herpes, but no, it's reptiles. He's a huge fan of nightclubs. Stephen Platt conducts a study on Ramory Island and discovers that Wright had been working from notes when he wrote his chapter on Ramory. A key bit of evidence on this

is seemingly something that no one else picked up on. The chapter on Ramory Island is the only chapter of the book written in the third person rather than the first. Huh. Interesting. Now, if he got notes,

that would be fine. That's what we just call, you know, citable sources. And you can see the sources of this podcast and our show notes as always. However, Wright never cites who gave him anything.

Yes, he's doing the literal version of source. I made it up. I made it the fuck up. And to go even deeper, and a different book Wright wrote, The Frogmen of Burma, he says he only arrived in Ramory after the battle was over, meaning he accidentally debunked himself or simply forgot and hoped nobody would notice. And you might be wondering why would anybody give a fuck about this guy's opinion? It's one guy, right? But the thing is, is Wright would become a respected naturalist over the years. And so when someone that respected in a field says something about, say, crocodiles,

and he has the added cloud of being a upper middle class British man with a classical education, it just kind of takes off. And this isn't me filling in the blanks of how could this has possibly happened. We actually have a conservationist saying that's why he believed it. Roger Carus, a conservationist, quotes Wright's bit about Ramri in his 1964 book, Dangerous to Man, and points out the fact that he is certain that Wright got the account from a different guy, but didn't know who, but also trusted Wright because it's him, and that's clearly how science works. The story has been running unbroken ever since, despite the fact that,

Obviously, multiple scientists have pointed out that this is not true. The few Japanese survivors of the battle said that, yes, they did see crocodiles drag off a few people. But most of them were already dead. They didn't kill a thousand people. At most, snatched maybe 15, specifically when they tried to get away down one of the channels and ended up surprise acting in the world's most visceral version of Peter Pan. But like, at no point was there like a mass murder by crocodiles? The 15 men number is a bit of a guess by the Japanese survivors.

They said 15 men took off in a direction and they never fucking saw them again. And they very easily could have been eaten by crocodiles because they do crocodiles were in the channel. Hence why the majority of them didn't go near the fucking water if they could help it. I do find it very funny that if you have a fancy British accent and have the correct pedigree that these people had, especially in this era that you effectively could cite the sources this was revealed to me in a dream. And everyone would be like, well, that's what it is. There are many such cases of this, which I really want to go to in one case. However, I know he's litigious as fuck.

It has already threatened to be once. So I'm not going to say it. I'm clenching so hard right now. There is one quote unquote historian who only has an undergraduate degree, which I need to point out here, not shit talking on my history fans out there with it. undergraduate history degree. We all start off somewhere, but that does not in fact make you historian. But he is a British guy with a classic British education who wrote a book about, let's say, a specific region on a specific topic that was not very heavily written about in English.

It is very, very flawed and has since made him an expert on the subject. He's not. He's a very dumb man. And his book pretty much wanders into genocide denial about the Armenian Genocide. Was it about a topic sometimes called the Shmarmi- and Schmeneside. No, that's not the topic of what his book is about. It's about, let's say, a more modern conflict in the same region. And if I talk about any more, we might get in trouble.

But yeah, it's real bad. He's a classic example of this where you just get believed because you sound the way people think a respected person should be sound. You have David Attenborough voice. Yeah, exactly. When you're like, when you're like actually elephants, trunks are their dicks, people are like, well, I didn't know that. They having crazy nose sex in the bush.

One naturalist in an in-depth study points out, there's no way Ramory Island even had enough crocodiles in the space of the entire island, let alone in the swamps, to do such a thing as right insist happened. I can't imagine a crocodile, no matter how many were there, would approach a group of like a thousand people

to pick them off slowly. That is far more shark behavior, quite frankly. And it's like, that's what they do. I mean, flat flat out, but like sharks are different. Crocodiles don't act away. Also, crocodiles like, they hunt when they're hungry and they typically, you know, they eat something and like, then they go away until they're hungry again. A lot of the herpetologists have pointed out this, to believe this requires a fundamental misunderstanding of crocodile behavior at minimum. I like the crocodiles are all gluttons.

And also, they got like lethargic, but they kept killing and eating more. They just pushed those 15 soldiers where I said, oh, take them away. I can't have any more. I'm so full. Take them away. Just like full on just at a certain point, like all the soldiers were being, you know, eaten. And it was screams of pain. But if you could filter that out and only listen to the crocodile noises, it was basically moan.

The entire time. I could possibly eat another one. Islanders who were living on the island before, during and after the Japanese occupation, say, sure, there's crocodiles, but not the Legion of Sauri and Super soldiers like right claims. By the 1940s, the crocodile population of Ramri, was already on the decline thanks to human activity, and within 20 years, they'd be pretty much extinct on the island. Frank McClain in his book, The Burma Campaign, points this out pretty bluntly. Quote, most of all, there's 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 going to survive later? The ecosystem of a mangrove swamp simply would not have permitted the existence of so many Sarians before the coming of the Japanese. Animals are not exempt from the laws of overpopulation and starvation. But that brings us other questions. For example, the one thing that soldiers other than right claim to have heard the screams of desperate dying men. That did happen. So what was that if had nothing to do with crocodiles, right?

Yeah, because there's fucking a thousand guys stuck in a mangrove swamp starving. death and full of disease. Of course they're going to be screaming. What are you fucking talking about? Getting bitten by snakes and shit. Scorpions freaking out, having delusions because they're starving to death and they're also like dying of thirst. And drinking salt water. drinking salt water, being in pain, vomiting painfully. Like yeah, there's all kinds of things that can be happening. I'll give it to both of you. Both valid reasons. But British military records do have one specific incident pretty much figured out. And that is on February 18th, one of the boats, hundreds of Japanese soldiers, ferrying men from Ramory Island to the mainland, got clapped by our Royal Navy ship.

The soldiers then fell into the sea and began to drown and panic. Soldiers sitting in the darkness would probably not be able to tell where exactly the sound was coming from and figured it was probably coming from the swamps of doom because that's where you'd expect that kind of sound to fucking come from. They just listened to hundreds of men drowning in the night. amongst other things. Mm-hmm. Again, we are in the literal nightmare factory here.

Yeah, no kidding. We're in the bloodborne level where crocodiles fucking eviscerate you and you just drown in the mold. That's far more plausible, quite frankly. I mean, that's a very, very logical point to point sort of explanation versus like, oh, there was actually like

a forward deployed brigade brigade of crocodiles from elsewhere that just showed up. Yeah, they're part of the Commonwealth. So that begs the obvious question. Again, if it wasn't a mass crocodile attack that wiped out the Japanese soldiers held up in the swamp.

Did they all just die of disease or thirst or starvation? Kind of? But it's not even just that either. Most historians and naturalists tend to fall on the sides of thirst being the main killer, with soldiers kind of speeding that up by drinking the salt water, with disease following thereafter. Obviously, one leads to the other in the situation. You become weaker from thirst and hungers.

Disease will take you faster. However, a lot of these dudes, killed themselves because, yeah, I don't really blame him. Yeah, a phenomenon Japanese soldiers during World War II are kind of known to do. This is a known quantity. Like men were around people dying of starvation, thirst, disease. The occasional animal attack did happen. So they shot themselves in the head or blew themselves with hand grenades,

which would go on to explain the reports of sporadic gunfire and explosions that the British herd from the swamps. They weren't fighting off a zerg rush of crocodiles. They were committing mass suicide, which despite sounding like your local Kasabian family reunion is a lot more plausible in the context of World War II. Like Tom pointed out, Japanese soldiers did the shit all the time. Sometimes that just they just do that. It's like JFK's head exploding. Sometimes it just did that.

If you trap a group of Japanese soldiers in a hole somewhere for long enough, the odds of them all killing themselves increases quite rapidly. So I guess in closing, Wright just made it the fuck up. up. None of this happened. Prime age for historians just making shit up. Can't really get away with that anymore. And this continues on. Like, I'm hardly the first historian on earth to loudly

say this shit never happened. I won't be the last. It has been debunked for a very, very long time. Like, the first stuff I found written about it date back way before I was born. Talking about, like, Wright was lying out of his teeth. Or like, the best thing, because he,

was such a well-known guy that people didn't want to say, oh, he's a fucking lying hack. They would say he's clearly using someone else's account and not citing it, which is being a hack and whatever. But also, it's important to remember that he's writing it from his perspective as this he is there. So he's already lying. And then in a book afterwards, he was like, yeah, I totally wasn't there at all. Yeah, right.

Just pulled like a James Frey million little pieces on the crocodiles. That implies that one of the crocodile's names was hip hop. Hip crock. Hip crock. That's a pretty good crocodile name. But fellas, that's the end of the Battle of Ram Marie. But we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, support the show on Patreon.

You can ask us through our Patreon DMs and our Discord, which will also have access to, which is pinned to the top of the Patreon. Or you can attach the letter to a Japanese soldier and then feed him to a crocodile and we'll answer it on the air. Today's question is what video game or piece of media multiple people recommended to you that you should have liked, but either thought it was terrible or simply did not work for you. I consume a lot of pieces of media that I don't like, but I don't want to say as bad. Like it's just not made for me. You know what I mean? I didn't and probably still don't have the free time or attention span to actually get through Disco Elysium. I really,

really like Disco Elysium as a vibe of the story. It's really, really funny. But it's a very complex game. And like, if you make mistakes, you can really fuck yourself and have to go back quite a ways or start over. And I have tried to get through it multiple times, but maybe someday I will. I do actually really like it. But I think that it's the wrong kind of game for me. I was literally going to say Disco Elysium as well. Kentucky Root Zero is another one too. I like it a lot. I haven't given that a try yet.

I haven't been able to really get into it because like you have to be kind of in the mindset. It's a cool idea and it's a cool like kind of vibe, kind of aesthetic to the game. But I have struggled to really get into games like that at all. Whereas you hit me with the age of empires four and I'm on that shit like nobody's business. I'm in the exact same boat. When I saw this question from the Legion and the Discord, I is immediately discoleseum

jump to mind. I'm not saying Disco Elysium is a bad game or the writing is bad. I think the writing is actually quite good. It's incredible. Everything about is amazing. It's really funny. It's just, those kind of games don't work for me. This has nothing to do with the quality of the game. Obviously, it's drowning under a pile of awards. I am aware it is a critically acclaimed video game. I'm not saying it's not, just not for me. That's all it is. It's just not for me. It is actually for me in a lot of ways. It's just that I don't have the mental space to devote to like playing it the way that it's meant to be experienced and I find it kind of frustrating. See, I don't, I don't even have that excuse.

I loved Kings Quest games when I was a kid and like fucking they didn't have like it was hard to get FAQs or walkthroughs back then. So like those games were insanely frustrating. But like it's different when you're playing it as a nine year old versus as an adult. Like I don't want to be frustrated in a limited amount of free time. I have to play games. You know what I mean? I play games that are very long, you know, 40 to 80 hours sometimes.

Like it's not the length of the complexity. Just it's the mechanics themselves just aren't for me. It's the same reason why I should have liked Boulder's Gate, really don't. It's the mechanics. If the story was presented to me in a different way, I'd probably like it. It's just not for me. I know I should like it. I just don't.

Like we've talked about Blood Buridian on this show before. I'm not a huge fan. Not really. And everybody says like, oh, the people that don't like Blood Bridian don't like it because it's graphic content. I fucking assure you that's not what's chasing me away from it. it's kind of empty. Like to me, I think there's much better Cormack McCarthy books,

frankly. Yeah, I personally love the road, which nobody would ever accuse of being lighthearted, a lighthearted adventure tale. All the pretty horses. As I said on the recent episode, read Butchers Crossing, a better version of Blood Meridian. And people are very angry about that.

I think, and I say this as an author, not everything is for everybody. Like, some people love my shit. Other people hate it. Um, like, I love like Daniel, Abraham's fantasy novels. He's one of the two authors for The Expans. A lot of people who love The Expans

don't like them. Sometimes shit just isn't for you. Like it doesn't click. The vibe doesn't work for you. You're reading it or consuming it at the wrong time. This could be games, movies, or books. And it's just not working for you. It's not a value judgment because I can remember in the pitchfork wars of the early 2000s, whenever we were to convince

themselves that if you didn't not just get into but really actually enjoy the fiery furnaces, that something was wrong with your critical faculties. And I think we can go back and be like, Eleanor Friedberger is a great songwriter. But fuck me, I do not want to listen to an album that's them plus an old lady narrating her life from start to finish for 90 minutes. Like, it was annoying.

I'm sorry. The whole idea that not liking something is a value on like your intelligence or ability to absorb things is like the most pitch for fucking take on her. I mean, it can be if in terms of like being like wanting to the exclusion of other things, if you're like, I like this one thing and everyone who doesn't like, it's an idiot, but that's kind of on you. That's what I mean. That's on you. But like, we see, we look at somebody if they did that about Lincoln Park, you're like, well, you're kind of like diminishing your horizons, but then people do the exact opposite stuff. I mean, it's just as limiting

if you do it about, I don't know, fucking, uh, something that's just kind of more notably obscure. You know what I mean? Like, cool, whatever. We all have different tastes. You know, like, I read very different things in YouTube read. I think it's fair to say. Yeah. Um, I think we just all have different tastes of what we're consuming. I genuinely like the van suicide, even when they're really difficult. I also like weird kind of like suicide-related sort of vibe sounds of even more difficult bands from the 70s. I think it's safe to say that you two have the strangest musical taste of anyone I've ever met. But I'm not saying it's bad. You're the ones that say my musical taste is bad. I also fucking really, really like a lot of stuff that

probably wouldn't vibe with it. Like people who are into that typically don't also like, you know, stuff that Timbaland and Danger Hands produced. That Deli Furtado album, Luce, is incredible. It's fucking amazing. Tom, what do you got? So, films, I saw Marty Supreme a couple of months ago, did not like it. Just felt it was massively overhyped. In terms of books, I picked up a book that I actually own and do not like, which is say nothing. We've talked about this, yeah. My feelings have been like very, very clear on that book.

And in terms of games, literally every single JRP, I just do not care for them. I don't get it. And I'm just like... I'm totally fine with that. Like, I know other people who love... the genre as much as I do. I'm like, oh, if, you know, people just gave it a chance. I'm like, look, this shit ain't for everybody, man. Like, let's be fucking honest here. Like, there's a degree of nostalgia factor, too, that like, I'm not really into JRP's in the sense of continuing to

play new stuff. I do sometimes revisit the games that I really liked when I was like a tween, but like, yeah, that's, that's that hard nostalgia pill. Like, there's some that like, you know, for example, I have gushed about Expedition 33 a lot because I think that, you know, there's certain entryways into a genre, but I don't even like calling him that. That is like really, really easy and good and, you know, very easily consumable. And I think Exhibition 33 is the best example of that because it doesn't have any of the weird shit that JRPs tend to have, which like you're not playing as a teenager trying to fight God with all of your friends.

You know what I'm saying? Like, nobody wants to play 20 games of that. It gets fucking exhausting. You have to dress up as a girl, Cloud. It's the only way. Hey, that's enough about my weekend, Nate. I do have one that like some of my friends have gotten really mad at me

for is that I think Radiohead fucking suck so much. I'm not a fan of Radiohead. I fully get why people enjoy it. I just think it is boring, fright, terrible music that like if you weren't like 22 and insufferable in the early 2000s

that you just like, I just don't get it. I think it's stupid. You're doing literally the thing that Nate I just talked about. You can like Radiohead. It's fine. It's just not for us. I don't think liking a band makes you less of a person.

Radiohead is definitely a band that attracts a kind of fan that basically treats Radiohead as like the apotheosis of music. And I think that's the behavior we're talking about. Like a lot of people get mad about it. I mean, like I obviously was 12 when OK, computer came out. And, you know, I look back on it fondly. But I've listened back to it. And there's parts of it that I still like. There's parts that I find not very good.

I don't think a lot of their. recent stuff, or rather a lot of the stuff I feel like it could do with a more critical lens. Their behavior, certainly Johnny Greenwood's behavior is pretty fucking atrocious. I'm happy to say I'm ignorant of the behavior of the people of radio. Johnny Greenwood is married to an Israeli woman and has basically turned Radiohead into a vehicle for doing like somewhere between soft and hard Zionism. It's pretty bad. Yeah, it's really bad. But as a caveat and I know Joe said, like, I'm really happy to know that everything I've learned about Radiohead has been against my will.

Radiohead is music. I'm like, whatever, it's not good. To me, it's not good. Like, if people enjoy Radiohead, whatever, I think out of every single, like, artists that I've had maybe disagreements with, like, people who enjoy their music, I think per capita, I've had the most with people who love Radiohead, because they are so adamant about making, trying to make me like Radiohead. Like, and someone did this to me, like, a couple of years ago with Bjork, and it's, and it's, you know, it's not that I didn't enjoy Bjork, it was just like I didn't get it. You got an argument with a Bjork fan? Yeah. This is the kind of shit that only happens to you, Tom? It wasn't necessarily an argument. It was just like, oh, I said that like,

oh, I don't really like Bjork. And they were like, I think you would enjoy Bjork if you actually sat down and like listened to the albums like very actively. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to do that. And after like maybe a week of like listening to the stuff, you know, on loop, I was like, okay, I fully get it. This is incredible.

Like, this is like really incredibly made music. Radiohead is just like everyone that has tried to do that to me has been insufferable. I'm getting very few music related beefs, but like whenever, because you're not obnoxious like me and Nate about music. I'm exceedingly normal, but

I get the same thing, like the same kind of like irk from people like, oh, you need to like sit down and actively listen to this to really understand it. It's like people like, oh, you'll really like this book after you read it like three times and it's like 700 pages long. I'm like, I'm not going to fucking do that. It should just be easily understand

from the till like, ah, God, I hate that shit. It's the same shit that JRP fans say. It gets really good after 12 hours. Like, that's a fucking insane thing to say. You've got to have a reason. Like, you have to have, like, it can't just be the, you know, the idea that, you know, you're, you think there's going to be some promise. Like, there's got to be a reason.

And it's perfectly fine to abandon something. I mean, like, with me, I think playing music now, I can definitely be like, okay, there's some aspects of radio has music to where like, I'm quite impressed with what they did. I will say the song Body Snatchers is great. And the fact that Tom York can play that song. that lead on the guitar and sing the old way is awesome. However, if you don't connect with it, like, that's not like a moral feeling. Who fucking cares? Like that album... We've been going out about

Radiohead for way too long. Okay. So, so to end this conversation, if you want Joe and Nate to force me to play Final Fantasy 7 for the podcast, let us know. I mean, yes, the answer to those... I mean, it would be funny, but also like, I don't know. If you don't enjoy it... But what if Cloud listened to Radiohead? actually he would he would listen to radio it's most radio head thing about like being a radio head fan also it predisposes you to being really really adamant about this other thing you have to really enjoy is donnie darko i'm sorry but fucking like if you grew up in that era don't darko i grew up in that era and i like don't listen to radiohead ass fucking movie on

the planet all right i don't know garden state's pretty radio no it's not guard yes it is way more twee man no it just wants to be but it has zach braffett it and That's the thing is that because you don't, because you, you don't recognize enough of the annoying radio head guy types to be able to make the joke funny. Tom does. Tom absolutely knows all those guys.

He could tell you, because, yeah, radio head people aren't tweet. They're in their 50s and they're divorced. Either Zach Brath. Natalie Portman is meant to be the tweet one in that film, not Zach Brath. The film itself is tweet.

Sorry. The film itself sucks. It sucks. It sucks so bad. Fuck it's bad. And I love that shit when it came out. The guy we're talking about is like in his like, in his like,

early 50s. I'm really putting, I'm putting it into the radio head conversation. We're done. But fellas, that's a podcast. You host other podcasts. Plug those other podcasts, which I assume are all about radio head. What a hell of a way to radio head.

Kill James Radiohead. Trash Radiohead. No gods, no radio head. I'm in a band called Better Than Radiohead. I listen to Beneath the Radiohead and Radiohead work. everybody thank you for listening. This is the only podcast that I host famously known as Alliance led by Radiohead.

Consider supporting us on Patreon. $5 a month gets you absolutely everything to include our entire back catalog. Every episode early, Discord, access first tips on live show tickets and merch. And of course, my own collection of Radiohead albums. You got Joe's audiobook exclusively about Radiohead? Yeah, yeah.

It's a radio book. I mean, I was thinking of the lyrics of Airbag and just been like, In the next world war, we'll fight about radio head. Gonna kill myself. Oh, God damn it. Until next time, everybody, arm the crocodiles.