According to the Guinness Book of Records (1968 edition) – Crocodiles attacked and killed about 1,000 Japanese soldiers in one night
Myanmar (formerly Burma) has an island called Ramree,
On February 19, 1945 – the end of World War II, a fierce battle took place between the Allies and a Japanese force and when evening fell, the Japanese force was pushed into the mangrove swamps.
Ramree’s mangrove swamps are populated saltwater crocodiles that reach a maximum length of more than 6 meters and weigh more than a ton.
The Japanese force tried to cross about 16 miles inside these swamps to connect with the rest of the Japanese force on the island. Out of about a thousand soldiers only 20 soldiers survived the journey.
One of the participants in the battle, a British soldier Bruce Stanley Wright, who later became a naturalist, wrote a testimony in his 1962 book “Wildlife Sketches – Near and Far“
In it he described the disappearance of the Japanese and testified that gunshots and the sounds of crocodiles could be heard. Other researchers consider disaster on such a large scale impossible and question the accuracy of the information from Wright’s book.
Although Wright’s testimony has become a fact in Guinness books
In 2000 Steven G. Platt was able to find surviving witnesses from the Japanese forces who confirmed that crocodiles indeed killed some of the men but only about 15 soldiers, the rest died from diseases, snakes, pests, dehydration and lack of means of crossing the swamps and the dense jungles.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ramree_Island