From Wikipedia:<p>> In his 2011 analysis of the Burma campaign, the historian Frank McLynn challenged this interpretation, saying,<p>> 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).<p>> 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.<p>> 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".