The Battle of Ramree Island was fought for six weeks during January and February 1945, as part of the British Fourteenth Army 1944/45 offensive on the Southern Front of the Burma Campaign during World War II. 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... The British Fourteenth Army was a multinational force comprising units from Commonwealth countries during World War II. Many of its units were from the Indian Army as well as British units and there were also significant contributions from East African divisions within the British Army. ... The Burma Campaign was a campaign in the South-East Asian Theatre of World War II. It was fought primarily between Commonwealth, Chinese and American forces against the Empire of Japan. ... The Burma Campaign was a campaign in the South-East Asian Theatre of World War II. It was fought primarily between Commonwealth, Chinese and American forces against the Empire of Japan. ... Combatants Allied Powers Axis Powers Commanders {{{commander1}}} {{{commander2}}} Strength {{{strength1}}} {{{strength2}}} Casualties 17 million military deaths 7 million military deaths World War II, also known as the Second World War (sometimes WW2 or WWII), was a mid-20th century conflict that engulfed much of the globe and is accepted as...

Ramree Island lies off the Burma coast and was captured along with the rest of Southern Burma, during the early stages of the Burma Campaign, by the rapidly advancing Imperial Japanese Army in 1942. In January 1945 the Allies were able to launch attacks to retake Ramree and its neighbour Cheduba, with the intention of building sea-supplied airbases on them. Ramree Island is an island off the coast of Myanmar (Burma). ... The Imperial Japanese Army ((: 大日本帝國陸軍 Shinjitai: 大日本帝国陸軍 Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun) was the official ground based armed force of Japan from 1867 to 1945. ... The group of countries known as the Allies of World War II came together as World War II unfolded and progressed. ... Cheduba Island is an island belonging to the Asian country Myanmar. ...

Battle

The battle started with Operation Matador, an amphibious assault to capture the strategic port of Kyaukpyu – located at the northern tip of Ramree Island, south of Akyab across Hunter's Bay – and the key airfield near the port. Reconnaissance carried out on 14 January 1945 disclosed Japanese forces busily placing guns to sweep the landing beaches on Ramree, so the Royal Navy assigned a battleship and an escort carrier to provide heavy naval support to the task force. History Records a number of operations named Matador: // The British in Malaya Operation Matador was a plan of the British Malaya Command to move forces into position to counter a Japanese amphibious attack on Malaya. ... Kyaukpyu is a town of western Myanmar on the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. ... Akyab is a city and district in the Arakan division of Burma. ... January 14 is the 14th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... The Royal Navy of the United Kingdom is the senior service of the British armed services, being the oldest of its three branches. ... The escort aircraft carrier or escort carrier, was a small aircraft carrier developed by the U.S. Navy in the early part of World War II to deal with the U-boat crisis of the Battle of the Atlantic. ...

On 21 January, an hour before the Indian 71st Brigade was to land, the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth opened fire with her main battery while planes from the escort carrier HMS Ameer spotted for her. The light cruiser HMS Phoebe also joined the bombardment, along with B-24 Liberators and P-47 Thunderbolts of No. 224 Group RAF, which strafed and bombed the beaches. The assault troops landed unopposed and secured the beachhead; the following day, the British 4th Brigade landed.^[1] January 21 is the 21st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... HMS Queen Elizabeth was the lead ship of the Queen Elizabeth-class of Dreadnought battleships, named in honour of Elizabeth I of England. ... The escort carrier USS Baffins (CVE-35) (originally AVG-35, then later ACV-35) was launched 18 October 1942 by Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corp. ... HMS Phoebe was a Dido class cruiser of the Royal Navy. ... Royal Canadian Air Force B-24 Liberator The Consolidated B-24 Liberator was produced in greater numbers than any other American combat aircraft, and was used by most of the Allied air forces in World War II. Designed as a heavy bomber, it served with distinction not only in that... The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, or Jug as it was known, was one of the main US Army Air Force (USAAF) fighters of World War II. The P-47 was a big, rugged, overbuilt aircraft that was effective in air combat but proved particularly useful as a fighter-bomber. ... The Royal Air Force (often abbreviated to RAF) is the air force branch of the British Armed Forces. ...

On 26 January in Operation Sankey, a Royal Marine force landed on the Island of Cheduba, which lies to the south of Ramree, to find that it was not occupied by the Japanese. On Ramree the Japanese garrison put up tenacious resistance. The British 4th, 26th, 36th and 71st Indian Brigades landed, with RAF and Royal Navy Marine units, and when the Marines outflanked a Japanese stronghold, the nine hundred defenders within it abandoned the base and marched to join a larger battalion of Japanese soldiers across the island. The route forced the Japanese to cross 16 kilometres of fetid mangrove swamps, and as they struggled through the thick forests the British forces encircled the area of the swampland. Trapped in deep mud-filled land, tropical diseases soon started afflicting the soldiers, but worse was the presence of huge numbers of scorpions, tropical mosquitoes and thousands of, on average, 4.6-metre-long (about 15 feet) saltwater crocodiles. January 26 is the 26th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... The Corps of Royal Marines, usually just known as The Royal Marines (RM) - or colloquially, The Green Berets[1] - are the United Kingdoms amphibious forces and a core component of the countrys Rapid Deployment Force. ... Above and below water view at the edge of the mangal Mangrove are woody trees or shrubs that grow in coastal habitats or mangal (Hogarth, 1999), for which the term mangrove swamp also would apply. ... Superfamilies Pseudochactoidea Buthoidea Chaeriloidea Chactoidea Iuroidea Scorpionoidea See the classification section for families. ... Genera See text. ... ‹The template below has been proposed for deletion. ...

Repeated calls by the British for the Japanese to surrender were ignored: the Marines holding the perimeter shot any Japanese attempting to escape, while within the swampland hundreds of soldiers died over the course of several days for lack of food or drinking water. Some, including naturalist Bruce Wright, claimed that the crocodiles attacked and ate numerous soldiers;

That night [of the 19 February 1945] was the most horrible that any member of the M.L. [marine launch] crews ever experienced. The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by the screams of wounded men crushed in the jaws of huge reptiles, and the blurred worrying sound of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left...Of about 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive.^[2]

However, these claims are disputed, and interviews with senior residents of Ramree deny that crocodiles attacked the beleaguered Japanese soldiers. When the British eventually moved in on the swamp, they found that of the nine hundred troops that originally fled into the swamp, only around twenty seriously wounded and weakened Japanese soldiers were still alive. In all, about 500 Japanese soldiers escaped from Ramree despite the intense blockade instituted to stop them.^[1]

References

• This article includes text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.

The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS for short) is the primary reference work for the basic facts about every ship ever used by the United States Navy. ...

Notes

1. ^  ^b DANFS: HMS Ameer
2. ^ massacre by crocodiles on Ramree Island