Open tothe public Yes, for 24 hours. | Built In 1939 | |
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Condition Originals demolished, now replaced with replicas. In use Early to middle part of February in 1942 Demolished Middle of February in 1942 Address 27 Cosford Rd, Singapore 499549 Similar Changi Museum, Fort Pasir Panjang, Fort Siloso, Kranji War Memorial, Reflections at Bukit Chandu | ||
Panoramic view of johore battery
The Johore Battery was a coastal-type artillery battery in Changi located at the eastern part of Singapore. It consisted of a set of three large BL 15-inch Mk. I naval guns installed on land by the British government in the second-half part of the 1930s to defend the approaching path to the Naval Base located at Sembawang from an enemy naval force in a war.
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Johore battery project f pos
History
Five 15–inch guns were installed in Singapore by the British government before 1940, with three in Changi and two in Buona Vista. The three guns in Changi formed the Johore Battery. It was named as the Johore Battery because the Sultan of Johore gave King George V of the UK £500,000 for his Silver Jubilee in 1935, of which £400,000 of the total sum of the royal gift was used by the British government to install the three gigantic naval guns in Changi, which, in 1942, was used in the artillery bombardment of Johor Bahru, which at that time was under Japanese military occupation after the British-commanded troops were forced to retreat from British Malaya to Singapore.
Built by the British government in 1939 for the naval defence of Singapore (in particular,to defend Singapore from an aggressive Imperial Japan, which had possessed a strong and a powerful navy by the later part of the 1930s and was expanding deeper and deeper into China), the Johore Battery is a large gun emplacement site consisting of a labyrinth of underground tunnels. These tunnels were used to store ammunition for the three 15-inch guns (most of which were of the armour-piercing (AP) type rather than the high-explosive (HE) type as these naval guns were intended to be employed against heavily-armoured enemy warships).
These naval guns were the largest installed on land outside Britain during World War II. They were all destroyed before the official surrender of the British Army on the 15th of February in 1942 to the conquering Imperial Japanese military and the related tunnels (for the storage of the ammunition for the guns and gun-crew quarters) were sealed up after the war. The location remained a largely-unknown secret until the Singapore Prisons Department re-discovered them by chance in April 1991.
Today, a replica of the large gun and a dummy 15-inch shell are located at the former site of the Johore Battery, along with a newly-opened restaurant located just beside.