History
The Kranji area was previously a military camp. At the time of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, the area was in use as an ammunition magazine. After the fall of Singapore, the Japanese established a prisoner-of-war camp at Kranji and a hospital nearby at Woodlands. After the war, In 1946, it was decided that Kranji would be designated as Singapore's War Cemetery so the small cemetery at Kranji was developed into a permanent war cemetery and subsequently war graves from Buona Vista, Changi, and other cemeteries were removed and re-interred at Kranji. .
The site was expanded by the concentration of graves from surrounding areas and from Saigon in then-French Indochina (now Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam).
Colin St Clair Oakes designed the Singapore Memorial and the War Cemetery, and the memorial was unveiled on 2 March 1957 by Sir Robert Black, who was a former a prisoner of war of the Japanese and at the time of the unveiling was then the Governor and Commander-in-Chief, Singapore.
Read more about this topic: Kranji War Cemetery
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“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
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—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)