History
Given its position in the western Pacific, Singapore had long been recognised as being strategically important for the Royal Navy in order to counter the growing influence of the Japanese, who were regarded as being the logical threat to Britain’s interests in the Far East and the Pacific. To counter this, the Admiralty devised the Singapore strategy, which required a well equipped naval base. Accordingly, the Singapore Naval Base was constructed on the north shore of Singapore Island. The base, and its associated defences, required a large British military presence on the island.
Fort Canning was used by the British army as their headquarters in Singapore, with a number of buildings built for this purpose in the 1920s. However, the lack of a headquarters combining all three services present in Singapore - the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force - was appreciated in 1936 by the then Colonel Arthur Percival, the Chief of Staff to General Dobbie, 'General Officer Commanding, Malaya'. To remedy this, a Combined Operations Headquarters was proposed for Fort Canning.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)