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.
Read more about this topic: The Battle Box
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)