Johore Battery 2.38

The Johore Battery was a coastal artillery battery located in Changi, on the eastern side of Singapore. It consisted of three large BL 15-inch Mk I naval guns installed on land by the British government in the late 1930s to defend the approaching path to the Naval Base located at Sembawang from an attacking enemy naval force.HistoryFive 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, named after the Sultan of Johore who gave King George V a royal gift of UK £500,000 for his Silver Jubilee in 1935; of which £400,000 was used by the British government to install the three large naval guns in Changi. The battery, 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).