Kranji War Cemetery 3.47

The Kranji War Cemetery is located in Kranji, Singapore, and is the final resting place for Allied soldiers who perished during the Battle of Singapore and the subsequent Japanese occupation of the island from 1942–1945 and in other parts of Southeast Asia during World War II.There are 4,461 World War II casualties buried or commemorated at this cemetery, of which more than 850 of these are unidentified. There are 64 World War I headstones, of which three commemorate casualties known to have been buried elsewhere but whose graves could not be found on concentration.Adjacent to the War Cemetery is the Kranji Military Cemetery, also administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.HistoryThe 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).