Imbiah Battery

location

Located beside Sentosa Mega Adventure Park
Get Directions
Fort Siloso was built on Mount Siloso from 1878 to defend the western entrance of Keppel Harbour and the straits surrounding Singapore. Designed by Colonial Engineer Henry McCallum, the fort features artillery and antiaircraft emplacements, machine gun and searchlight posts, barracks, casemates, underground magazines, and tunnels. The coolies working on the fort had to use the parbuckling system to haul heavy equipment up the hill, as there was no existing road.

The first artillery emplacements consisted of three 7-inch rifle muzzle loading guns and two 6-inch quick-firing guns housed in earthwork batteries. However, these guns became inadequate to deal with the threat of ironclad warships. By the 1890s, breech-loading guns armed with armour-piercing shells were added for faster fire rate. The gun array would undergo several upgrades until the 1930s.

While initially positioned to repel seaborne assaults from the south, the batteries of Fort Siloso were turned around during World War II when the Japanese invasion arrived from the north. Despite heavy bombing, the batteries continued to fire on Japanese forces until being destroyed on the eve of the fall of Singapore to deny their use by the Japanese.

After the British Army phased out fixed coastal artillery defences in 1957, the guns of Fort Siloso and other forts on Blakang Mati became non-operational. In February 2022, Fort Siloso was designated a National Monument.