Singapore is a compact city-state where futuristic gardens rise beside ancient temples, hawker centres serve some of Asia's finest street food, and a single efficient metro line connects rainforest reserves, colonial heritage and one of the world's most photographed waterfronts.
Singapore: Fort Siloso – Singapore’s Last Wartime Fortress
🏯 Singapore: Fort Siloso – Singapore’s Last Wartime Fortress
🔍 What Is Fort Siloso?
Fort Siloso is a decommissioned coastal artillery battery situated at the western tip of Sentosa Island, Singapore. It was one of 12 such batteries that collectively formed what the British military grandly called “Fortress Singapore” at the outset of the Second World War, and it saw direct action during the catastrophic Battle of Singapore in February 1942 — one of the most significant and, frankly, embarrassing defeats in British military history. Today, it stands as Singapore’s most intact surviving coastal fortification and one of the most genuinely absorbing military heritage sites anywhere in Southeast Asia.
🚇 Getting There: Sentosa Then and Now
One of the things we had wanted to do whilst we were in Singapore was to revisit Fort Siloso on Sentosa Island. I had been to the fort over 30 years previously and was curious to see how Sentosa itself had changed, given that the whole island had been transformed beyond recognition in the intervening decades into a resort development on a truly spectacular scale. We caught the MRT to Vivo City, the enormous shopping mall that sits right on the waterfront directly opposite Sentosa, and walked across the pedestrian bridge that links the mall to the island — which, it has to be said, rather sets the tone for the Sentosa experience these days.
When I visited Sentosa back in the early 1990s, it was essentially parkland: wide-open green spaces, a few modest attractions, and a genuine feeling that you were escaping the relentless intensity of Singapore proper. Today, the open spaces have largely been buried under a jungle of a very different kind — hotels, shopping malls, entertainment centres, a vast aquarium, and, of course, Universal Studios Singapore, which opened in 2010 and for a while made Sentosa the most visited attraction in the whole of Southeast Asia. The island was formally converted into an Integrated Resort in stages from 2006 onwards, following a government decision to develop it as a major leisure and tourism destination, and in the years before the pandemic it was pulling in upwards of 30 million visitors annually. It used to be an escape from hot and densely populated Singapore, but has now been absorbed into the amorphous urban mass. Even more than the city itself, Sentosa has no real character of its own, and it had been laid bare by the Covid-19 pandemic — there were dozens of shops and restaurants that had closed, and the ‘downtown’ area of the resort felt frankly deserted. We only saw a handful of people milling around the main thoroughfares, which on a development of this scale feels genuinely eerie. Apparently thousands of employees were laid off when the tourists stopped coming during 2020 and 2021, and it was evident that the recovery was painfully slow — let’s hope it happened before the hotels and buildings started to deteriorate and Sentosa became a ghost town. Anyway, we weren’t here for theme park thrills; we were here to visit a historic site hidden away at the very western tip of the island, Fort Siloso, which has been quietly getting on with telling one of the most important stories in Singapore’s modern history whilst everything around it turned into a giant funfair.
🌿 The Fort Siloso Skywalk
It wasn’t a particularly long walk from the centre of Resorts World Sentosa to reach the fort’s entrance, but it was genuinely, oppressively, tropically hot — Singapore sits just 1.3 degrees north of the equator, so there is no seasonal respite to speak of, and the humidity in September makes every ten minutes of outdoor walking feel like a moderately vigorous workout. We could have taken a bus or the Sentosa Express monorail to Beach Station and then picked up the cable car to Siloso Point, but instead we caught one of the free shuttle buses that circuit the island and asked to be dropped at Siloso Point, which saved us a fair amount of faff.
From the bus drop-off, there is a short walk to the fort entrance and, at that point, a choice. You can walk through the jungle along the ground-level path, or, as we did, take the Fort Siloso Skywalk — a 181-metre-long elevated walkway that carries you through the forest canopy en route to the fort entrance. The Skywalk, which was constructed as part of ongoing improvements to the site, can be reached via a flight of stairs or by lift if your knees are having an off day, and it sits approximately 36 metres — or 118 feet in old money — above the ground below. The views out over the harbour and towards the Southern Islands are genuinely lovely from up here, and the tree canopy is close enough that you can keep an eye out for the squirrels and birds that nest in the branches alongside you. The glass floor panels set into the walkway add a pleasing frisson of mild terror, provided you are not especially bothered by heights, and there are information panels positioned along the route explaining the history of the fort and the broader strategic importance of this particular corner of Singapore. It is well worth taking the Skywalk rather than the ground route — it is more interesting, better signposted, and considerably more scenic, even if the glass floor panels do make certain members of our party walk with slightly more purpose than usual.
📜 A Brief History of Fort Siloso
Fort Siloso has its origins in a period when the British Empire was busily fortifying its most important strategic assets across the globe, and Singapore — as the gateway to the Malayan Peninsula, the hub of regional trade, and home to a major Royal Navy dockyard — was about as important as it got. Located on what was then known as Pulau Blakang Mati, a name that translates from Malay as “death from behind” (which, with hindsight, has an unfortunate ring to it), the fort was constructed in 1878 as part of a trio of defensive batteries intended to protect the New Harbour — later renamed Keppel Harbour — and the surrounding straits. The other two fortifications in this initial scheme were Fort Connaught and Fort Serapong, both also positioned on Pulau Blakang Mati, and between them they were designed to make any naval assault on Singapore Harbour from the south effectively suicidal for any attacking fleet. The name “Siloso” is generally held to derive from a Malay word meaning “rock,” a likely reference to the rock outcrops that once projected from the sea at the western entrance to Keppel Harbour before being removed or submerged in later years.
Over the following decades, the fort was progressively upgraded as naval artillery technology evolved and the strategic demands of defending the British Empire’s eastern possessions became more sophisticated. By the time the Second World War broke out in Europe in September 1939, Fort Siloso was equipped with a formidable array of coastal guns ranging from 6-inch to 15-inch calibre pieces — the latter being genuinely enormous weapons capable of throwing a shell weighing nearly a tonne over distances of more than 40 kilometres. The popular post-war myth that the big guns at Singapore were all pointing the wrong way — permanently fixed to face south over the sea, unable to engage the Japanese forces who ultimately attacked from the north — is, incidentally, largely just that: a myth. Most of the guns at Fort Siloso and the other Sentosa batteries had full or near-full traverse, meaning they could indeed be rotated landwards, and were used in exactly that way during the battle. The real problems were a shortage of armour-piercing shells for the largest guns (which had been supplied primarily with ammunition designed for use against warships), a catastrophic failure of Allied military intelligence regarding the speed and direction of the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula, and a series of command decisions that, viewed through the comfortable retrospective clarity of hindsight, were somewhere between optimistic and catastrophic.
⚔️ The Battle for Singapore, February 1942
During the Battle for Singapore, which lasted from 8 to 15 February 1942 — just one week, against what British commanders had confidently expected would be months of resistance — Fort Siloso was one of the two busiest gun batteries in action on Pulau Blakang Mati, the other being Fort Connaught. The fort’s guns were turned landwards to engage the advancing Japanese forces, who had swept down the entire length of the Malay Peninsula in just 70 days following their initial landings at Kota Bharu in the far north of Malaya on 8 December 1941 — the same morning, just a few hours later in local time, as the attack on Pearl Harbor. In a particularly decisive piece of defensive demolition, the guns of Fort Siloso also destroyed the oil refineries on the nearby islands of Pulau Bukom and Pulau Sebarok, denying the advancing Japanese forces the enormous quantities of aviation fuel and refined petroleum products that the refineries contained and that would have been of substantial strategic value to them.
In the early hours of 14 February 1942 — Valentine’s Day, as it happened, though the mood on the island was not exactly romantic — with the fall of Singapore now inevitable and imminent, the battery at Fort Siloso was deliberately destroyed by its own garrison at 5 a.m. to prevent the Japanese from capturing and potentially using the guns. Singapore formally surrendered to Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita on 15 February 1942, with Lieutenant General Arthur Percival leading approximately 85,000 British, Australian, Indian and local forces into captivity in what Winston Churchill, not a man given to understatement, subsequently described as the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.
During the Japanese Occupation that followed and lasted until August 1945, Fort Siloso and the rest of Pulau Blakang Mati served as a prisoner-of-war camp, primarily holding captured Australian and British troops. After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August, the roles were neatly reversed: Fort Siloso became a prisoner-of-war camp for Japanese detainees awaiting processing by the returning Allied authorities.
🏛️ The Fort Complex: Exhibits and Displays
There are several buildings to explore within the Fort Siloso complex, each containing display panels, artefacts, and short films that collectively tell the history of the fort and its role during the Battle for Singapore. The exhibits are thoughtfully put together and go well beyond a straightforward military history, addressing the broader impact of the Japanese Occupation on the civilian population of Singapore in considerable depth. The experience of the city’s different ethnic communities during the occupation varied dramatically and in ways that are still sensitive today: the ethnic Chinese population, regarded by the Japanese military as politically suspect owing to their connections with Nationalist China and the ongoing Sino-Japanese war on the mainland, received by far the harshest treatment, and the displays address this directly and without euphemism. The Indian and Malay populations fared rather differently, with some Indian soldiers and civilians being recruited — under varying degrees of duress — into the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, and the Malay community occupying a more ambiguous position in the occupiers’ calculations. It is genuinely informative, properly contextualised history, rather than a sanitised heritage experience, and we found ourselves reading the panels far more carefully than we had expected to.
🔦 The Underground Tunnels
As well as exploring the fort’s buildings and outdoor gun emplacements, visitors can walk through the network of underground tunnels that were used to move personnel and ammunition safely around the fort complex during the conflict, out of sight and range of enemy fire. There are three tunnels — designated A, B and C — cut through the rock beneath the fort, and each contains additional exhibits including wax figures posed in period-appropriate scenarios, with a sound system providing a more immersive atmosphere as you walk through. The tunnels are cool, which after the heat above ground feels like an unexpected luxury, and the lighting is atmospheric without being so dim that you spend the whole time squinting at exhibit captions. One of our favourite displays anywhere in the fort complex was a collection of drawings and cartoons produced by prisoners of war held in camps across Singapore — most notably Changi Prison, which held around 85,000 Allied prisoners during the occupation — and on the infamous Thailand to Burma “Death Railway,” constructed between 1942 and 1943 using forced prisoner-of-war and civilian labour at the cost of an estimated 100,000 civilian and 12,000 to 16,000 Allied prisoner lives. The artwork is remarkable in its dark humour and observational sharpness — even in genuinely horrific circumstances, the human instinct to sketch, satirise and document clearly survived intact.
🔭 The Fire Director Tower and Coastal Emplacements
One of the trails around the fort winds its way down to the shoreline, where you get a genuinely striking view out across the entrance to Singapore Harbour and the Strait of Singapore beyond. Here stands the Fire Director Tower, a compact but imposing structure from which lookout officers would have kept watch through powerful telescopes and rangefinding equipment, scanning the horizon for the silhouettes of approaching enemy warships and relaying firing data to the gun crews below. At the base of the tower stands a 12-pounder quick-firing cannon, one of the lighter pieces in the fort’s extensive artillery inventory, positioned as it would have been during the fort’s operational years. Inside the tower itself, wax figures bearing binoculars peer out through the observation slits with the fixed, slightly unnerving concentration of people who have been standing in the same position for several decades, watching for a Japanese fleet that, as history recorded, came from entirely the wrong direction.
As you moved around Fort Siloso, the sheer range and variety of artillery on display was genuinely impressive, spanning from 19th-century muzzle-loading pieces through to mid-20th-century quick-firing guns and heavier coastal defence weapons. Some of the pieces stood alone as static exhibits, whilst others were set out in their original gun emplacements and arranged as they would have appeared during active service — breech mechanisms open, shells and charges laid out, crew stations marked — giving a real sense of the human activity that these positions would once have contained. The largest pieces, in particular, were on a scale that has to be seen to be properly appreciated.
🎭 The Surrender Chambers
Our final port of call was the Surrender Chambers, which had a somewhat peripatetic institutional history before finding their current home. The Surrender Chambers were first opened to the public in 1985 at a building that subsequently became the present-day Madame Tussauds Singapore, before being relocated to their current home within Fort Siloso in 2004, where they have been ever since and where, frankly, they make a good deal more contextual sense.
The centrepiece exhibits are wax-figure tableaux depicting the scenes of two surrenders of enormous historical significance, separated by almost exactly three and a half years: the British surrender to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, and the subsequent Japanese surrender to the Allied powers on 12 September 1945, when the formal capitulation of Japanese forces in the Southeast Asia theatre was signed in the Municipal Building in Singapore — now the City Hall — by General Seishiro Itagaki on behalf of Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi, and received by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South-East Asia. The wax figures are rather good, and the whole thing is considerably more affecting than you might expect from a collection of dummies in a concrete room.
The Surrender Chambers experience is anchored by a 15-minute multimedia presentation using lights, audio commentary and projected graphics that carries visitors through the full arc of the story: the British surrender in February 1942, the Japanese military’s subsequent conquests across the Asia Pacific region in the following months — reaching as far as Burma, the Solomon Islands and the coast of Australia — the long Allied counter-offensive from 1943 onwards, the dropping of atomic weapons on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, and finally the Japanese surrender. It is well-paced and punchy, covering an enormous amount of ground in a quarter of an hour without feeling rushed or superficial, and it left us in a rather more reflective mood than when we had arrived.
🚌 Heading Back: Beaches, Tanks and Marks & Spencer
From Fort Siloso we caught the free shuttle bus to Beach Station. Sentosa does have some perfectly pleasant-looking beaches, it has to be said — white sand, decent facilities, bars and restaurants in abundance. The slight issue is that they all look out across the bay towards the Southern Islands, which are largely covered in oil storage tanks, whilst the middle distance is occupied by what appeared to be several hundred container ships sitting at anchor waiting for berths in what is one of the world’s busiest ports. Hardly idyllic! Each to their own, but we were not exactly reaching for the sunscreen. The monorail from Beach Station deposited us neatly at the Vivo City shopping mall, where we headed — with the optimism that apparently only abandons you somewhere around the fourth decade of life — to Marks & Spencer to see if we could pick up some familiar snacks from home. One look at the prices put paid to that idea rather sharply, so we beat a hasty retreat and caught the MRT back to our hotel, concluding that Fort Siloso had been very much worth the trip, even if the duty-free Digestives were not.
Planning Your Visit to Fort Siloso
| 📍 Location | Siloso Point, Sentosa Island, Singapore 098996 | ||
| 🕖 Opening Times | Daily, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM | 🌐 Website | nss.com.sg/fort-siloso |
| 📞 Phone | +65 6275 0388 | info@nss.com.sg |
🎟️ Entry Fees
| Adults | Children (3–12) | Senior Citizens (60+) | Under 3s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Free | Free |
Fort Siloso is currently free to enter as part of Sentosa’s ongoing heritage offering.
🚌 Getting There
| 🚡 Sentosa Express | Board at VivoCity (HarbourFront MRT, NE1/CC29) and alight at Beach Station, then take the Sentosa Bus B or walk the Siloso Beach trail west toward Siloso Point. |
|---|---|
| 🚌 Sentosa Bus | Bus B runs between Beach Station and Siloso Beach, stopping close to the fort entrance. |
| 🚗 By Road | Drive via Sentosa Gateway; paid parking is available at Beach Car Park near Siloso Beach. |
| 🚶 On Foot | A shaded walking and cycling path runs along the north shore of Sentosa from Beach Station to Siloso Point, roughly 15–20 minutes on foot. |
| ℹ️ Notes | A Sentosa island entry fee applies to all visitors arriving by road (waived for those entering on foot via the Sentosa Boardwalk from HarbourFront). Check the Sentosa website for current charges. |
Download the Fort Siloso Brochure here.
Getting to and Around Singapore
Getting to Singapore
By Air: Singapore Changi Airport (SIN) is the main international gateway and, by several widely consulted indices, one of the finest airports in the world — consistently rated number one in the Skytrax World Airport Awards, which it has claimed a record-equalling number of times. It is served by more than 100 airlines connecting to some 100 countries, with direct long-haul services from London Heathrow on Singapore Airlines and British Airways taking approximately thirteen hours. Terminal 4 opened in 2017 and has become notable for its fully automated check-in and bag-drop procedures and its rather impressive Heritage Zone featuring a traditional Peranakan shophouse. Terminal 2 is currently undergoing a major expansion expected to complete in 2028.
By Train from Malaysia: The Woodlands Train Checkpoint connects Singapore to the Malaysian rail network via Johor Bahru, and the KTM intercity service operates from JB Sentral across the Causeway to Woodlands CIQ. A new Rapid Transit System link between Woodlands North and Bukit Chagar in Johor Bahru, long planned and much delayed, was expected to open by 2026 — check current schedules before travelling, as the timeline has shifted on multiple occasions. Most visitors arriving from Kuala Lumpur take the ETS train to JB Sentral and then a taxi or bus across the Causeway, which adds an hour or so to the journey but remains considerably cheaper than flying.
By Bus from Malaysia: Long-distance coach services from Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Ipoh and other Malaysian cities terminate at the Queen Street Bus Terminal or the Larkin Bus Terminal in Johor Bahru, from where onward connections cross the Causeway regularly.
By Ferry from Indonesia and Malaysia: The HarbourFront Ferry Terminal and Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal both handle ferry services from the Indonesian Riau Islands — including Batam and Bintan, both popular weekend destinations for Singapore residents — as well as from Tanjung Belungkor in Malaysia’s Johor state. Crossings from Batam take approximately 45 minutes; from Bintan, around one hour.
Getting Around
MRT (Mass Rapid Transit): The MRT is the single most useful thing in Singapore for getting around, and it is clean, punctual, air-conditioned and blissfully cheap in a city where almost everything else is expensive. The network currently covers six lines with a total of 133 stations, connecting the airport, the CBD, Orchard Road, the cultural districts and the northern, eastern and western suburbs. A journey from Changi Airport to Orchard Road costs around S$2.50 on an EZ-Link card, takes about fifty minutes and involves no stress whatsoever. Trains run from approximately 5:30 AM to midnight, with frequencies of three to five minutes at peak times.
- Website: smrt.com.sg
- Fare: From S$0.92 per ride (distance-based); EZ-Link card (S$12 including S$7 stored value) available at all stations
Bus: The public bus network is extensive and covers areas the MRT doesn’t, operated by SBS Transit and SMRT Buses. The same EZ-Link card works across both systems, and the myTransport.SG app provides real-time arrival information and journey planning.
Grab: The dominant ride-hailing app in Southeast Asia operates throughout Singapore and is reliable, quick and considerably more convenient than flagging down a taxi, with fares agreed upfront. Surge pricing applies during peak times but is clearly displayed before you confirm.
Taxis: Metered taxis are available throughout the city and at all major hotels, shopping centres and transport hubs. The various surcharges — for peak hours, late nights, booking fees and CBD zones — can add substantially to the meter fare, so checking the total upfront via Grab or ComfortDelGro’s app is advisable.
SBS Transit and NETS FlashPay Bikes: Singapore’s public bike-sharing schemes, including Anywheel and Moovit, operate across the island, and the network of dedicated cycling paths connecting many of the parks and residential areas is expanding. The East Coast Parkway in particular offers a lovely flat route along the seafront.
Driving: Rental cars are available at the airport and various locations across the city, but Singapore’s Electronic Road Pricing system — a congestion charge applied to vehicles entering the CBD and expressways during peak hours — combined with some of the most expensive petrol prices in Asia and parking costs that will make your eyes water makes driving within the city considerably more hassle than it’s worth. For day trips across the Causeway to Johor Bahru or further into Malaysia, a rental car makes considerably more sense.
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