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To this new base was towed the third largest floating drydock in the world, a lumbering catamaran big enough to hold a 50,000-ton battleship. Land batteries were strategically placed. To Singapore went the only three 18-inch guns military experts now know of. Sixty feet long, weighing 150 tons apiece and firing a 3,333-lb. shell, they were much too heavy for the World War cruisers for which they were designed, lay about London dockyards until emplacements ready to hold them were built on the Strait of Johore. Since then they have cracked many ceilings in Singapore with the crash of their firing. It took 15 years of work and $100,000,000 to build the greatest fortress east of Suez, though in the meantime the dank heat and corroding tropic waters had rendered the giant floating dock almost useless. Therefore, a permanent stone drydock was necessary, for which much granite was ferried all the way from Scotland. On its broad bottom there is room for two full-size football fields.
Strategy. The British naval defense lines from Gibraltar to Darwin and from Hong Kong to Simonstown cross at Singapore. Hence the defense of Australia, New Zealand and British interests in the Far East is all based on the supposed "impregnability" of Singapore. That strong point of Empire is strategically buttressed by its position at the apex of the defensive triangle between the bases at Colombo and Darwin. But although Singapore can now accommodate a fleet of more than 100 warships, Britain has as yet no battleships to spare to be based permanently at Singapore. Darwin, in barren North Australia, is as yet little more than a fueling station. Nightmare of Britons Out East pictures Japan thrusting at Singapore or Darwin, or even Colombo, should the Japanese persuade easily persuadable Siam to permit them to cut a canal across the Malay Peninsula at Kra. To gain time for part of the Mediterranean fleet to reach Singapore in the event of such thrusts is the job of Britain's secondary base at Hong Kong and the small China Fleet stationed there. British strategists do not expect Hong Kong to be able to withstand a major Japanese attack for more than three weeks, but think that should be time enough.
Britain is not the only Western nation interested in the defensive potentiality of Singapore. Neither French Indo-China nor The Netherlands Indies, which now sells the Japanese Navy some of its fuel oil, would be able to withstand a Japanese naval attack. A defensive line, Saigon-Singapore-Surabaya, is thus a strategic likelihood. If there is a defensive alliance now in effect, however, it is not admitted.