the area's shoreline. In light of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the expansion of the military (especially the navy) of the Empire of Japan during the 1930s (when there was a worry by the USA and the UK about Japan's increasing aggressiveness and the country's rapid pace of militarization and desire to conquer most of Asia), the British government conducted a general review of the coastal defences in Singapore and showed that Pasir Panjang Beach would be an easy place for an enemy military force to land ashore. As a result, the surrounding land was taken over by the British colonial government and was redeveloped for an expansion of Pasir Panjang Fort. Machine-gun emplacements, artillery-gun casemates and barbed-wire entanglements were built and set up together with a fence running along the entire length of the beach. The artillery and coastal-defence guns facing the sea were also upgraded, such as the installation of two six-inch naval guns weighing 37 tonnes each, which could fire 102 lb shells up to a range of 10 miles, together with numerous searchlights that faced the sea to prevent an enemy naval force to conduct a night-time landing-and-invading operation and to seek out any enemy naval force approaching under the cover of darkness. The British military strove to make the beach an element of a so-called "impenetrable fortress" as part of their strategy to turn Singapore into a powerful military base (which was believed by the British government to be akin to a "Gibraltar of the East") in Southeast Asia to protect the UK's colonial interests and territories in the surrounding region that would be shown by making it extremely difficult and costly (in manpower and related resources) for an invading enemy force to conquer Singapore and would have proven very useful in fending off an enemy naval force trying to land troops on the southern shorelines of Singapore. Alas, there was not much combat action in the area of Pasir Panjang Beach during the Second World War. When Japanese military forces attacked their way into Singapore after taking over the whole of British Malaya by 1942, they invaded from the northern coast of mainland Singapore (along the Straits of Johor that marks the border between present-day Malaysia and Singapore) instead of the southern coast where the British military had initially expected. No Japanese naval vessels went past the southern coast of Singapore at all. As