The commonly bandied notion that there was a tunnel connecting Sentosa with Singapore’s southern district in Labrador, is a myth that could well have been blown to ridiculous length!
“There never was a tunnel and most of it is neighbourhood myth” declared Professor Brian Farrell head of the National University of Singapore (NUS) History Department to The Independent.
Professor Farrell’s comments follows inquiries from the Independent along with widespread unsubstantiated rumours following television documentaries and commentaries over the years that a secret tunnel had existed. A Channel News Asia (CAN) telecast a few years laid open the possibility that a secret may have existed and offered no real evidence and did not say who could have had built the tunnel and for what purpose.
For years reports rumours have revolved that the secret tunnel had existed to ferry and conceal either British and Japanese troops during the heat of World War II and its aftermath. Though a tunnel may have been an excellent concealment place, building it is an arduous task a feat that simply may not have possible for the technologies that had existed during World War II.
For one, it would have exacted enormous outlays of finance and engineering expertise, which neither the weary British nor Japanese would have any stomach for, because of the huge sacrifices needed for the project. Secondly, if it bears out that the menacing Japanese had actually invaded from the north and not the south as how the British have been thinking all along, the construction of the tunnel would have rusted to waste and heaped on by weeds and moss that could never ever be easily cleaned out.
Nor were there any deeply moving strategic reasons to build a tunnel.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had used underground bunkers in central London to hold cabinet meetings to deliberate on military campaigns during World War II. That led the Germans to speculate intensely as to from where, Churchill was making his inspirational war speeches. His underground bunkers remained a very closely guarded secret until 1986 when it was opened to the public for visiting and viewing.
Such an attribution cannot be said of the Labrador Tunnel as none had ever existed in any manner or form for it to tip the scales of the war in favour of the Allies. y
History’s saving grace is to leave it as a footnote of some wild unfettered imagination triggered from the depths of some idle thoughts!