Advance planning between the Glen Line and Admiralty remains a suspicion rather than a proven arrangement. The merchant hulls had useful structural hard points and were converted with remarkable speed once requisitioned. Their layout does not look optimized for an armed merchant cruiser, making a landing-ship role a plausible alternative wartime purpose. A close commercial relationship with the Admiralty would have made it possible to consider such features before war. The surviving evidence does not establish a secret agreement, so this remains a carefully bounded inference from design and timing.
Notable Point · 24:20-25:22
Were the Glen ships designed with wartime conversion in mind?
The hull layout and fast conversion raise a cautious hypothesis that the Glen Line and Admiralty anticipated an amphibious role in a future war with Japan.