A joke about secret submarine construction leads to one plausible way the Royal Navy could conceal a small program. Major British yards had subsidiaries around the empire, and some colonial settings imposed tighter information controls than Britain itself. That network might have allowed a few ships to be built with less public visibility. The claim remains limited: it could provide a modest wartime advantage, but could not conceal hundreds of submarines.
Notable Point · 1:18:04-1:18:50
Could the Royal Navy conceal submarine construction overseas?
Imperial subsidiaries could plausibly hide a limited British submarine program, but not a mass fleet on the scale imagined for Germany.