On Fri, 18 May 2018 22:32:57 -0400, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
wrote:
>This is - of course - a transparent stratagem, but it has at least
>fictional precedent . . .

There was also a Lord Darcy story in which the Polish did this to get armed
light cruisers out of the Baltic and into the Atlantic where they could
harass Anglo-French shipping. It relied on the difference between two
treaties imposed on them after a general war; the Anglo-French and
Scandinavians had a strong 'stop and frisk' clause, while the Greeks did
not. So, the Polish sent the hull out of the Baltic as an innocent
freighter, it worked its way around to the Black Sea, where it took on its
guns as cargo (The Anglo-French and Scandinavians would have confiscated
them in the Baltic/North Sea; the Greeks wouldn't - as long as the ship
isn't visibly armed), and then it went down to Abidjan in the Ashanti
Empire in Africa, where the guns would be mounted.