Tuesday Submarine Tidbits 12 May 15

Category:  Sweden's Competition for Headline Submarine News

We had commented this past October on Sweden's primary motive for its headline, Russian submarine scare.

"It is more likely, in our experience, that a much needed Swedish Military training excercise, a PR recruiting effort, or a combination of both, have been conducted with renewed world attention.  And so we hope."

Today, 12 May 2015, comes this news:  Swedish peace group uses gay sailor sign to fend off Russian submarines 
 

"The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) has created the 'The Singing Sailor Underwater Defence System' - a small waterproof box with a neon sign of a gyrating topless sailor wearing a pair of skimpy briefs, which transmits the words "this way if you are gay" in morse code through the water.

Below the sailor are neon letters which read "Welcome to Sweden - gay since 1944". 1944 was the year that homosexuality was legalised in Sweden, 23 years before it was made legal in the UK.

SPAS, the world's oldest peace organisation, says the 'Singing Sailor' is a much more cost-effective method of protecting against Russian submarines than the Swedish navy's ongoing series of unsuccessful patrols and searches. SPAS hopes the cheeky device will scare off any vessels from Russia, a nation which has much less tolerant views of homosexuality than Sweden. A 2013 survey found that 74 per cent of Russians thought homosexuality should not be accepted by society."

Category:  WWII Secret

(color emphasis added)
During World War II, troops were stationed in the basement [of NYC's Grand Central Station]. If a person was to wander in there by accident the orders were that he or she would be interned there for the rest of the war. If that person happened to be holding something like a bucket of sand, the orders were to shoot that person on sight.  ...  Adolf Hitler sent spies in two submarines to sabotage the basement during World War II, but they were caught before reaching it. Two were executed and two were imprisoned.  - source

More: Operation Pastorius

Read the full article (only excerpts follow):

"Recruited for Operation Pastorius were eight German residents who had lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States. All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany.

On the night of 12 June 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202, landed at Amagansett, New York. ... A massive manhunt for the German agents was conducted; however, they did not know where exactly the Germans were going. ... The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on 16 June 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine. ...

Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on 2 July 1942 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. ...  The trial for the eight defendants ended on 1 August 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others. The others were executed on 8 August 1942."

Submarines are always silent and strange.