15 Years Ago

I am pleased that KTB #11 was the last of the 'legal size' KTB format. We were still pursuing rumors of the UBoats carrying uranium to Japan in the closing months of the war. There was quite a bit pertaining to Gunther Prien and his conversation with OTTO KRETSCHMER (122-+-1985) prior to their departure for the patrol that was to be their last in March of 1941. This covered almost the entire four pages of this KTB.
Right, KTB #11 was only four pages long and done on that old manual typewriter - and with no photos.

10 Years Ago

In KTB #46 I happily reported that my son SEAN PATRICK COOPER (V2-1987) was born. Okay, so we are a little behind with the 'Ten Years Ago' but this was a very important day for me. We had more memories of our First Annual Convention which was in Key Largo. We continued to look into the strange disappearance of the giant French submarine SURCOUF and we divulged the classified (SECRET in the USA; MOST SECRET in the British Empire) letter to Admiral Potts from RADM H. C. Train, director of Naval Intelligence and the letter told how the news of the loss of SURCOUF should be reported and controlled. We were still looking for information on Aktion FEUERLAND but until the last few years, have had little luck. There was information about the so-called 'short signal' which the Americans called the BETA signal and the Brits called it the 'B-BAR' signal.

We received a lot of information from Kplt. HORST DEGEN (116-+-1985) about him and his boat. KTB #46 was only 16 pages long and still done on that old manual typewriter. Compare it to this computer-set KTB of 40 pages; & at the time of KTB #46, SHARKHUNTERS consisted of less than 400 Members - compared to 5,900 today.

5 Years Ago

The front cover of KTB #94 showed that religion is coming back to the collapsed Soviet Union with great vigor. The cover photo of the priests coming to board Russian ships was supplied by the Chief of Press of the Russian Navy, Capt. VALERI NOVIKOV (2552 1992). We asked for a Member (or Members) to write a Technical Column. To date, that has not happened but we would like to see it take place. We announced that there were SHARKHUNTERS Members in 40 countries (today there are Members in 70 countries). There was a little more on Operation 'URSULA', the top-secret mission of German U-boats into Spanish waters in 1936 to support the Franco regime.

While we were in Russia, I was given a quote that said "I have met the Russian people and flnd them very friendly.1y The reason this quote was given to me is that it was spoken by another guy named Cooper more than a century ago when my ancestor James Fenimore Cooper visited there. I had no idea that he and his writings were so popular in Russia until that time. We covered the sad situation in which former Member Will Henricks behaved so badly at our German convention that we had to put him out of the convention and also out of SHARK-HUNTERS all together. We continued to run the Senate report in which the US Senate was trying to get the two top men of Standard Oil (today known as Exxon) to stop selling fuel to the Germans, Italians and Japanese. They had a lot of reasons why they could not stop these sales - I suspect that massive profits were not the least of these reasons.

We reported that both USS HARDER and USS CAPELIN were sunk by an American destroyer. (Before anyone goes nuts over that revelation, USS STEWART was captured in a repair dock at Surabaya (Java) by Japanese ground forces and converted to I.J.N. use). KTB #94 was only 28 pages long but it was done by Pen Harms and looked sharp.