Germany's declaration of war on the United States on December 11, 1941 brought the Battle of the Atlantic to America's doorstep. By January 1942, burning Allied merchant ships could be seen from North Carolina beaches, and over the next three years 81 merchant ships, nine Allied naval vessels, and five U-boats were lost off coastal Virginia and North Carolina. This concentrated area of naval conflict became a World War II battlefield where Hitler's Germany reached America's shores, and today coastal Virginia and North Carolina form a uniquely accessible underwater museum and memorial to the Battle of the Atlantic. Since 2008, NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and its partners have documented and surveyed this collection of Allied and German vessels in order to protect these fragile historic resources and preserve the memory of the Allied servicemen and U.S. merchant mariners who fought there. Among the losses were the merchant freighter City of Atlanta, sunk by U-123 with 43 of 46 crewmen lost; the tanker Dixie Arrow, sunk in less than a minute by U-71 with 22 of 33 crewmembers surviving; the British trawler HMT Bedfordshire, sunk by U-558 off Cape Lookout with all 37 crewmembers lost; and the German U-701, which laid a minefield at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay during its last cruise and sank four ships while damaging five others.