Did you know that part of WWII was fought in the Gulf of Mexico? Nazi shipwrecks in the Gulf show just how close the war came to Louisiana.

To most Americans, WWII was fought across the pond, and only really saw any action in the states when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Turns out, the ghostly shipwrecks of Nazi U-boats in the Gulf prove that the war came a lot closer to home than we previously thought.

A recent exploration of the remains of a Nazi U-boat, and one of the freighters it sank, SS Robert E. Lee, was led by the man who discovered the Titanic.

“Everyone thought the war was fought over there, as they would say,” said Dr. Bob Ballard, the president of the Ocean Exploration Trust, speaking aboard the exploration vessel Nautilus. “But Hitler brought the war to our doorstep.”

But why haven't we heard more on this until now?

“And there’s a very good reason,” said Richie Kohler, a renowned diver and shipwreck historian participating in the expedition. “The United States government didn’t want us to know. They didn’t want us to know how Germany was taking us to task, how successful these U-boats were.”

There's a total of 56 ships at the bottom of the Gulf that are believed to have been sunk by Nazi U-boats. Americans sunk only one U-boat in the Gulf.

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