The Casablanca Conference January 1943

During the first month of 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston S. Churchill met at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca in French Morocco for a ten-day conference to plan the next stages of the war against the Axis. Accompanied by the French generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, the two leaders and the Combined Chiefs of Staff mapped out the grand strategy for both the European and the Pacific theaters. (Soviet premier Joseph Stalin was invited but unable to attend because of the ongoing Battle of Stalingrad.) Held just two months after the Anglo- American landings in French North Africa and known as the Casablanca Conference, the meeting lasted from January 14 to 24 and addressed several key issues of the conflict, such as the opening of a second front in France (the decision was made at Casablanca to first invade Sicily and then the Italian mainland in order to drive Italy out of the war), the German U-boat threat on convoys in the Atlantic, and Roosevelt and Churchill's decision to pursue the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. Casablanca was one in a series of high-level conferences held by the US and British leaders in Washington, DC; Morocco; Quebec; Cairo; Tehran; Malta; Yalta; and Potsdam to formulate the Allied grand strategy. At the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, the Soviet leader Stalin was also in attendance and played an important role. ISBN: 9780160938931 (Mobi) and ISBN: 9780160938948 (PDF) are companion formats for this title and also available for free download from http://bookstore.gpo.gov The World War II Inter-Allied Conferences digital series is also available for free download and include these products: Arcadia Conference (Washington, DC), December 24, 1941–January 14, 1942: ISBN 9780160938870 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160938863 (ePub); ISBN 9780160938887 (PDF) Post-Arcadia Conference (Washington, DC), January 23–May 19, 1942: ISBN 9780160938900 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160938894 (ePub); ISBN 9780160938917 (PDF) Trident Conference (Washington, DC), May 12–25, 1943: ISBN 978016-0938795 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160938788 (ePub); ISBN 9780160938801 (PDF) Quadrant Conference (Quebec City, Canada), August 14–24, 1943: ISBN 9780160938825 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160938818 (ePub); ISBN 9780160938832 (PDF) Sextant Conference (Cairo, Egypt), Eureka Conference (Tehran, Iran), and the Second Cairo Conference (Egypt), November 22–December 7, 1943: ISBN 9780160938856 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160938849 (ePub); ISBN 9780160939266 (PDF) Octagon Conference (Quebec City, Canada), September 12–16, 1944: ISBN 9780160939259 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160939273 (ePub); ISBN 9780160939280 (PDF) Argonaut Conference (Malta and Yalta, Soviet Union), January 30–February 11, 1945: ISBN 9780160939303 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160939297 (ePub); ISBN 9780160939242 (PDF) Terminal Conference (Potsdam, Germany), July 17–August 2, 1945: ISBN 9780160939235 (Mobi); ISBN 9780160939310 (ePub); ISBN 9780160939327 (PDF)