Casablanca Conference Morocco January 14 24 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 (CCS) 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.One major issue was the opening of a second front in France, something that Stalin had long pressed for. General George C. Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, wanted to land troops in France as soon as possible, but the CCS decided instead to 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 was also assessed, and antisubmarine warfare was discussed at length. Other topics for deliberation included material assistance to Russia and China, and the campaign against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. On the final day of the conference, Roosevelt and Churchill announced their decision to pursue the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, which was the most far-reaching policy decision made at Casablanca. This, in Roosevelt's words, did not "mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it [did] mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people."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. Reports, memorandums, position papers, and maps were prepared by the CCS for the conferences, and minutes were taken at the accompanying CCS meetings. The Casablanca documents also contain the minutes from the Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings held at the conference. Taken together, these documents address virtually every policy and strategy issue of the war, from troop deployments, to debates about the location and timing of key Allied offensives, to discussions about postwar occupation boundaries. Thus, they record the early years of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and serve as an indispensable primary source on the planning and conduct of World War II.