Eighty years ago, in January 1943, President Franklin D Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for one of the key summits of World War II in Casablanca, in what was then French Morocco. There the Allied leaders, accompanied by their military chiefs of staff, resolved a set of strategic issues that would determine the course of the war in the Mediterranean for the rest of 1943. They also took the big decision to start planning for a cross-Channel invasion of northern France in the spring of 1944.
Casablanca had been captured, or liberated, from French Vichy control in a set of landings forming part of Operation Torch (see box opposite) in November 1942. These momentous events provide the backdrop for the immensely successful feature film Casablanca, released by Warner Brothers in North America just as the summit in that city came to an end.
A poll found that most Americans had no idea where Casablanca was nor why their President had gone there for a summit with Churchill. The movie Casablanca is set in late 1941, before Pearl Harbor, when America was still neutral. It helped put the city on the map and gave audiences in both the US and the UK some idea of the atmosphere of the place that preceded the successful landing of their troops.
Excavating the CA Archive: Sutton Hoo revisited