Meeting in French Morocco while Stalin, tied down at Stalingrad, stayed away, Roosevelt and Churchill spent ten days mapping Allied strategy for 1943. Their most consequential decision, announced at the conference's close, was the demand for unconditional surrender from Germany, Italy, and Japan, a policy meant to reassure Stalin of Western resolve but one that later drew criticism for potentially prolonging the war.
The Casablanca Conference, code-named Symbol, brought Roosevelt and Churchill together at the Anfa Hotel starting January 14, 1943, just weeks after the Allied invasion of North Africa had succeeded. Stalin was invited but declined, citing the ongoing Battle of Stalingrad, a battle that would end in Soviet victory just weeks later.
Over ten days, the two leaders and their military staffs hashed out the next phase of the war: an invasion of Sicily rather than an immediate cross-Channel assault into France, continued strategic bombing of Germany, and increased support for China against Japan. General Charles de Gaulle and General Henri Giraud, rival leaders of the French resistance movements, were also summoned and pressured into an uneasy public handshake for photographers.
The conference's defining legacy was Roosevelt's declaration, seemingly improvised in a press conference but actually pre-agreed with Churchill, that the Allies would accept nothing short of the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Historians still debate whether this hardened Axis resistance and lengthened the war, but at the time it served its purpose: proving to a skeptical Stalin that his Western allies would not seek a separate peace.
Key people: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle