Anfa 1943: the Casablanca conference that scripted the end of the war

By Laura Whitfield

In January 1943, in Casablanca’s quiet Anfa suburb, the leaders of the free world sat down and decided how the Second World War would end — before the ending was in sight. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill gave the war its terms: nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.

Anfa in images

The setting

The war was turning. In the east, the German army was dying at Stalingrad; in the Pacific, Midway had checked the Japanese tide; and in North Africa, two months after the Anglo-American landings of Operation Torch in November 1942, Allied armies were closing on Tunisia. The initiative, for the first time since September 1939, belonged to the democracies — and Casablanca, the furthest reach of the Allied advance, was the place secure and symbolic enough to bring both leaders together.

Roosevelt’s journey alone made the meeting historic: leaving Washington in secret — the press was told of a Florida inspection tour — he flew from Miami across the Atlantic, the first sitting American president to leave the country in wartime. He and Churchill settled at the Anfa Hotel, under the codename SYMBOL, for the conference of January 14–24, 1943. Joseph Stalin, invited, declined: Stalingrad required him in Moscow. And in a gesture Casablanca has never forgotten, Sultan Muhammad V was received by the two leaders — and heard Roosevelt speak warmly of Morocco’s aspirations to independence.

There was an older thread binding Roosevelt to Casablanca too. In 1777, Sultan Mohammed III opened Morocco’s ports to American ships — the first recognition of the new American republic by any foreign sovereign. The 1786 Treaty of Peace and Friendship remains America’s longest unbroken treaty relationship; the alliance endures, Morocco a major non-NATO ally. The Americans came to Casablanca in 1943 on more than a century and a half of friendship.

The decisions

The most far-reaching decision came on the last day, January 24, 1943. Roosevelt declared the Allies would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan — the Casablanca Declaration. It did not mean, he added, the destruction of the German, Italian, or Japanese peoples, but the destruction of the philosophies in those countries based on conquest and the subjugation of other peoples. Churchill, not forewarned, backed him on the spot — closing the door on negotiated peace, and on any future claim, as after 1918, of betrayal rather than defeat.

The military decisions were the machinery behind the doctrine. Against Marshall’s plea for a 1943 landing in France, Churchill’s argument prevailed: strike Sicily first — Operation Husky, launched in July 1943 — then the Italian mainland, to knock Italy out of the war. The bombing of Germany was to be intensified; sinking U-boats became the Allies’ first priority; and the advance on Japan through the central Pacific was endorsed, setting the island-hopping campaign in motion.

Then there was the French question — the conference’s delicate subplot. Two men claimed to speak for liberated France: Charles de Gaulle, the Free French leader, and Henri Giraud, the Americans’ man in North Africa. Days of coaxing produced, on January 24, the forced handshake on the hotel terrace — performed once for the cameras, then, too fast, performed again. No agreement on French leadership was reached. The handshake was a photograph, not a settlement — but it kept the French war effort from splitting in two.

The legacy