During World War II, US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in the Moroccan city of Casablanca in 1943. The meeting, which started on January 14, concluded 11 days later with a declaration calling on Germany to surrender unconditionally
Casablanca & the Soviets
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin who was invited couldn’t attend the conference as his army was battling to hold Stalingrad, a turning point in the war between USSR and Germany. While the Western Allies harped on unconditional surrender, Stalin had emphasised in his radio propaganda that he was fighting not against the German people but against “the Hitlerites”
This led German General Claus von Stauffenberg and others plotting against Hitler to believe they might get a better peace deal with USSR. But they abandoned “such wishful thinking” when in October 1943, the Soviets formally adhered to the Casablanca declaration
‘Here’s looking at you, kid’
A year earlier, in 1942, the acclaimed film Casablanca was released. Set during World War II in the town which was then under French Vichy, the romantic drama starred superstars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The Vichy government was a puppet state of Nazi Germany
First US Prez to fly on a plane
Roosevelt became the first US President to fly on an plane when he flew 8,000 km across the Atlantic to attend the Casablanca Conference. When he again flew abroad to Yalta in 1945, he had to wear oxygen masks as the plane did not have a pressurised cabin