Today, Casablanca is a big skyscraper-ed city, the westernmost and eighth-largest in the Arab world. Eight decades ago, along with the rest of Morocco, it was a French colonial possession. With the fall of France to the Germans in June 1940, it became part of unoccupied or Vichy France: technically neutral but administered with a decidedly pro-Axis tilt. Operation TORCH, the combined British-American landings in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria in November 1942, put Casablanca back into the Allied column for the rest of the war’s duration.
That same year, Hollywood offered its version of Casablanca in the Michael Curtiz film of the same name, starring Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, the cynical (but not too cynical) proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, and Ingrid Bergman at her most winsome as Rick’s lost love, Ilsa Lund. Casablanca was filmed almost entirely on the back lot in Los Angeles between May and August of 1942, replete with pasteboard minaret, casbah, souk, and, in the set for Rick’s Café, what became one of the most famous nightclub interiors in movie history. The story takes place in the days just before Pearl Harbor, and with its “Wake up America before it’s too late” and “Yes, there really are things worth fighting for” themes wrapped around a love story, the film played up America’s newfound resolve that the time had come to get into the fight and win. Casablanca previewed in New York in December and was released in January 1943, the same month as the Casablanca Conference (code-named SYMBOL) of January 14 to 24. SYMBOL’s official purpose was to plot the Allied strategy toward final victory, which by 1943 looked probable though not yet certain. Its unofficial purpose was to affirm the special relationship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
At that moment Britain fielded a larger fighting force than America’s, and the relationship between the British and American leaders still had a sense of equal partnership. Both men looked forward to meeting again. In his best cloak-and-dagger style, Roosevelt left Washington in secret, traveling by Pan Am Clipper to South America, then across the Atlantic to British West Africa, and finally by military aircraft on to Morocco. Churchill flew from England in one hop in his specially adapted B-24 Liberator. They rendezvoused with their military advisors at the Anfa Hotel in suburban Casablanca, surrounded by suitable villas large enough to accommodate key guests. The streamlined art-deco structure, now condos, still stands today.
As the purpose of the conference was not to discuss post-war settlements but near-term military strategy, neither State Department nor Foreign Office representatives were present. Nor was Joseph Stalin, the ghost at the feast. Stalin had declined the invitation, giving the battle for Stalingrad as his excuse, though the real reason probably had as much to do with the dictator’s paranoia over security. He feared flying and would meet his “allies” only on Soviet soil or soil close to it, as in Tehran that December. Though superfluous in western theaters of war, Stalin was in one sense the point of it all. TORCH was intended to buttress Soviet resolve in the East with proof that the Anglo-American Allies were at last on the move in the West. SYMBOL was the follow-up.
The British out-prepared and out-planned the Americans ahead of the conference. They had their way on the central strategic agenda item, which was how to go about penetrating Hitler’s Festung Europa in 1943. The Americans believed landings in northwestern Europe were feasible. Churchill was cautious and favored going at it from the south. This was his “soft underbelly” approach, which in fact prevailed with the invasion of Sicily in July. The other agenda items yielded high degrees of consensus. The Battle of the Atlantic, nearly lost the year before, was beginning to turn in the Allies’ favor, though tonnage losses were still high. The Atlantic allies agreed to press on with more ships, planes, and ever-improving submarine-killing weaponry. Everything depended on victory at sea, if the Allies’ greatest advantage—the virtually limitless industrial capacity of the United States—was to be turned into the ultimate weapon of war. It was on this contingency that the success of any large-scale, cross-Channel invasion of the Continent depended. The Combined Bomber Offensive, which aimed to destroy Germany’s industrial capacity with the RAF bombing by night and the American Eighth Air Force by day, would be intensified (and would deliver, for the British, an element of vengeance for what they had suffered in the Blitz). The principals each had pet projects (Turkey for Churchill and China for Roosevelt) that were argued and postponed. How to deal with the Vichy government and the Free French remained an awkward point, as did British imperialism about which Roosevelt nagged and Churchill bristled. Of equal consequence to the fate of the European empire was the dispute between the two allies over cooperation in the development of an atomic bomb, masked in the record as “Tube Alloys.” This too was discussed, and deferred, at Casablanca.
What was new to the Casablanca meeting, and thus the thing for which it became chiefly remembered, was Roosevelt’s solo press-conference pronouncement on January 24, the last day of business, that the Allies would pursue the war against both Germany and Japan to the bitter end and accept no terms short of unconditional surrender. The precedent was Ulysses S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant’s policy in the American Civil War, but there was a more recent memory too. This was the specter of the Armistice and the Allies’ failure to end the First World War with the decisive military conquest and occupation of Germany and Austria, a failure that smoothed Hitler’s path to power. Certainly, Roosevelt saw his declaration about unconditional surrender as a way to placate Stalin, then bearing the brunt of the fight, and with this Churchill did not disagree. While the two Western leaders had discussed the matter, they had not planned its announcement, which miffed Churchill, who feared the policy might make Germany fight all the harder and could dash hopes for a quick settlement taking Italy out of the conflict and shortening the war.
Roosevelt’s action also reflected the unremarked but undeniable reality (that Churchill recognized but of course could not admit) of the changing relative power of the two Western Allies. Early 1943 marked the threshold beyond which the British and the Americans could no longer be regarded as fully equal partners. For Churchill, who understood from the beginning that the American alliance was not just desirable but indeed essential for his country, there was poignancy in this re-tipping of the scales, signaling as it did the passing of the torch of world primacy that Britain had carried since Victorian times. The rest of the war (American forces predominated by D-Day) and the peace to come would belong to the Americans.
For this reason too, Casablanca marked the pinnacle of the special relationship that Churchill had talked into existence during the two and a half years before America sent troops to Europe, and to which Roosevelt’s pre–Pearl Harbor “all means short of war” policies were the response. Both men frankly enjoyed the kind of personal, war-leader diplomacy on display at Casablanca for the last time, between equal allies in agreement on the fundamental things. The style did not outlive them. Roosevelt was dead before the war’s end. Churchill was voted from power soon after it, and though he returned seven years later, he did so as the aged leader of a shrunken country.
Eighty years on from January 1943, Britain has taken diminishment as a national theme. America, her great partner, has diminished too, from the confident, if initially reluctant, world power it was then becoming, and has taken up apology as its national theme—apology for the beneficent post-war dominion, inherited from Britain, that brought such good to so many around the globe. To look back with longing on this moment in history, when for both Anglo-American partners such abject postures were unthinkable, is not nostalgia. It is to re-appreciate challenges of war and peace long past yet not past, and to ponder anew how the leaders of a great alliance met them and what they passed on.
If nostalgia is your line, however, you may indulge it shamelessly in today’s Casablanca at Rick’s, a meticulous re-creation of the Casablanca Rick’s in a restored 1930s Moroccan mansion with palm trees framing the formidable front doors. Inside, Bogart and Bergman are missing but not much else: white walls, tiled arches, a great curved bar, and a house piano player who croons “As Time Goes By” complete the illusion. Rick’s is owned and operated by an investor group whose moniker ought to resonate with any policy realists in the room and certainly will for those students of history tuned to the routine villainies of the past and the endless battle between the friends of freedom and its foes: “The Usual Suspects, S.A.”